Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Buzz, premiering September 25 on HBO, follows Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author Buzz Bissinger as he experiences a sexual awakening while collaborating with Caitlyn Jenner on her tell-all memoir. A verité portrait of his transformative journey, directed by his childhood friend Andrew Shea, Buzz follows the author as he simultaneously examines his own heteronormative constraints, exploring previously uncharted sexual desires in ways that test his marriage, family and
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Apply by October 25, 2019 for fellowship is designed to enhance opportunities for writers from underserved and underrepresented communities to participate in the editorial planning process at, and contribute content to Documentary magazine.
Thirty-seven years since IDA was launched, the documentary form has soared in popularity, keeping us attuned, informed and endlessly curious. Not only have documentaries become a staple of every digital streaming platform available, but they have transformed into episodic content, audio stories, animation and immersive, new media experiences that have widened the scope of what a documentary means, or can achieve. As the 35th anniversary of the IDA Documentary Awards approaches, we reached out to some of the prime movers behind the awards, as well as some of the past winners, to give us a sense
Essential Doc Reads is a weekly feature in which the IDA staff recommends recent pieces about the documentary form and its processes. Here we feature think pieces and important news items from around the Internet, and articles from the Documentary magazine archive. We hope you enjoy! IndieWire's Erik Kohn talked to filmmaker Orlando von Einsiedel about his slate of short docs he's making for The Nobel prize and National Geographic. "It's not a financially stable way to work, but it’s lovely to be able to do something relatively quickly," he said. "You can find a story and shoot in a reasonable
Jacqueline Olive’s debut feature, Always in Season—its title a nod to the year-round racial terror that African-Americans, especially in the Deep South, historically have experienced—picked up the Special Jury Prize for Moral Urgency at this past Sundance Film Festival. Though the film explores the domestic terrorist act of lynching and its legacy through multiple angles—from sober, talking-head interviews to Monroe, Georgia’s harrowing, annual lynching reenactment— the beating heart of the film lies within one specific woman: Claudia Lacy. Five years ago, Lacy—a native of Bladenboro, North
Who Will Write Our History, a documentary about a group of heroic spiritual resisters in the Warsaw Ghetto who wrote and buried eye-witness accounts in a secret archive so the truth would survive, even if they did not, was seven years in the making. During that time, I was fixated on premiering at the Berlin International Film Festival. That didn’t happen. At least not in the way I’d expected. What did happen is that I learned (again) that there are more ways than one to have a successful roll-out. The film premiered in July 2018 at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, where it received the
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Filmed over more than 25 years, The Pushouts follows Victor Rios’ inspiring trajectory from high school dropout, three-time felon and Oakland gang member to award-winning professor, author and expert on the school-to-prison pipeline. Filmmakers Katie Galloway and Dawn Valadez weave in the stories from YO!Watts, a youth center serving 16-24 year-olds who are out of school and out of work. The Psuhouts premieres September 20 on PBS/ Voces. Inside Bill’s Brain: Decoding Bill
Essential Doc Reads is a weekly feature in which the IDA staff recommends recent pieces about the documentary form and its processes. Here we feature think pieces and important news items from around the internet, and articles from the Documentary magazine archive. We hope you enjoy! Robert Frank, one of the greatest American photographers, passed away Monday at age 94. He also gained acclaim as a filmmaker, and his documentary work included Conversations in Vermont (1969), Life-Raft Earth (1969) and About Me: The Musical (1971). But the doc he is best known for is the one that is hardest to
The podcast space, even with hundreds of thousands of titles proliferating the market, is still emerging and evolving. Like documentary filmmaking, the podcast promises compelling stories and examines important issues. The overlap is organic. But the two also underlap, if you will, as podcasting’s audio-only limitations invite inventive, cinematic use of sound, engulfing the ear to incite the imagination. Ultimately, the audience is coaxed into seeing sound. For the podcast-curious, leading podcast producer Wondery and IDA offered a day-long program on August 24 of topic-specific panel
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Premiering September 9 on POV, Grit, directed by Cynthia Wade and Sasha Friedlander, tells the story of a natural and manmade catastrophe in East Java, Indonesia: a massive mudflow triggered by a mismanaged series of fracking incidents at the suspected hands of Lapindo, a natural gas multinational company. In the aftermath, nearly 60,000 residents have lost their homes and dozens of structures—mosques, schools and factories—are now submerged in a massive wasteland of cracked