What does it mean to die well in the 21st century, and how does it feel? End Game, from longtime collaborators Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman ( The Celluloid Closet; Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt), takes us inside the world of hospice and palliative care, following the journey of terminally ill patients, their families and caretakers in two cutting-edge San Francisco facilities. Documentary spoke with the Oscar-winning filmmakers about their vérité approach to a universal subject that most of us spend our whole lives avoiding. DOCUMENTARY: What would an Oscar win do for End Game
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Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Filmmaker Matt Tyrnauer captures the roiling debauchery of the Disco Era of the 1970s--the nucleus of which was Studio 54, the club whose clientele was a massive swirl of uptown and downtown culture, the gay community and A-list celebrities. Studio 54 premieres February 11 on A&E. The Oscar-nominated Hale County, This Morning This Evening premieres February 11 on Independent Lens. Director RaMell Ross creates an immersive cinematic reverie of African American life in rural
While Talal Derki was working on his first documentary feature—the Sundance-winning Return to Homs, a story that goes behind the barricades in the war-torn city of Homs, Syria, to follow 19-year-old Basset and his comrades in their quest for a successful revolution against the Assad regime—the seeds of his second documentary were sown. In Homs, he met a man who, he would later learn, was teaching his five-year-old son how to use weapons. The image lodged into Derki’s mind, but it wasn’t something he was able to use in Return to Homs, because his story focused on a more historical narrative
Following on the heels of last month’s “Doc Star of the Month,” Ashley York, the lead character and co-director of hillbilly, Documentary is pleased to present for February yet another face of flyover-country diversity. Walter Burrell is the proud owner of a drinking hole in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, that he lovingly refers to as the “hillbilly Studio 54” in Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher’s The Gospel of Eureka. (And which, though it hosts weekly drag shows, Burrell is quick to point out is not a “gay bar,” since it welcomes everyone regardless of sexuality; he’s staunchly opposed to “gay
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! Wesley Morris of The New York Times praises the work of Marlon Riggs, the subject of a weeklong perspective--Race, Sex & Cinema: The World of Marlon Riggs--at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. There’s no reason all of this work should still work, that it should still hypnotize, upset, delight and astound. But genius
I first saw Hale County This Morning, This Evening, RaMell Ross’s cinematic look at daily life in the Alabama Black Belt, at last year’s CPH:DOX. It was one of those unexpected festival finds, a film up for the DOX:AWARD, and thus required viewing for us international critics serving on the Danish film magazine Ekko’s annual Starbarometer jury. As I wrote of the doc in my final assessment, “A series of exquisitely framed snapshots alternate with kinetic camerawork, set to an ambient sound design weaved with an elegant score. The poetry of daily life in the rural South is deftly captured
Documentary filmmaker Chai Vasarhelyi and her husband, climber and filmmaker Jimmy Chin, haven’t been making movies together for all that long. But you wouldn’t know it when talking to them, as their synchronicity is acute, even over a conference call with each of them in different locations. Vasarhelyi made her first documentary—a feature about friends in Kosovo during the war at the turn of the last century—when she was still an undergraduate student at Princeton University. Though she went on to work under narrative director Mike Nichols on Closer, nonfiction was her passion. She set off to
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. On the heels of a year of popular and critical acclaim, Morgan Neville’s Won’t You Be My Neighbor? makes its television premiere on HBO this Saturday, February 9. Meet the television icon who made kindness and empathy the twin drivers of his irresistible persona. Sealab, premiering February 12 on American Experience, tells the little-known story of the Sealab project, launched 50 years ago this month as a pressurized underwater habitat, complete with science labs and living
The Academy recently announced its Oscar nominations. At IDA, Oscar season means that we are in high gear planning for DocuDay LA, our annual day-long marathon screening of nominated films. If you have not been, DocuDay LA is IDA’s longest-running signature event, since 1983! Our loyal fans take the annual pilgrimage from all over North America to see the year’s most powerful films, hear from the key creatives who made them, and gain insight into the anatomy of an Oscar-nominated documentary. Whether you are a doc-maker yourself, or simply love documentaries, the event is a truly inspiring day
Three Films by Raymond Depardon Released by Icarus Films 2018 3-Disc Boxed Set Featuring 12 Days / 87 minutes, 2017 /French w/English subtitles, Journal de France /100 minutes, 2012, France ( Les Habitants)/ 84 minutes, 2015 If you are unfamiliar with the work of French photographer, photojournalist and filmmaker Raymond Depardon, this newly released three-disc boxed set from Icarus Films provides a basis for understanding who he is and what subject matter occupies his field of vision. Born in Villefranche-sur-Saône in 1942, the 76-year-old Depardon shows no signs of slowing down. The