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
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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
The 2019 Tribeca Film Festival will screen several films supported by IDA’s Fiscal Sponsorship Program and funding initiatives, including the opening night film, The Apollo by Roger Ross Williams. Here’s the lineup: The Apollo (Roger Ross Williams) Academy Award® winning filmmaker Roger Ross Williams looks at the storied history of the iconic Apollo Theater. The landmark has been a cultural anchor on Harlem’s West 125th St. since 1934, and through its doors have passed the most legendary African-American artists of the past nine decades. It represents the ongoing struggle of black lives in
Though I’m a nonfiction cinephile who’s been attending Copenhagen’s always invigorating CPH :DOX for nearly half a decade, this past 2019 edition (March 20-31) proved especially delightful when it came to the virtual realm. Conveniently located on the top floor of the fest’s Kunsthal Charlottenborg (contemporary art museum) headquarters, the VR:Cinema and its accompanying Inter:Active installations had me raving in a way I normally reserve for the moving image. While Eliza McNitt’s three-part (seven-figure dealmaking) planetarium-in-a-headset Spheres was wowing the crowds as it did at last
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. The Providers, from Anna Moot-Levin and Laura Green, follows three healthcare professionals in northern New Mexico as they struggle to reach those who would otherwise be left out of the American healthcare system. Amid a physician shortage and an opioid epidemic in rural America, these physicians strive to make a difference in providing optimal care for marginalized patients. The Providers premieres April 8 on Independent Lens. Reconstruction: America after the Civil War, a
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 tributes to the great Agnès Varda continued to stream in from around the world a week after her passing, we present a few worthy of consumption: The New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis: At the end of The Beaches of Agnès,” Varda asks, “What is cinema?” repeating André Bazin’s essential question. She
Stephanie Wang-Breal’s Blowin’ Up—the term that sex workers use for leaving one’s pimp—is a surprising slice of cinema vérité, an artistic and nonjudgmental, years-in-the-making look at New York City’s Queens Human Intervention Trafficking Court. Run by Judge Toko Serita and her all-female team, it’s the first of its kind to emphasize the welfare of sex workers over the criminalization of their trade, addressing the root causes of prostitution while providing alternative solutions (but only if that’s what the arrestee wants). And one remarkable woman providing that respectful, pressure-free