Editor’s Note: Jonas Mekas, dubbed by many as “the godfather of avant-garde cinema,” was this and many more: As an archivist and exhibitor, he co-founded Anthology Film Archives (and he earned the IDA Preservation and Scholarship Award in 1997); as a film critic, he launched Film Culture magazine; and as a filmmaker, he was a true pioneer—not just in avant-garde cinema, but in mining the beauty of home movies and arguably laying the foundation for the personal documentary genre. He was also a teacher and a poet, and an immigrant, who came to New York City from Lithuania, having endured labor
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As the third round of applications opens later this month on Thursday, February 28, we invited Assia Boundaoui to share her story behind the IDA Enterprise Documentary Fund funded project and what it means to be a documentary journalist.
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. From executive producer John Legend and first-time directors Dyana Winkler and Tina Brown, United Skates travels to cities around the country to capture the dynamic world of roller skating and underscore how it’s such an intrinsic and indelible part of African-American culture. United Skates premieres February 18 on HBO and will stream on HBO Go and HBO Now through February Minding the Gap, the Oscar-nominated and IDA Award-winning film from Bing Liu , premieres February 18
Editor's Note: Hans-Robert Eisenhauer, the longtime documentary commissioning editor at ZDF-Arte and a documentary producer for Ventana-Film, Germany, is experiencing an unexpectedly long delay in obtaining his visa to travel to Los Angeles to attend the Academy Awards and IDA’s DocuDay. Eisenhauer is one of the producers of Talal Derkl's Of Fathers and Sons , one of the five feature documentaries nominated for an Academy Award. The IDA has sent this letter of support to the US Consul General in Frankfurt to process Eisenhauer's visa swiftly. Please join in our support for Eisenhauer to enter
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! Vanity Fair’s Laura Bradley talks to directors Betsy West, Julia Cohen and Chai Vasarhelyi about why the Best Documentary category has become “an Oscar haven for female directors” over the past ten years. Why has this category made deeper strides than the awards’ narrative categories? Perhaps it’s because the
If you are an urban Indian woman, chances are that you’ve been asked at some point to desist from touching or staining or entering spaces while on your period. Temples and other religious sites are off limits. In certain homes, so are kitchens. This is such a normalized phenomenon, that most Indian women will not blink at it. When buying pads at the local store, chances are that the owner has wrapped the pack in newspaper so your period will remain private, not to be carried or seen out in the open. In Bengal, even today, albeit under protest by feminists, the term “shorir kharap,” or sickness
Filmmaker Skye Fitzgerald’s upbringing in Oregon defied the norm, even in a state known for alternative lifestyles. Consider the family dog: his name, Spot, was conventional, but the breed was not. “Half-dingo, half, probably German Shepherd, we think,” Fitzgerald tells Documentary. Fitzgerald spent his teenage years living in Spartan conditions, in a rural dwelling that lacked electricity and running water—his parents’ choice. “It taught me a lot of things,” he observes. “It taught me that you don’t take things for granted, and to appreciate the simple things in life.” That experience of
In his third Academy Award-nominated film, Marshall Curry delivers a striking variation on his previous nominees, Street Fight and If a Tree Falls. A Night at the Garden is a seven-minute horror show taking place in an America we both thought we knew better and know all too well. In 1939, several years into Hitler’s reign of terror and months away from his invasion of Poland, American Nazis staged a rally in New York City’s Madison Square Garden—and 20,000 hale-and-hearty people showed up. In the film, the leader of the party rails against the media and the Jews, and clamors for “America First
If we listed Betsy West and Julie Cohen’s numerous accolades, films, documentary news programs and teaching credentials—namely all the reasons they were the perfect pair to make RBG—we’d have no room for anything else. Suffice it to say, West and Cohen had been on the path to telling Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s story for quite some time, even if it wasn’t always apparent. The two journalist-filmmakers were introduced by a mutual friend and colleague in 2011, when West was looking for a producer on Makers: Women Who Make America, a PBS series about the modern women’s movement
“I did whatever I needed to do to fit into a group of people who hated the color of my skin… I wanted love. I wanted to feel love, so yeah, I just made friends with monsters.” — Cornelius Walker With politicians being outed for past ethnic slurs and cultural insensitivity, the topic of race is a volatile one, but that’s not exactly a news flash. There’s no shortage of drama where the clash between races is concerned, and when the volatility of adolescence gets added to the mix, well, violence is seldom in short supply. But then from the other side of the Atlantic comes Black Sheep, a short