Editor’s Note: Filmmaker Jason DaSilva premieres his latest work, When We Walk , an IDA Pare Lorentz Doc Fund grantee, at the Hot Docs Canadian Documentary Film Festival this week. He shares his thoughts here on the making of, and his hopes for, the film. As his health declines due to Primary Progressive Multiple Sclerosis, DaSilva has crafted this article in the form of a letter to his son—as he has done in the making of When We Walk . To my son, Jase DaSilva, for whom this film is dedicated. My son, I think about you all the time. I want you to grow up with me. I want you to know me. I want
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Back in 2010, filmmaker Sam Green staked out new territory in the documentary space with Utopia in Four Movements, in which he explored the history of the utopian impulse and how it relates to the convulsions of the 21st century. This was a live documentary, with musicians accompanying Green on stage as they took audiences on this cerebral metaphysical journey. Up to that point, Green had demonstrated his documentary bona fides with, among others, The Weather Underground, which he made with IDA’s own Carrie Lozano and the late Bill Siegel; the film earned an Academy Award nomination and a DGA
Editor’s Note: Filmmakers/partners Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert have been racking up the career kudos over the past few months, starting in December, when Reichert received the IDA Career Achievement Award. April has been the coolest month for the duo, with the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival bestowing its annual Tribute to them with a retrospective of their work, and Hot Docs feting Reichert this week with the Outstanding Achievement Award. Accepting the Full Frame Tribute award, Bognar read the following: To work in documentary is to feel a lack of confidence in your abilities, to
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Filmed over three tumultuous years covering the lead up to, and aftermath of, Freddie Gray’s death in police custody in Baltimore, Marilyn Ness’ critically-acclaimed Charm City, an IDA Enterprise Documentary Fund grantee, is an intimate cinema verité portrait of those surviving in, and working to improve, the vibrant city they call home. The film airs April 22 on Independent Lens and streams through April. Stanley Nelson’s latest film, Boss: The Black Experience in Business
Today, IDFA and IFFR issue a joint statement that calls for the immediate release of imprisoned Myanmar filmmaker and festival director Min Htin Ko Ko Gyi. We urge you to read the statement and sign your name below.
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! Discussing Homecoming, the new Beyoncé documentary now streaming on Netflix, IndieWire’s Tambay Odenson argues that the film goes beyond celebrating her transcendent 2018 Coachella performance, to bring black excellence front and center. For Beyoncé and Homecoming, black history is American history, and the black
Penny Lane makes a point on her website, pennylaneismyrealname.com, to remind us that she is neither a street in Liverpool, nor a Beatles song, nor the famous 1960s groupie (who spells her name “Pennie”). She is Penny Lane, film director and educator. And yes, as her website also notes, her parents “clearly liked the Beatles.” Lane has been making films and earning awards and grants since 2002, including her 2005 short The Abortion Diaries, which featured women from all walks of life and different ages speaking about their abortion experiences. She's also been teaching video and media arts for
Moderated by “The Woke Coach,” Seena Hodges (who began by acknowledging the Catawba people, onetime inhabitants of the land on which the Durham Hotel was built), the fourth edition of Full Frame Documentary Film Festival’s #DocsSoWhite discussion focused squarely on concrete solutions to the film world’s stubborn resistance to true inclusion behind the lens. Hodges then laid out a few “rules” for her panelists, which included Gina Duncan, associate vice president of film at BAM; Maori Karmael Holmes, founder/artistic director of Blackstar Film Festival; and filmmakers Edwin Martinez ( Personal
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. A co-presentation of Frontline, Independent Lens and Voces, David Sutherland’s Marcos Doesn’t Live Here Anymore examines the US immigration system through the eyes of a married couple whose lives reveal the human cost of deportation. Elizabeth Perez, a decorated US Marine veteran, fights to reunite her family after her undocumented husband, Marcos, is deported to Mexico. With his signature raw, unfiltered intimacy, Sutherland weaves a parallel love story that takes us into a
IDA’s own Dana Merwin, a native of south Georgia who, as Program Officer, administers the Enterprise Documentary Fund and the Pare Lorentz Documentary Fund, moderated the “Southern Sustainability” panel at Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham, North Carolina, which ran from April 4-7; the panel featured the diverse foursome of Eric Johnson of the Raleigh-based Trailblazer Studios, Rachel Raney of UNC-TV, Susan Ellis of Raleigh-based Footpath Pictures, and Naomi Walker of the Durham-based Southern Documentary Fund (SDF). Sitting that Friday morning in the laidback lobby area of The