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
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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
Editor’s Note: Orwa Nyrabia is the artistic director of International Documentary Filmmaker Amsterdam (IDFA). He was born in Syria, where, in 2002, with his partner, Diana el Jeiroudi, he launched the first independent documentary production company in the country. They later founded DOX BOX, the leading documentary festival in the Arab region. As a producer, his films have earned numerous honors, including a Sundance Grand Jury Prize and a Grierson Award. What follows is the edited version the keynote address that he delivered at Getting Real ’18, via Skype. Where I come from, there is no
Editor’s Note: Chi-hui Yang is program officer at Ford Foundation’s JustFilms initiative. What follows is an edited version of his keynote address at the 2018 Getting Real conference. What I’d like to talk about today are in many ways some age-old questions that get to the heart of the documentary as a social and political form—and what it means to me to be a funder of social justice documentary filmmaking at Ford Foundation. These are some thoughts about the stakes of documentary today and what I’ve been calling “Documentary Power”—not the “power of documentary,” which is a very different
Editor’s Note: Molly Thompson is Senior Vice President of Feature Films at A&E Networks. In 2005 she launched the network’s feature documentary arm, A&E IndieFilms. What follows is an edited version of Thompson’s keynote address at the 2018 Getting Real conference. I wanted to begin this morning by posing what seems like a simple question: What is a documentary filmmaker? It’s one of those questions, it should be a piece of cake. But then I cleared my head and thought about it for a while—and to be honest I am still thinking about it. When I let the definition float to the surface in my mind
Transcription of Michele Stephenson's Keynote address from Getting Real '18.
Raising money for a film often feels like a Sysyphean task, constantly pushing a boulder up a hill. But as documentaries have become more popular among audiences (both at the cinema and on streaming platforms), nonfiction now appears more commercially viable than in the past. Equity finance, also referred to as hard money (as opposed to grants, which are soft money), has become increasingly a component in many documentaries. But at times, there are hidden perils of finding generous investors, as filmmakers sometimes enter unsuspectingly into Faustian pacts out of sheer desperation. As long as