The International Documentary Association (IDA) has awarded directors Nina Alvarez and Violet Feng the 2019 Logan Elevate Grants. The Elevate Grants are an initiative of IDA’s Enterprise Documentary Fund supported by a grant from the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation. The $25,000 grants are awarded to emerging women filmmakers of color whose feature-length projects integrate journalistic practice into the filmmaking process. The Jonathan Logan Family Foundation supports organizations that advance social justice by promoting world-changing work in investigative journalism, the arts, the
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As we commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising this month, a slew of films reflecting on that seminal event in LGBTQ history are, unsurprisingly, hitting screens from coast to liberal coast. What sets Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s State of Pride apart from this pack, though, is the doc’s firm focus forward, as the Oscar-winning duo turn their lens on the many young queer communities celebrating Pride today. And not just the usual suspects—i.e., white cisgender gays and lesbians of means living in New York City and the Bay Area—that have historically been visible onscreen
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. On June 26, HBO premieres True Justice: Bryan Stevenson’s Fight for Equality, from Emmy-winning filmmakers Peter Kunhardt, Teddy Kunhardt and Geroge Kunhardt. The documentary follows Bryan Stevenson, an Alabama attorney and founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, as he shares his experience advocating for the poor and condemned within the criminal justice system and his struggle to create a more fair system in the face of deeply entrenched racial
Long before marriage equality, non-binary gender identity, and the flood of new documentaries commemorating this month’s 50th anniversary of the Greenwich Village uprising that begat the gay rights movement, there was Greta Schiller’s Before Stonewall. Originally released in 1984—as AIDS was slowly killing off many of those bar patrons-turned-revolutionaries—the film, through the use of evocative archival footage, presents a remarkable portrait of queer life in the closeted time from the early 20th century right up until that fateful night in 1969.
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 RealScreen, Daniele Alcinii navigates the fatigue and frustration many consumers feel in a crowded subscription video streaming market and how a shift to ad-supported video on demand might be the way of the future. "We’ve reached the point where consumers are making it very clear what they want," Kevin
Jehane Noujaim is internationally recognized for her confrontational documentaries and her bold insights into a range of topics, from identity to technology to sociopolitical conflict in the US and the Middle East. IDA has honored Noujaim’s films several times at the IDA Documentary Awards: she has won Best Feature Award in both 2001 and 2013, along with Feature Documentary Honorable Mention and Emerging Documentary Filmmaker Award in 2004. Her film The Square was also nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the 91st Academy Awards®. Ahead of IDA’s Conversation Series with her on July 9
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Premiering June 19 on Netflix, The Edge of Democracy traces the rise of democracy in Brazil following years of authoritarian rule under military dictatorship. Filmmaker Petra Costa was witness to this transition as a child in Brazil in 1985. Gaining unprecedented access to working-party leaders Lula de Silva and his protégée Dilma Rousseff, Costa traces the downfall of both democratic leaders following corruption scandals that resulted in the impeachment of Rousseff and the
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! Pat Mullen calls Martin Scorsese’s Rolling Thunder: A Bob Dylan Story the Seinfeld of documentaries in his review for POV Magazine. The film revisits the 1975 concert tour/travelling circus that brought Dylan back on the road after a long hiatus from performing. Scorsese presents the Rolling Thunder Revue through
In 1994 I was a queer, Asian-American art student attending the University of California San Diego. Having grown up in a very white, conservative, small town in Central California, attending a media art program was not supposed to be in the cards. Indeed, I didn’t grow up dreaming of being a filmmaker, let alone a documentary filmmaker. After taking my first film history course, my view of documentaries widened to include Nanook of the North, Salesman and Dont Look Back. Though these are arguably important foundational films, their scope was limited to “exotic” cultures, white Americana and
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Premiering June 14 on Showtime, Richard Rowley’s 16 Shots, an IDA Enterprise Documentary Fund grantee, examines the 2014 shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald by Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke and the cover-up that ensued. After the police initially declared the shooting as justified, journalists and activists fought for footage of the event to be released, sending the Chicago Police Department and local Chicago government officials into upheaval as the community