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In the beginning, there was the documentary, the cinematographic evangelist. Argentinean cinema did not escape this origin. The Lumière brothers' historic and The Departure of the Lighting Factory Worker and The Arrival of the Train at the Vincennes Station have their contemporary local equivalents in The Hoisting of the Flag and The Arrival of the President of Brazil (1900), made by the photographer Eugenio Py, one of our pioneers. The cinematographic sons and daughters of the legendary Py have traveled along hazardous roads, and the majority of us have ended up imprinting our imaginations on

Dear Members, It's been a busy summer for me, the IDA, and documentarians everywhere. I just got back from the Republican National Convention in San Diego, where I began shooting Fender Philosophers, a documentary for PBS about Americans and their bumper stickers. I'm also finishing up my personal documentary, Breaking Up, which I will be taking to the Independent Feature Film Market in September. Stay tuned for a report on that market. The IDA staff and three volunteer juries have been working all summer screening documentaries from around the world submitted for the 1996 IDA Distinguished

There is a powerful scene near the end of Frederick Wiseman's new film on France's 330-year-old Comedie­ Française that the audience has been waiting for without knowing it. A scene that causes everything else in the film—before it and after it—to fall into place, and moves the audience to understanding and to tears. A prominent member of the Comedie-Française, the actress Catherine Simare, visits a home for retired artists to present an award to another actress who had also been a member of the CF many years ago. The latter is having a birthday celebration, her 100th, and is quite moved by

The 19th annual INPUT conference did not begin promisingly. You arrived at the ultraplush Continental Plaza (replete with heat-seeking air conditioning and toilets that flush themselves as soon as you stand up), in the middle of Guadalajara's sterile Expo suburb, miles from the center of town and anything Mexican. It felt like something out of Godard's Alphaville. This was too bad, because May 26-31 marked the first time that INPUT, the International Public Television Screening Conference, was held in Latin America (or anywhere outside Europe, the United States, or Canada). Fortunately, the

For one week in February of this year, nearly 1.700 Houstonians and visitors were treated to the First Houston Pan-Cultural Film Festival. sponsored by Ancestral Films, a nonprofit arts organization whose mission is to increase cross-cultural interaction and social awareness through the medium of film. ID's Flora Moon attended the festival and spoke with several key participants. Following are excerpts from her interviews with Ancestral Films Executive Director Mohammed Kamara and documentary filmmaker Vojtech Jasny ( Why Havel?), in the interviewees' own words. Moon's talk with documentary

Dear Members, By now, many of you have probably read Peter Nichols' recent article in the New York Times, titled "Smile When You Say Documentary." The article is definitely making the rounds in documentary circles—it has been both faxed and e-mailed to me from colleagues across the country. Nichols seems to be pointing out a paradox that we documentary makers, distributors, and exhibitors are already acutely aware of: that while documentaries seem to be enjoying more critical and commercial success of late, they are still perceived to carry a stigma. " Documentary can be a mark of death for a

Television: the household appliance that we love to hate. Children, parents, soap opera addicts, cable network managers, ad execs, reporters, producers, critics, scholars, spin­ masters, and stars of television all offer frank and revealing observations about their relationships with the tube in Signal to Noise: Life with Television, a documentary miniseries scheduled to air nationally on PBS July 11, 18, and 25. Producer/writer/director Cara Mertes commissioned 21 pieces by 17 independent producers and wove them together with archival footage and interviews to create a richly colored quilt of

In Looking Like the Enemy, a new documentary about the wartime experiences of Japanese American veterans in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam, David Miyoshi describes an incident that happened to him during Marine officer training. As a young officer candidate during the Vietnam War, Miyoshi was ordered to get up on a podium and stand at attention in front of his fellow candidates. A drill instructor told the assembled trainees, "This is what the enemy looks like. Kill it before it kills you." Miyoshi was then told to "growl for me, gook," an order he quickly obeyed. His interpretation of the

For 18 years, Cinema du Réel, the international festival of ethno­graphic and sociological films, has been revealing the world in all its diversity. Held this year from March 8 to 17 in Paris, the 18th Festival du Cinema du Réel had the same goals with the international competition as well as with a retrospective salute to African cinema. Indeed, African cinema is celebrating its fortieth year of existence as we Europeans are celebrating a century of cinema. The festival opened with a screening of Raymond Depardon last film, Africas: How Is It with the Pain? The international jury, which

For one week in February of this year, nearly 1,700 Houstonians and visitors were treated to the First Houston Pan-Cultural Film Festival, sponsored by Ancestral Films, a nonprofit arts organization whose mission is to increase cross-cultural interaction and social awareness through the medium of film. !D' s Flora Moon attended the festival and spoke with several key participants. Her interviews with Ancestral Films Executive Director Mohammed Kamara and documentary filmmaker Vojtech Jasny ( Why Havel?) will appear in the July/August issue. Following is her interview with documentary filmmaker