Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Premiering March 15 on Paramount Network, I Am Richard Pryor, from Jesse James Miller, explores and celebrates the life and career of the iconic comedian who lifted himself out of poverty to achieve worldwide success as a shrewd and penetrating observer of the Black experience in America. The six-episode Finding Justice, airing Sundays on BET through April 14t, travels the country to join heroes, leaders and activists as they battle to bring change to their home cities. Each
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Editor’s Note: Documentary filmmaker and cinematographer Andrew Berends passed away—just a week after Free Solo , on which he was one of the cinematographers, won the Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary. Berends had to have been drawn to the brand of fearlessness that Alex Honnold exuded in scaling El Capitan. Berends himself personified that kind of moxie throughout his career, venturing alone to some of the more unnerving places on the planet in pursuit of stories of compelling humans who challenged the stigma that often tainted these places, who proclaimed a kind of fierce hope. For
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! Filmmaker’s Vadim Rizov talks to Brett Story about her latest film, The Hottest August. ...I’m really interested in expanding what we call “political cinema.” I also dislike message-y films, or whatever you want to call the films that see their role as delivering a particular policy line and/or demanding that
This past December, the Cinema Vérité Iran International Documentary Film Festival staged its 12th edition. For the last three years, the festival has taken place in a large multiplex, Charsoo, in the busy business district of Tehran, surrounded by appliance and mobile phone shops. It is a newly renovated building that houses upscale Samsung and other tech stores on its ground floor. The festival was on the 6th floor, above the food court and away from shoppers. For six days the festival drew thousands of mostly young people, including students, filmmakers and artists. Charsoo comprises six
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. The Case Against Adnan Syed, a four-part series directed by Amy Berg, reinvestigates the case behind the hit 2014 podcast Serial, which examined the 1999 murder of 18-year-old Baltimore County high school student Hae Min Lee, and the subsequent conviction of her ex-boyfriend, Adnan Syed. The HBO series, which premieres March 10, evolves from the genesis of their high school relationship to the original police investigation and trial, and moves into the current day as Syed
Dear Documentary Community: On the eve of the East Coast premiere of Alex Rivera and Cristina Ibarra's Sundance Film Festival Award-winning The Infiltrators at the Miami International Film Festival, one of the protagonists from that film, Claudio Rojas, was detained by ICE and is now in the Krome Detention Center in South Miami-Dade. What began as a routine check-in with ICE has quickly devolved into the very real possibility of Rojas being deported immediately. A native of Argentina, he has lived in the US for 19 years and is a father and grandfather to US citizens. For more on this story
Amidst an exceptionally (though necessary) rainy winter season in Los Angeles, IDA staff were thrilled to host another Volunteer Appreciation Night at the Iron Triangle Brewery in the Downtown Arts District for a night of food, drinks, games, and camaraderie with longtime and new volunteers. Volunteers are the lifeblood of any organization and that is especially true with the IDA. Events like Getting Real, the IDA Screening Series and the IDA Documentary Awards rely heavily on our 150+ active volunteers to make sure our events run efficiently and smoothly. Our IDA volunteers are often the
IDA announced sixteen grants totaling $245,000 to films through its Enterprise Documentary Fund and Pare Lorentz Documentary Fund.
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Premiering February 25 on PBS World, ‘63 Boycott documents a boycott of the Chicago Public schools, spearheaded by 250,000 students. Combining 16mm footage of the march, shot by Kartemquin Films founder Gordon Quinn, with participants’ contemporary reflections, ‘63 Boycott, directed by Quinn, Rachel Dickson and Tracye E. Matthews, connects the forgotten story of one of the largest civil rights demonstrations in the north to today’s issues around race, education, school
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! New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd writes about Leaving Neverland, Dan Reed’s upcoming HBO doc about Michael Jackson’s alleged history of sexual abuse of children, as recounted through the on-camera recollections of two of his victims. Reed is a Brit who made several documentaries about terrorism. He says he