Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Premiering January 7 on Independent Lens and streaming here , Rita Baghdadi and Jeremiah Hammerling’s My Country No More takes viewers to Trenton, North Dakota, a quiet, tight-knit farm town that underwent a radical transformation during the oil boom years between 2011 and 2016. With billions of dollars to be gained, small towns like Trenton became overwhelmed by an influx of workers from across the country and by the repurposing of countless acres of farmland for industrial
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After her breast cancer diagnosis in 2015, Emmy Award-winning chef, author and magazine publisher Sandra Lee chose to invite cameras to her medical appointments and consultations, into the operating room where she underwent a double mastectomy, and to witness her recovery process in the hospital and at home. The resulting documentary short, RX: Early Detection, A Cancer Journey with Sandra Lee, directed by Cathy Chermol Schrijver, is a raw, intimate look at her experience with cancer. Lee is now cancer-free and passionate about the importance of early detection for both women and men: “This is
Editor's Note: This article is now out-of-date, and was updated in December 2024. | This revised look at documentary budgeting update the 2006 Documentary article “Don’t Fudge on Your Budget: Toeing the Line Items.” At the center of the documentary "business" is the budget, which offers a map of the filmmaking process, expressing both the film you’re planning to make and how you plan to make it. Ideally, it is also a living document that can help get a film to completion.
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! Now that the Shorts Lists for Best Documentary Feature and Best Documentary Short Subject are out, Vanity Fair’s Katey Rich looks at the recent history of the race to the final ten nominees. “The unfortunate reality is it is a competitive space,” Martin said. “If you’re not constantly doing screenings and being
From DocuDay in February through Getting Real, the IDA Screening Series, and the IDA Documentary Awards, 2018 has been a remarkable year for IDA and nonfiction storytelling as a whole. The compassion and camaraderie we've seen this year in our documentary community—our documentary family—has truly made this year a special one as we've watched a new generation of storytellers emerge across the globe and be welcomed with open arms by veterans in the field. With so many highlights this year at festivals, community events, and our own IDA events we asked our IDA colleagues to share a few of their
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Premiering December 17 on Independent Lens is Joel Fendelman’s Man on Fire, winner of the 2017 David L. Wolper Student Documentary Award. Fendelman travels to Grand Saline, Texas, the site of a horrific event in 2014, in which a 79-year-old white Methodist minister, Charles Moore, set himself on fire in a local parking lot. His suicide note, found on his car windshield, explained that this act was his final protest against the virulent racism in the community and his country
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! As the world winds down its year-long reflection on 1968, POV Magazine editor Marc Glassman assesses the documentation--both then and 50 years later--of the epochal events of that year. Marshall McLuhan’s famous assertion that “the medium is the message” may predate 1968 by a year, but that’s alright. We can see
Bill Siegel, the Chicago-based filmmaker best known for The Weather Underground and The Trials of Muhammed Ali, died suddenly on December 10. He was 55. Siegel earned two IDA Documentary Award nominations for The Weather Underground, for Best Feature and for the ABCNews VideoSource Award for best use of archival footage. The film, which he made with Sam Green and Carrie Lozano, went on to earn an Academy Award nomination. Ten years later, Siegel won an ABCNews VideoSource Award for The Trials of Muhammed Ali, which he made under the auspices of Kartemquin Films—his de facto home base since his
Bing Liu’s "Minding The Gap" emerged this evening with top honors in the Best Feature category at the 34th Annual IDA Documentary Awards. Floyd Russ’s "Zion" was awarded Best Short. The year’s biggest night in documentary took place at the Paramount Theatre and was hosted by actor, television presenter, and producer Ricki Lake.
My exposure to documentary film was quite limited growing up. Like many, I got my fair share of Ken Burns clips and maybe an episode of PBS FRONTLINE in high school, but for the most part, I knew very little about documentary film. Enter, the IDA Documentary Screening Series—a godsend to a documentary novice like myself trying to grasp the nuances of nonfiction storytelling. Gliding up the escalator of The Landmark to my first screening, Three Identical Strangers, I was greeted by a line of ecstatic filmgoers of all ages. I expected to see many people my own age; free entertainment is a huge