In 2003, a group of eight artists covertly built a living space in an unused part of the parking structure for Providence, Rhode Island’s gargantuan Providence Place shopping mall. Upon the apartment’s discovery in 2007, it became a brief local news sensation, before the story was largely forgotten. Jeremy Workman has brought the group back together to tell the tale in his documentary Secret Mall Apartment. We sat down with Workman for a call to discuss the unusual art project, the footage his subjects captured, and how he gained their trust to make the documentary after they’d denied other filmmakers for years.
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Documentary is happy to debut a clip from Jim Lebrecht’s ( Crip Camp ) latest feature, Change, Not Charity: The Americans With Disabilities Act. The film premieres tonight as part of flagship history series American Experience on PBS and streaming on pbs.org. Alongside narration from Peter Dinklage, this meticulously researched doc is told through the voices of key participants and witnesses who testify to “the power of coalition building and bipartisan compromise,” according to the official description, that culminated in the 1990 passage of the American With Disabilities (ADA) Act
Documentary is happy to debut the trailer for Vicky Du’s first feature, Light of the Setting Sun (2024) . The film premiered last year at Full Frame and will open theatrically next month at DCTV. Light of the Setting Sun inquires into the director’s family history through family archives, Du’s voiceover, and a culminating mother-daughter trip to Taiwan to unlock what can’t be said. Pic is produced by Danielle Varga ( The Hottest August ). Citing inspiration from Taiwanese auteur Edward Yang, Du explains the incredibly personal beginnings of her film: “Eight years ago, my brother shared that he
Earlier today, March 24, No Other Land co-director Hamdan Ballal was violently attacked and kidnapped in the West Bank. This news was reported in social media posts published by Ballal’s No Other Land collaborators Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham.
International Documentary Association (IDA) announced that Inti Cordera, executive director of DocsMX, Nathalie Seaver, Producer and executive vice president of Foothill Productions, Joel Simon, founding director of the Journalism Protection Initiative at Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, and Luis González Zaffaroni, executive director of DOCSP have joined its board of directors.
Yesterday, Miami Beach Mayor Steven Meiner officially rescinded his recent proposal to defund and evict the government-housed and funded O Cinema for showing No Other Land. At a Miami Beach City Commission meeting on Wednesday, March 19, Meiner presented an alternate proposal, which would require the independent theater to “showcase films that highlight a fair and balanced viewpoint of the current war between Israel and the groups Hamas and Hezbollah.” “We were so very glad to see the vast majority of the commissioners speak up for the importance of free speech without government interference,” O Cinema co-founder and board member Kareem Tabsch tells Documentary, after the meeting concluded. “And grateful that Mayor Meiner listened to his community and his colleagues and withdrew the resolution.”
No summary could ever do justice to what Belgian filmmaker Johan Grimonprez has created through his audiovisual-textual collage Soundtrack to a Coup d’État (2024). The year 1960, famously called the “Year of Africa,” serves as the political, social, and cultural matrix on which Grimonprez builds his manifold narrative—moving back and forth in time and space, layering sound, image, and text with texture and depth. Now an Oscar nominee, the documentarian comes well-prepared, armed with the quintessential skills of an avid researcher and a seasoned orator, opening new tabs in our minds with each question while anticipating potential criticisms with humility and curiosity. Documentary magazine sat down with Grimonprez to discuss Soundtrack to a Coup d’État in his format of choice: a dialogue.
Although few people outside China have heard of it, the West Lake International Documentary Festival—locally known as IDF, which stands for “I Documentary Fact”—has quickly become the country’s leading documentary festival since its inception in 2017. The 2024 edition of IDF was held on the last weekend of October at the Xiangshan campus of CAA on the outskirts of Hangzhou, the city whose iconic lake inspired the festival’s name. Over the past few years, IDF has made a name for showcasing formally innovative and thematically diverse works from around the world. This dispatch covers: Anĝelo in 1948, Flames, White Snow, Yellow Roses, Blanket Wearer, and The Dream of Super Bridge.
Makarenko, a public school in the Parisian suburb of Ivry-sur-Seine, is the subject of Elementary , the latest vérité study from renowned French documentarian Claire Simon . While the film is replete with tender and surprising observations on today’s young people, it also treads similar ground for Simon. Récréations , her breakthrough documentary feature from 1992, captured the schoolyard antics of kindergarteners. With 2018’s Young Solitude , she set her sights on a public high school—also located in Ivry—and filmed intimate interviews with 16- to 18-year-old teenagers. While those previous
The revision process for Core Application 3.0 was informed by feedback gathered from filmmakers and industry professionals. Building on the success of Core Application 2.0, which was generally well-received as a tool for simplifying the application process, we identified areas for improvement.