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
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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
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. Filmmaker/educator Robert Greene, writing for the British Film Institute’s website, cites the greatest documentary performances of all time, from Nanook to AOC. Great performances are often the most overlooked aspect of great documentary films. We audiences naturally resist the seemingly contradictory notion of
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. From Academy Award-winning filmmakers Ron Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, State of Pride takes an unflinching look at the significance of Pride 50 years after the Stonewall Riots. The film travels to three different cities in America – Salt Lake City, San Francisco, and Tuscaloosa, Alabama, to get a sense from the LGBTQ+ communities there of the meaning of Pride, from the perspective of a younger generation for whom it still has personal urgency. State of Pride streams on
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. In the latest installment of his brilliant canon, Monrovia, Indiana, Frederick Wiseman travels to rural, small-town America for a deep-dive into the day-to-day life--the institutions, the rituals, the mores--of this farming community. Monrovia, Indiana premieres May 31 on PBS. Premiering May 28 on ESPN’s 30 for 30--just in time for the Indy 500--is Jenna Ricker’s Qualified, which tells the story of Janet Guthrie, the first woman to qualify for the fabled Memorial Day weekend
The SFFILM Festival played at several San Francisco Bay Area venues from April 10-23. At 62 years, it’s the longest-running film festival in the Americas, and this year's edition screened almost as many documentary features (40) as narratives (46), showing the gradual creep of the nonfiction form toward filmfest dominance. Doing post-festival reports on them can be a little anticlimactic, since many of them have been released into theaters or on Netflix and are not shiny new phenomena. But they also have a chance to live in my memory for a few weeks, and some bubble up more insistently than
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! Whitney Friedlander of Paste explores the power of political documentary, spotlighting Rachel Lears’ Knock Down the House and David Modigliani’s Running with Beto. “But, it was really the type of campaign [for U.S. Senate] that he was going to run: that he was going to go to every county in Texas, that he was only