Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Drawing on unprecedented access, Foster, from Academy Award-winning filmmakers Deborah Oppenheimer and Mark Jonathan Harris, traces a complex path through the Los Angeles Department of Children and Family Services, challenging some of the most enduring myths about foster care and Interweaving first-hand stories of those navigating the child protection system with insights from social workers, lawyers and other advocates. The film, which is a project of IDA's Fiscal
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Over the span of a few weeks, Werner Herzog will have had three films released. There is the world premiere of a feature film at Cannes, Family Romance LLC, shot in Japanese with Japanese actors; the festival premiere of his BBC documentary, Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin, at Tribeca Film Festival; and the theatrical release of Meeting Gorbachev, which he co-directed with longtime collaborator André Singer. Documentary spoke on the phone with the 77-year-old filmmaker about the latter, which is somewhat of a departure from what one might expect from a Herzog documentary. Herzog was
Erin Lee Carr ( Thought Crimes: The Case of the Cannibal Cop; Mommy Dead and Dearest) has built an impressive career turning ripped-from-the-headlines stories (she is the daughter of late media icon David Carr, after all) featuring society’s “monsters” into sober reflections on society itself. So perhaps it was only a matter of time before the deft documentarian decided to tackle one of the most outrageous scandals in recent memory: the aiding and abetting of pedophile doctor Larry Nassar over decades by Michigan State University, USA Gymnastics and the organization’s Olympian-making
Bakur , which translates to “North” in English, is a documentary made with inside access to the Kurdish separatist group, PKK, who are considered a terrorist organisation by Turkey, the US and NATO. This was the first time any film crew had ever accessed these camps. Filmed during the peace process in 2013–2014, Bakur intimately explores the daily reality of guerrilla fighters residing in the mountains of northern Kurdistan. It is a fresh perspective with real personal stories of men and women who have chosen to join the armed resistance in order to create a new future. The two Turkish
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Premiering May 3 on HBO, and streaming later on HBO GO and HBO Now, Erin Lee Carr’s At the Heart of Gold: Inside The USA Gymnastics Scandal goes beyond the headlines of the decades-long pattern of sexual abuse of female athletes by Dr. Larry Nassar, an osteopathic physician for the US women's Olympic gymnastics team, as well as a physician at Michigan State University. Carr’s film reveals a dangerous system that prioritized winning over everything else, including protecting
The Honorable Kevin K. McAleenan Acting Secretary U.S. Department of Homeland Security Washington, D.C. 20528 Dear Acting Secretary McAleenan: We are a coalition of 103 civil liberties, civil rights, corporate responsibility, faith-based, human rights, immigrant rights, journalism, media, privacy, and government transparency organizations, legal service providers, and trade associations. We write to express our deep concern with reports of surveillance and targeting of activists, journalists, and lawyers by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Those reports indicate that Customs and
Roman philosopher Seneca once said, "Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” Apparently, Rachel Lears was listening. Her self-created luck began in 2016. Having directed two feature documentary films ( Birds of Passage and The Hand That Feeds), she had the preparation. She took the opportunity after the 2016 presidential election to contact the political action committees Brand New Congress and Justice Democrats to propose a documentary project about their plan to forge a new path to Congress for ordinary working people. Through the PACs, she met four women who had decided to
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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 reached out to the filmmakers as they were either winding their way through the festival circuit, or gearing up for it. In this edition of "The Feedback," we spotlight Lily Zepeda’s Mr Toilet: The World’s #2 Man. We caught up with Zepeda via email as was readying her film for its world
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! Nina Sachdev of Media Impact Funders talks to Roll Red Roll director Nancy Schwartzman about her ongoing impact campaign addressing and confronting rape culture. “Additionally, for many people, ‘rape culture’ is a new concept. Instead of explaining it with talking heads or experts as an abstract concept, in the