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
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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
Years before the #MeToo movement galvanized women around the world, the sexual assault in 2012 of an incapacitated teenager by members of the Steubenville High School football team set the international media ablaze. Sparking the firestorm was Alexandria Goddard, a crime blogger originally from the Ohio town. Fully aware of the centrality of Big Red football to the city’s identity, Goddard nevertheless methodically collected and pieced together social media evidence of the rape. Then she used her blog Prinniefied.com to blow the whistle on the assailants (who’d seemed determined to live up to
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Premiering March 30 on Discovery Channel, Tigerland, from Born into Brothels director Ross Kauffman and The Cove producer Fisher Stevens, takes viewers to Far East Russia, where the guardians of the last Siberian tigers risk everything to save the species. Directors/producers Marc Levin and Daphne Pickerson follow renowned neurosurgeon and Emmy-winning CNN chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta on a journey across the US to understand why Americans rank near the bottom
Note the date: February 6, 1982, when, at the instigation of filmmaker and psychotherapist Linda Buzzell, 75 docmakers gathered in Los Angeles for a charter meeting of the International Documentary Association. Its mission coming out of that meeting: “To promote nonfiction film and video, to encourage and celebrate the documentary arts and sciences, and to support the efforts of nonfiction film and video makers all over the world.” Thirty-seven years later, its mission modified and refined, its programmatic scope greatly expanded, IDA heeds closely to the essence of its original aspirations
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! Vox’s Alissa Wilkerson talks to Khalik Allah about his new documentary Black Mother. My inspirations never actually look like what I make, but I definitely draw inspiration from all over. The main thing was, I think, just walking and asking myself what’s important to me. I wasn’t necessarily thinking of my
SXSW, the annual mega-event in Austin, TX, has become not just a festival, not just a destination, but a spectacle in four dimensions. As cosplay characters, bizarrely groomed dogs, illuminated scooters and rickshaws wove through my 2019 journey, I could visit a battery of corporate “houses” programmed to attract attention, attend “parties” promoting the latest app or device, or visit massive installations celebrating digital artistry that brings echoes of 1970s lightshows. It takes focus to pay attention at SXSW, where your time is the most relevant currency. I was focused on documentary