Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. The Changing Same tells the story of Lamar Wilson, a young man who learns his hometown of Marianna, Florida was the site of the brutal slaying in 1936 of Claude Neal, a young African-American man accused of murdering a 20-year-old white woman, at the hands of a mob of white men. Wilson takes it upon himself to confront his town’s dark history by running the 13-mile route that Neal took that fateful night. On the 70th anniversary of the lynching, directors Joe Brewster and
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Fifteen years into its mission of promoting human rights through film, the Copenhagen-headquartered Why Foundation is coming up against a distribution dilemma. The nonprofit organization—best known for pioneering commissioning strands such as the Peabody Award-winning Why Poverty? series—is being courted by an array of streaming services that are hungry for the high editorial standards that have become a hallmark of The Why’s projects. No stranger to the specific set of challenges posed by cash-flush digital players, CEO and executive producer Mette Hoffmann Meyer—former head of documentaries
By Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi Documentary filmmakers in the US routinely employ fair use—the right to limited use of unpermissioned copyrighted material—in their films. Since the Documentary Filmmakers Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use was created in 2005, errors and omissions insurers have routinely accepted their claims. Fair use makes possible archival work like Gordon Quinn’s’63 Boycott, critical films like Barbara Kopple’s Gun Crazy, films that include accidentally captured footage like Bing Liu’s Minding the Gap, and much, much more. But how does fair use work in a global
In the US and Europe, there is a tendency to think of Latin American documentary filmmaking in terms of coups, government repression and revolution, but the new reality in many Latin American nations is a different kind of revolution. Case in point: Tea Time (La once) by Maite Alberdi of Chile, in which a group of upper-middle-class women, friends since high school, have been meeting once a month for “tea time” for 60 years. Alberdi’s documentary, which aired on POV in 2015, is one of too few Latin American documentaries to reach audiences in the US and Europe, despite being part of a rapidly
The Distant Barking of Dogs has received an impressive number of international awards—including two IDA Documentary Award nominations and an honorable mention for the Pare Lorentz Award—as well as resounding praise from film critics around the world. Documentary sat down with the film’s producer, Monica Hellström, to discuss the creative collaboration behind the film, the different co-production structures involved and the management of European and North American funding. “It has been such a wonderful process to co-produce The Distant Barking of Dogs with international partners,” says
At IDA’s 2018 Getting Real Conference, Brown Girls Doc Mafia, Firelight Media and A-Docs collaborated on a series of panels entitled #Decolonize Docs. The three panels focused on the industry, the filmmakers and the audience, and the discussions yielded an action plan designed to think beyond diversity and visibility; foster inclusion and equity; and create access, within the film community, for marginalized communities. In her book The Undocumented Everyday: Migrant Lives and the Politics of Visibility , Rebecca M. Schreiber, an American Studies professor at University of New Mexico, does an
Dear Documentary Community, Over the past few months we’ve witnessed an alarming uptick of filmmakers and their protagonists under a range of threats, both here in the US and around the world. In Myanmar, Min Htin Ko Ko Gyi, a filmmaker and co-founder of the Human Rights Human Dignity Film Festival in Yangon, is being held in detention for “insulting and defaming the Army.” In Turkey, filmmakers Çayan Demirel and Ertuğrul Mavioğlu are being tried for producing “propaganda for an illegal group” in the film Bakur, which follows guerrilla fighters residing in the mountains of northern Kurdistan
By Steven Beer, Jake Levy and Neil Rosini Foreign production and distribution of a documentary raise a variety of distinct legal issues. Here are frequently asked questions about three of those issues, and our responses. Before filming in a foreign country, what basic legal considerations should be addressed? Just as production in the US is subject to federal law as well as laws of the state and local jurisdiction where it occurs, production abroad, as well as traveling there with crew and equipment, is governed by the applicable laws of that jurisdiction. Depending on factors such as the
Sometimes I feel like I never unpack. As a documentary cinematographer, I’m so grateful for all of my travels and am humbled by the incredible stories I’ve been privileged to shoot. Though I try to have some sort of standard gear bag packed and at the ready, there’s no single bag that does the trick every time. I find myself adapting the bag or case or backpack I choose to the current job, the travel schedule, the logistics, the gear, etc. That said, one of the bags I ALWAYS have with me is my beloved CineSaddle—the “Marsupial” version. I’ve had to refill it four times in the past 10+ years
Dear Readers, The Documentary Space…is vast and global and diffuse and interconnected. And while we at the IDA and Documentary magazine have made great strides in recent years to be true to the “International” side of our name, we are always looking to improve our global service, with our active presence at festivals and markets around the world, the global representation at the past two Getting Real conferences, and a significant growth in editorial coverage of the Pacific Rim, Latin America and Europe, So, think of this issue as a promissory note to keep our eyes on the “I” in IDA, with an