It's difficult to separate the Dallas Video Festival from that of the personality of its founder and guiding force, IDA member Barton Weiss. Truly passionate about diversity in media and committed to presenting all forms of video to a wider audience, Weiss earned his undergraduate degree at Temple University in his native Philadelphia, a school with a reputation for nurturing aspiring documentary film and video makers. In the early 1980s, armed with a graduate degree in film directing from Columbia University, Weiss was programming videos for nightclubs when he founded the Dallas Video
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It's that time of year again, time for you and your colleagues around the world to submit documentaries for the 13th Annual IDA Awards. An important mark of distinction in the documentary field, IDA Distinguished Documentary Achievement Awards were initiated to " honor exceptional creative achievement in nonfiction film and video production, and to bring greater public awareness and appreciation to the documentary form." IDA Awards have achieved world status among awards for nonfiction film and video production: Distinguished Documentary Achievement Award to productions that have shown
The annual Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival, named for the renowned anthropologist and social activist, celebrated its twentieth birthday last November at its customary digs, three large and two small theaters, within the huge American Museum of Natural History, in New York City. As usual, a mixed bag of new and old titles-long and short, U. S. and foreign, documentary and fiction, video and film—Mead's weeklong program later began its national tour, to Philadelphia, Washington, DC, Los Angeles, Berkeley and Chicago. Of special interest on this anniversary occasion is a new biography film
Amidst all the black leather jackets, cell phones, pagers, rental cars, and gala soirees, documentaries manage more than just a niche at Park City's Sundance Film Festival. In the introductory remarks for a screening of one of the docs, a Sundance programmer said something to the effect of, "To escape the craziness and [Hollywood] hype of the festival, and come down to earth, I tell people 'go see a documentary. "'People must have listened: documentaries claimed full houses throughout the run of the festival. Sundance 1997 showcased 49 documentary features and shorts out of a total of 194
Editor's Note: Inspired by the film Around the World in Eighty Days, the Ford Motor Company hired Filmways in New York to produce a series of commercials and a documentary about two guys driving a new 1958 Ford from LeHavre, France, across Europe, through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and on to Saigon. To realize this task required a caravan of five vehicles: two identical Fords (in case one couldn't make it), two small trucks—one packed with spare parts and the other with a generator for lighting and camping gear for the rough, remote areas of the trip; a station wagon carried
From the very beginning, there were documentaries electrifying audiences in those early movie theatres, whether they were Parisians watching the workers of the Lumiere factory, or New Yorkers witnessing the inauguration of President McKinley. In fact, until the magic of Melies and Griffith infected screen fare, the documentary dominated the attractions that drew those early audiences into nickelodeons. It was not until 1941 that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences officially included documentaries in their awards programs. And this was a very appropriate moment: the horrors of
1941 SHORT SUBJECTS Adventures in the Bronx. Film Associates. Bomber. U.S. Office for Emergency Management Film Unit, Motion Picture Committee Cooperating for National Defense. Christmas Under Fire. British Ministry of Information, Warner Bros. *Churchill's Island. National Film Board of Canada, United Artists. Letter from Home. British Ministry of Information. Life of a Thoroughbred. 20th Century-Fox; Truman Talley. Norway in Revolt. March of Time, RKO Radio. A Place to Live. Philadelphia Housing Authority/ Association. Russian Soil. Amkino. Soldiers of the Sky. 20th Century-Fox; Truman
Best Documentary Feature THE LINE KING: THE AL HIRSCHFELD STORY Produced, written and directed by Susan W. Dryfoos Edited by Angelo Corrao Creative Consultant: Daniel Mayer Selznick A Castle Hills Productions, Inc. release of a Times History Production 87 min. A look at the 93 year-old caricaturist's astonishing career through interviews with the celebrities who have been his subjects, insights from his late wife Dolly Haas and his daughter Nina, vintage home movies and archival footage, along with commentary from Hirschfeld himself. The film documents Hirschfeld's life, from his childhood
From time to time, I lecture on the subject of documentaries. And I've found that the most frequently asked questions deal with funding: how do you obtain money for a specific idea. Many times, sheer luck has a great deal to do with creating and funding a concept. In my most recent experience, fortune came into my life in the guise of an old friend, William Cartwright, who has edited many of my films. He suggested I read a book about Man Ray, the early 20th century avant-garde artist, with the hope that we might be able to obtain funding for a documentary. The book, Man Ray—American Artist by
The 1996 additions to the U.S. National Film Registry included four documentaries: The Forgotten Frontier (1931), a film about nursing and healthcare in Kentucky; Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter (1980), focussing on women at work during WW II; Topaz (1943-45), a compilation of home movies from Japanese-American internment camps; and Woodstock (1970), the record of the '60s celebration. The U.S. Congress established the National Film Preservation Board in 1988, to preserve films deemed important to the nation's culture. Each year, the board selects twenty-five films to add to the Registry