To paraphrase Prospero from The Tempest, "My revels now are ended." After two years, I am stepping down as president of the IDA. A commitment to produce a group of television documentaries will require my full attention. I found my duties as president a very fulfilling experience. Among other things, I was able to meet a wide cross-section of documentary filmmakers, assist others in obtaining funds for projects, and, best of all, help to establish a permanent documentary archive at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. During these years, however, I noticed a further deterioration
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How quickly time passes. It seems such a short while ago that I sat in the lobby of the Sofitel Hotel, having a drink with the winners of the 1994 IDA Awards as we watched some strange creatures out of the Hollywood landscape parade by in their Halloween costumes. Suddenly it's October again, and the IDA Blue Ribbon Panel has just selected the winners of the 1995 awards. As often happens, a film the IDA is honoring has been the subject of controversy and rejection at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences. (Who are we to flaunt tradition?) This year the film is Crumb; a portrait of the
CRUMB Producers: Lynn O'Donnell and Terry Zwigoff Director: Terry Zwigoff Cinematographer: Maryse Alberti Editor: Victor Livingston Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics Crumb is an intimate, funny, and deeply disturbing portrait of the life and work of renowned underground cartoonist and artist Robert Crumb. Shot over a period of six years, the film uses unexpurgated interviews with Crumb, his family, colleagues, critics, and ex-lovers, along with footage of his work, to document the obsessions and uncompromising creativity of an individual who helped define the counterculture of the 1960s and
It's not often that you'll see documentarians outnumbering feature film types in the heart of Hollywood, but that's what happened when some 600 members of the worldwide documentary community (plus 400 students from the Los Angeles Unified School District, as part of the IDA Outreach Program) converged upon the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences on October 25 to 27. The occasion? The IDA/AMPAS Second International Documentary Congress, the much-awaited sequel to our first congress, held in 1992. Following is selected coverage (divided into "Nuts and Bolts," "Our Documentary Heritage,"
1994 Black Harvest Produced and Directed by Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson Freedom on My Mind Produced and Directed by Connie Field and Marilyn Mulford Hoop Dreams Produced by Frederick Marx, Steve James, and Peter Gilbert Directed by Steve James I Am a Promise: The Children of Stanton Elementary School Produced by Alan Raymond and Susan Raymond Directed by Susan Raymond Moving the Mountain Produced by Trudie Styler Directed by Michael Apted 1995 America and Lewis Hine Produced by Daniel Y. Allentuck and Nina Rosenblum; Directed by Nina Rosenblum George Stevens: A Filmmaker's Journey Written
OUT OF MY MIND Producer and Director : Katie Cadigan Distributor: Filmakers' Library This remarkable first-person account of schizophrenia focuses on the filmmaker's younger brother, John, a promising artist whose college career was halted by the onset of severe mental illness. After developing symptoms of schizophrenia during his senior year, John came to live with Katie Cadigan and her husband. Out of My Mind explores the ongoing nature of John's paranoia, his experience with various therapies, and the family love that sustained him through multiple crises. It sheds light on the terribly
As the president and chief operating officer of Turner Entertainment Company, Roger Mayer has made a significant contribution to preserving and protecting the vast Turner film library. Mayer's responsibilities at Turner Entertainment include overseeing the restoration, preservation, and storage of the company's film holdings. He supervises licensing of film clips and stills, dubbing, booking and shipping of library films, and coordinating remakes and sequels of titles in Turner's library . His success in ensuring the future of these irreplaceable films is a source of inspiration to all who
Among the most celebrated documentary filmmakers, Marcel Ophulus revolutionized the nonfiction genre with his monumental The Sorrow and the Pity (1969), a wrenching exploration of French collaboration during the Second World War. Featuring Ophulus' now well-known combination of extensive interviews and archival footage, the film exposed the shameful reality of the French people's cooperation with the Nazis and established Ophulus as a pioneering and uncompromising practitioner of the documentary form. A product of German, French, American, and Jewish culture, Ophulus was born in 1927 in
It is 40 degrees, raining and windy, and my wife and I are on Inishmore, one of the Aran Islands, sitting on a horsedrawn cart and heading to the Man of Aran cottage to explore the locations that Robert Flaherty used in his 1934 film. I am excited thinking about how I could show Man of Aran to my graduate documentary seminar. I am also thinking of how the discussion could go in class, how I can show my own images of the island today, and then, with regret, how I can't bring Flaherty himself in to talk with the students about his work. That would be the best: Flaherty and his films, live in
Human Rights Watch—the largest U.S.-based organization devoted to safeguarding human rights internationally—founded its annual film and video festival six years ago as a showcase to exhibit documentary and fiction works on human rights themes. The festival illustrates the faith of its founders that film and video are ideal tools for education and persuasion: they are fast, portable, flexible, adaptable to various formats, capable of speedy revision of both picture and sound components, and can be transported, exhibited, and reproduced relatively inexpensively. Because the watch monitors human