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! As the Toronto International Film Festival gets underway, opening with Daniel Rohrer’s Once Were Brothers, about The Band’s Robbie Robertson’s reflection on the iconic troupe he helped found, CBC News’ Deana Sumanac-Johnson delves into a developing trend: the music industry getting behind documentaries. But record
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Since IDA's DocuClub was relaunched in 2016 as a forum for sharing and soliciting feedback about works-in-progress, many DocuClub alums have since premiered their works on the festival circuit and beyond. In an effort to both monitor and celebrate the evolution of these films to premiere-ready status, we reach out to the filmmakers as they are either winding their way through the festival circuit, or gearing up for it. In this edition of "The Feedback," we spotlight Alex Lora & Adan Aliaga’s El Cuarto Reino (The Fourth Kingdom), an IDA Pare Lorentz Documentary Fund grantee. We caught up with
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Premiering September 3 on WORLD Channel, America Reframed presents Margo Guernsey’s Councilwoman, which follows Dominican immigrant Carmen Castillo as she transitions from hotel housekeeper to city councilwoman in Providence, Rhode Island and advocates for working families in her community. Nightshift, premiering September 3 on KCET and kcet.org, and September 8 on LinkTV, follows five Los Angeles residents in their routines as night shift workers. The filmmakers take viewers
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! On the eve of the premiere of Alanis Obonsawin’s Jordan River Anderson, The Messenger at the Toronto International Film Festival, POV Magazine’s Pat Mullen looks at the Abenaki-Canadian filmmaker’s recent cycle of work that addresses the rights of Indigenous children. The Abenaki director’s 53rd film completes her
Los Angeles, CA (August 29, 2019) - The International Documentary Association (IDA) announced today the lineup of their annual Screening Series to begin September 9 with a screening of Todd Douglas Miller’s Sundance Award-winning, awe-inspiring epic Apollo 11 at the Century City 15 IMAX Theater. Additional IDA Documentary Screening Series highlights in Los Angeles include Honeyland (September 24), The Cave (October 2), Sea of Shadows (October 23), American Factory (November 1) and For Sama (November 5). In addition to the always popular Los Angeles screenings, the Series has expanded to New
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Jawline, the debut film from Liza Mandelup, follows 16-year-old Austyn Tester, as he transforms his life in dead-end rural Tennessee into teenage stardom in the live-broadcast ecosystem, connecting with a global audience of young girls through an ongoing stream of positivity. Jawline, for which Mandelup won a Special Jury Award for Emerging Filmmaker at the Sundance Film Festival, streams on Hulu. Ghana Controversial: Music from the Ground Up, streaming on Al Jazeera English
Editor’s Note: The documentary career is as demanding and taxing as it is rewarding. On the one hand, there are the occasional honors, accolades, fellowships and grants, along with the impetus that your work can make a transformative difference in both moving the art form forward and making substantive social change. But the documentary profession is a long-odds game, one often fraught with disappointment and struggle. Since its launch in 2014, IDA’s biennial Getting Real conference has sparked dialogue and calls for action about such issues as sustainability—the elusive act of making a living
One of the many highlights of the always impressive CPH:DOX is its annual CPH:CONFERENCE, five days of jam-packed industry events with each full day centered around a specific theme (film, art, science, technology and social change). While I wasn’t in town to attend them all, I did at least have the good fortune to catch the Science & Film program, which opened the conference and was curated by Greg Boustead, the founding executive producer of Sandbox Films, a new mission-based documentary studio (underwritten by the Simons Foundation and headquartered in New York City) devoted to excellence
Recognizing that the world is in a perilous state—and that they are in a position to do something about it—three major environmental film festivals have ratcheted up their industry activities. Closely mirroring the documentary industry as a whole, for these festivals it’s all about engagement, immersion and making connections. Jackson Wild, formerly Jackson Hole (Wyoming) Wildlife Film Festival, has not only rebranded and become an annual event, but has fundamentally shifted its ethos to focus on engagement. “It's a real pivotal shift in philosophy and programming,” Jackson Wild’s executive
Stories, exposure, education, networks, funding: Around the world, these things are not a given, nor are they easy to access. In Turkey, the cultural and political context has made it difficult for documentary filmmakers to survive as working artists, despite their energy and interest. In a country with such a strong history, culture and language, there are many stories to be told. A national preoccupation with politics, however, means that even art is never completely free from responsibility. Shifting Goals of Filmmaking Before the 1990s, documentaries in Turkey tended towards nature