In Ukrainian, the film is called Myrni lyudy, which literally translates as Peaceful People. It is a clever, polysemic title that simultaneously addresses Ukrainian civilians embedded in their native wounded landscapes and Russian civilians calling their loved ones who are taking part in the invasion of Ukraine. Those people on the other end of the phone are fascinated by the soldiers’ detailed stories of war crimes and trophy theft and get very upset when their interlocutors become disillusioned with Russian propaganda. First screened at Berlinale, Intercepted has travelled to numerous festivals and political venues over the past year, including at IDFA in the Best of Fests section. Documentary spoke to Oksana Karpovych before the festival.
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With Film Independent, IDA hosted a work-in-progress DocuClub screening of New Wave in Los Angeles in December of 2022. While the feedback Ai and her team received from the screening was generally favorable, she nevertheless decided to overhaul the doc’s narrative in order to include intimate details from her family’s relationship with music—and each other—opening old wounds in the process, with particular emphasis on the filmmaker’s estrangement from her mother. The final version of the film premiered at last year’s Tribeca Festival, and is still seeking distribution. Documentary spoke with Ai via Zoom to discuss the shift in story subject over the course of seven years of development. This interview has been edited.
“It’s South Africa, it’s Vietnam, it’s Jim Crow—it’s like all of these defining moments,” says filmmaker Razi Jafri by phone from East Jerusalem, referring to the ongoing war across Palestine and the Middle East. “And when the films and books start coming out, there will be a moment that’s going to break out what has been happening.” Because of its central place in our current geopolitics, you’d think that stories about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and its many complex facets, would rise to the level of must-see viewing across film festivals, art-house theaters, and television screens (as
In 2018, Singaporean filmmaker Jason Soo boarded the Al Awda ( The Return in Arabic) with the intention of making a documentary about the surgeon, activist. and political exile, Dr. Ang Swee Chai. For six years, Soo reworked the footage he retained after the Israeli navy raided the Al Awda with videos captured by activists onboard, which filled in the gaps left by the footage that was confiscated by the Israeli navy. The resulting film Al Awda (2024), is less a portrait of Dr. Ang than a documentary about activism itself. Al Awda documents one of many attempts by the Freedom Flotilla Coalition
Darius Clark Monroe has been on my radar for a decade, ever since his feature debut Evolution of a Criminal , a revisitation of the robbery the filmmaker committed when he was a teenager and its impact on both loved ones and victims, which world premiered at SXSW back in 2014. (Later that year it took top honors at the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival, where I programmed the film.) Since then Monroe has been on an artistic evolution as well, continuing with such unconventional projects as the 2018 Tribeca-debuting short Black 14 , once again EP’d by Evolution executive producer Spike Lee
Dear Readers, No Other Land is both narratively explosive and achingly personal. In terms of craft, it’s one of the most impressive examples of verité scene-making in recent years—though its directors, a collective of four Israeli and Palestinian journalists, aren’t format purists in their story of how Israeli state legal machinations and individual soldiers force expulsions of Palestinian villagers in the West Bank. Mackenzie Lukenbill examines how the quartet of Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, Hamdan Billal, and Rachel Szor made the film their story in every mutual way possible. After No Other
In 2008 and 2019, in Documentary magazine, I published documentary budgeting articles and budget templates that have been read and used widely all over the world. I’m thrilled to return with a big update that includes: (1) a fully revised budget template that has been updated for 4K and streamer deliveries; (2) for the first time, a schedule template; (3) numerous new budget line items related to accessibility for film crews, participants, and audiences; and (4) a bigger reorganization to make the template more flexible and universal. The article has also been expanded and extensively rewritten.
The Oscar Shortlists for ten categories, including documentary and shorts, were released on December 17 before the March 2, 2025, Academy Awards ceremony. We are excited to have four IDA Enterprise Grantees shortlisted for Best Documentary Feature at the 2025 Oscars. Congratulations to the 2022 IDA Enterprise Grantees Black Box Diaries , Queendom , Sugarcane , and 2020 and 2022 IDA Enterprise Grantee Union . Fifteen films will advance in the Documentary Feature Film category for the 97th Academy Awards —169 films were eligible in the category. Members of the Documentary Branch vote to
The 2024 edition of the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam opened shortly after the world learned of two changes in leadership. One was at IDFA: Artistic Director Orwa Nyrabia’s decision to step down at the end of his term, next summer, capping seven years as the festival’s second chief since its founding in 1988. (Nyrabia is also a board member of IDA, which publishes Documentary.) The other change took place thousands of miles away from the Netherlands but with global consequences: the election of Donald Trump as U.S. president, a little over a week before the festival opened. Even
There is a certain spectacle to which the bullfight—or the corrida de toros , the sport’s less colloquial Spanish name—lends itself, which is at once literary, artistic, operatic, cinematic. Irish-born artist Francis Bacon produced one of his most well-known works in 1970, Study for Bullfight No. 1 , one that parallels the corrida’s own three stages. Against a backdrop of golden ochre, both toreador and toro are a whirl of movement, man and beast entangled in a dance of death. Though Bacon’s focus would largely remain with such thematic motifs as religious figures and mythological furies, he