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
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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! 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
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
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