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In Imago, the Chechnya-born filmmaker Déni Oumar Pitsaev journeys to a Chechen enclave in Georgia named Pankissi, where his mother has secured a plot of land for him to settle down. He spends time with his mother, with whom he’s close, and a hearty cousin and a friend, but he has barely seen his father since his parents divorced when he was nine months old. That’s on top of a childhood marked by his and his mother’s stays in Kazakhstan, Chechnya, and—when the Russians attacked Grozny in 1996—St. Petersburg, where she changed his Chechen name for his protection. After Imago won L’Œil d’Or, the best documentary prize of Cannes, Documentary interviewed Pitsaev about starring in a film about his life journey and the balance between pre-planning and responding in the moment.
This past March, we announced the launch of the Nonfiction Core Application 3.0, an update to the application template created to ease the application burden on filmmakers while reflecting evolving artistic and ethical practices. In our launch post, co-authored with Keisha Knight, we described the Nonfiction Core Application 3.0 not only as a shared resource, but also as a living document that should evolve with the field. Today, we are continuing that evolution.
Cinematographer Iris Ng seeks meaningfulness in her experiences on set, on and off-camera.
Documentary is happy to debut an exclusive clip from Edivan Guajajara, Chelsea Greene, and Rob Grobman’s environmental documentary We Are Guardians (2023), which kicks off a U.S. theatrical screening tour this Friday in Los Angeles. The film, produced by Academy Award winner Fischer Stevens’s Highly Flammable in collaboration with Appian Way, Leonardo DiCaprio’s production company, is a comprehensive examination of the ongoing deforestation crisis in the Amazon Rainforest.
When making Deepfaking Sam Altman (2025), documentary director Adam Bhala Lough (Telemarketers) found himself in deep doo doo. Despite months of trying, he still hadn’t gotten access to an interview with Sam Altman (CEO of OpenAI) for a film Lough had promised about AI. So he took a page from Altman’s own MO. The resulting film follows Lough setting about on his journey, working with deepfakers in India, meeting with lawyers, and ultimately spending a lot of time chatting and bonding with the resulting AI chatbot, called SamBot. For this edition of The Synthesis, we spoke with Lough about the film, his use of AI, and its implications for documentary.
Pinny Grylls and Sam Crane’s Grand Theft Hamlet (2024) is the latest in a wave of documentaries shot entirely inside Grand Theft Auto or other video games. Playing a game is often no longer a solitary exercise but a social one, and we can understand games not as experiences separate from the “real” world but as an extension of it. Within that new paradigm, it makes sense that we’re seeing more documentaries explore game spaces as if they are physical ones. Professional filmmakers and computer engineers alike recognized games’ potential as playgrounds for formal experimentation years before this trend.
Last year, national and international press widely reported on what The Globe and Mail described as “the most tumultuous year in the festival’s history,” complete with sweeping personnel changes, social and financial pressures, and the temporary closure of their flagship Ted Rogers Cinema. Though Hot Docs managed to pull through for its 32nd year with a new executive director (Diana Sanchez, formerly of TIFF) and a replenished staff (some of the programmers, including department head Heather Haynes, returned after their prior exodus), what frightened this hamstrung fixture of Toronto’s flailing film scene was dismally clear. Social issues don’t entirely permeate the programming, nor do their chosen films observe such issues in totality, but Hot Docs has always strived to stay in tune with urgent matters of the present, especially through films that align their audience’s point of view with what will one day be the right side of history.
Amid the past few decades of Holocaust-focused works, queer artist Kinga Michalska has found a unique approach to “the Holocaust memory documentary” in their native Poland. Their feature-length debut, Bedrock, is a psychological journey through the contemporary sites of former concentration camps and mass graves. It also poses the rhetorical question: What does “never again” really mean? Bedrock premiered in the Panorama section at the Berlinale, where Documentary spoke with Kinga Michalska.
This year, the Pare Lorentz Documentary Fund theme will be: Migration in and to the Americas. While based in the United States, IDA has long championed documentary filmmaking across borders and worldwide. IDA has members in over eighty countries, and nearly half of our staff and board come from outside the US. Cross-cultural, transnational dialogue is at the heart of who we are and what we do. Supporting documentaries means defending both freedom of expression and freedom of movement. Increasingly, those in power seek to close borders, narrowly define who belongs, and exclude others, often
We received yet another threat to free speech and expression by documentary filmmakers, this time, the call comes from Hungary. Our friends at the Hungarian Documentary Association have published the statement below on May 15.