ReFocus: The American Directors Series, from Edinburgh University Press, has an admirable mission statement: “The series ignores no director who created a historical space—either in or out of the studio system—beginning from the origins of American cinema and up to the present.” This may seem like a tall order, but not ignoring does not necessarily guarantee that a lesser-known director will be given representation on the printed (or digital) page; thus far, seven directors have been included this series: Budd Boetticher, William Castle, Delmer Daves, Amy Heckerling, Barbara Kopple, Kelly
Latest Posts
I spent my youth on the streets of St. Louis, obsessed with making photographs. I had no interest in movies in those years, but my mother had been introduced to a filmmaker named Arthur Barron, who was in town making a CBS doc about the neighborhood where she worked. On a visit to our house, he was told that I was a photographer, and he asked to see my pictures. I remember that he looked at them closely and called me a storyteller, that being the highest praise I’d ever gotten. Two years later, as a college freshman in New York, I saw Arthur’s name in the course catalogue offering a
By Steven Beer, Jake Levy and Neil Rosini This edition of Legal FAQ answers an assortment of questions relating to treatment of celebrities in remote locations, obtaining government-created stills and footage from private archives, and whether copyright applies to works generated by non-humans. My documentary has a celebrity host and we’ll be filming in a remote location. What now? Filming in remote locations can be trying for those working on and appearing in documentaries. A number of issues must be considered when production takes place in the wilderness or otherwise away from optimal
Dear Readers, As the world gets hotter and science takes a beating from the far right, the need for the nature/wildlife/science/environment docs is taking on a greater urgency. And filmmakers have stepped up, utilizing the most innovative tools and platforms at their disposal to create some of the most stunning testaments to the beauty and peril of our planet—and the universe in which it spins. We feature Victor Kossakovsky’s Aquarela, a breathtaking epic poem about water, a vital force that is increasingly destructive with each incremental degree of the planet’s temperature. Check out Peter
Documentary recently spoke with Dr. Bruno Lessard, director of the Graduate Program in Documentary Media in Ryerson University’s School of Image Arts. Lessard, himself a documentary photographer and the author of an upcoming book about Chinese documentary filmmaker Wang Bing, shared valuable information about what draws students to this internationally recognized, one-of-kind institution. DOCUMENTARY: Tell me about your program at Ryerson—how is it structured and what can students expect? BRUNO LESSARD: Ryerson offers a two-year Master of Fine Arts degree (MFA) that brings together many
Dayton, Ohio, is known as the birthplace of Orville Wright, and is also home to the National Museum of the US Airforce. Besides aviation, it is also a town steeped in manufacturing. But in 2008, gripped by the recession, the GM plant on the outskirts of the city was shuttered. Filmmakers Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert recorded this gloomy event in their Academy Award-nominated film The Last Truck: the Closing of a GM Plant. The loss of over 2,400 mostly blue-collar jobs had ripple effects throughout the community, which struggled to recover. Less than a decade later, in 2014, when Chinese
To help you get ready for Podcast Day, we’ve compiled a list of must-listen audio docs that you can dive into online. We even asked this Saturday’s panelists to recommend a few of their own personal favorites, including docs whose production and creation they’ve been involved in: from classic true crime to animated history, here are some audio docs to listen.
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 Derek Hallquist’s Denial. We caught up with Hallquist via email while he was touring the film on the summer festival circuit
“ You [Americans] did it for me. You wrote Moby Dick , The Old Man and the Sea . You inspired me with this amazing literature….It was just a question of saying the same thing, but with pictures, not with words.” —Victor Kossakovsky Master Russian filmmaker Viktor Kossakovsky does not want to tell you anything—he wants to show you everything. Aquarela is his 90-minute visual symphony to water and our planet’s precarious ecology. Filmed in 96 frames per second and projected in theaters at a stunning 46 fps (with no fewer than 118 channels of audio), the result is a triumph of European-style, non
Since I didn’t attend this year’s Sundance, I missed seeing Cold Case Hammarskjöld—the latest surreal offering from the Danish gonzo journalist/filmmaker/radio host/all-around provocateur Mads Brügger—at its debut back in January, when it won the World Cinema Documentary Directing Award. Which, like the film itself, turned out to be a bizarre blessing in disguise. Instead of braving the Park City crowds, I found myself, several months later, serenely watching the mesmerizing (and hilarious) doc—a through-the-looking-glass reexamination of the death of UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld in a