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
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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
It is an extraordinary time in the expansion of documentary filmmaking when narrative nonfiction programming has reached rock-star status. It seems audiences have a taste for real life on the small (and big) screen, and that’s encouraging to documentary filmmakers the world over. It’s also encouraging to distribution companies, and as the nontraditional leader in that market, Netflix has shown its chops over the last five years in nonfiction programming with sensational and critically acclaimed original series like Wild Wild Country and original features like Icarus. And though they’d had a
One problem with speaking truth to power is that sometimes, the powerful don’t like it. Although filmmakers can significantly reduce the likelihood of being sued, they can never entirely eliminate the risk. Identifying and mitigating risk was the focus of “Documentary in Deposition: The IDA v. Kamau Bilal,” held on February 28 during the Based On A True Story conference at the Missouri School of Journalism. The three-day conference explores the intersections of film and journalism. “Our goal is to make journalists better filmmakers and filmmakers better journalists,” said Carrie Lozano
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Launching April 1 on National Geographic as a six-part series that airs Mondays through May 6, Hostile Planet draws attention to the most extraordinary accounts of animals that have adapted to the cruelest evolutionary curveballs. The series zooms in on the world’s most extreme environments to reveal the animal kingdom’s most glorious stories of survival on this fast and continuously shifting planet. From the team behind The Blue Planet and Planet Earth II. Premiering April 1
If news media is to be believed, America is currently besieged by a state of nearly intractable divisiveness that some believe may be signaling the brink of the country’s self-destruction. But even this state of divisiveness is divisive; many will claim the country is no more divisive than it’s ever been. But regardless of where your beliefs lie, one of the personalities at the center of this divisiveness is political operative—and former documentary producer/director/distributor—Stephen K. Bannon. And, like a divisiveness lightening rod, Bannon is currently the subject of two documentaries
In October 2011, the documentary series Women, War & Peace premiered on PBS. It consisted of five hour-long docs, including Pray the Devil Back to Hell, about Nobel Peace Prize winner Leymah Gbowee, and I Came to Testify, about Bosnian women who broke history’s great silence and testified about their rape and sexual enslavement. Women from Afghanistan, Bosnia, Colombia and Liberia were featured in the series, which challenged the conventional wisdom that war and peace are men's domain, while simultaneously examining how war and conflict can look different from a female perspective. The series