In the week since the passing of DA Pennebaker, we have been honoring the great pioneer with social media posts, repurposed content, and recommendations for viewing from the prodigious Pennebaker Hegedus canon. And we’ve been reaching out to the friends who knew and loved him best. By my lights, Pennebaker, along with his many great collaborators—from the merry band of groundbreakers at Drew Associates to his longtime co-conspirator in art and love, Chris Hegedus—produced a inspiring body of work that showed us America in action—from the odyssey of presidential campaigns to the magical mystery
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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! From IndieWire, Robert Greene, a documentary filmmaker and professor at Murray Center for Documentary Journalism at the Missouri School of Journalism, maps out the career and impact of the late documentarian D.A Pennebaker. As much as his ingenuity, it was the image of Pennebaker that was so influential to several
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 Ofra Bloch’s Afterward. Bloch is a filmmaker and psychoanalyst based in New York City. She grew up in Israel, where her deep
Co-directed by Nanfu Wang and Jialing Zhang, One Child Nation examines China’s One-Child Policy, coaxing confessions and revelations of drastic, profound depth from its subjects. Taken together, these wide-ranging first-hand accounts tell the era’s story, conveying its dark, emotional legacy in an astonishing film that is sure to contribute to the historical and cinematic record. Enacted in 1979 and replaced with the “Two-Child Policy” in 2015, the One-Child Policy was a severe population-planning effort that limited the number of children parents could have. Its enforcers employed strategies
In celebration of the work and life of the late documentary master DA Pennebaker, IDA will be both digging into our archives and reaching out to his and Chris Hegedus’ many collaborators, friends and mentees for their reflections. In the meantime, here’s where you can catch some of his greatest films—in a trailblazing career that spanned over six decades. Daybreak Express is a five-minute short of the soon-to-be-demolished Third Avenue elevated subway station in New York City, set to the classic Duke Ellington recording of the same name. Pennebaker’s 1953 debut film is a tribute to his love of
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! Ken Burns’ documentaries have captured some of the most critical times in US history. In an interview with The Guardian's Mark Lawson, Burns discusses his new film Country Music, his distinct filmmaking style, and how his films have led many to reflect on what it means to be American. "While the stories I have
Science fiction scholars believe that Murray Leinster’s 1945 short story, “First Contact,” was the original use of “First Contact” to represent the initial meeting of two very different cultural groups. In the Leinster story the meeting of space travelers is a collaboration of equals. Both groups are explorers from advanced civilizations and share equal amounts of excitement and fear at discovering that they are not alone in the universe and that these Others may have much to offer them. In the end, they switch space vehicles so that each group can begin to explore the Others’ “new”
When the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, many of us were alarmed to learn the extent to which we’d transformed from consumer to product in the digital age. Few of us, however, were inclined to take on those greedy behemoths mining our online data in the ravenous mode of the copper barons of old. Fortunately, there was David Carroll, an associate professor of media design, and director of the MFA Design and Technology graduate program at the School of Art, Media and Technology at Parsons The New School for Design. In other words, the perfect foil for Big Tech Goliath. And in The Great Hack
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 decade comes to a close, IndieWire compiled a list of their 100 best movies from the last ten years. Several acclaimed documentaries made the list, including All These Sleepless Nights, Fire at Sea, Cameraperson and O.J.: Made in America. Fire at Sea is told largely from the point of view of Samuele, a 10
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Inventing Tomorrow, from director Laura Nix, follows a group of passionate teenage innovators from around the globe who are creating cutting-edge solutions to confront the world’s environmental threats - found right in their own backyards - while navigating the doubts and insecurities that mark adolescence. These inspiring teens prepare their projects from the largest convening of high school scientists in the world: the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair