In recognition of World AIDS Day on December 1, we've curated a list of documentaries that tell harrowing, honest and triumphant stories of individuals fighting for their lives against AIDS and the prejudice surrounding the disease. Watch these documentaries and find a way to get involved with your community to fight against the global pandemic of HIV/AIDS and honor those who have died from the disease. How to Survive a Plague (David France, 2012) David France’s directorial debut for Independent Lens takes you on an all-encompassing journey through the history of the HIV/AIDS in the United
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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! IndieWire’s Steve Greene ponders the future of YouTube as an SVOD player. In this way, YouTube is a kindred spirit with Facebook, which is also trying to figure out how to capitalize on eyeballs by directing them towards the Facebook Watch element of the site. In either case, they’re working against expectations
Since IDA's DocuClub was relaunched in 2016 as a forum for sharing and soliciting feedback about works-in-progress, many DocuClub alums have since premiered their works on the festival circuit and beyond. In an effort to both monitor and celebrate the evolution of these films to premiere-ready status, we reached out to the filmmakers as they were either winding their way through the festival circuit, or gearing up for it. In this edition of "The Feedback," we spotlight Andrés Caballero and Sofian Khan’s The Interpreters. We caught up with Caballero and Khan via email as they were touring the
The new era for the International Documentary Festival at Amsterdam (IDFA) has begun, and its theme is inclusion. New IDFA director Orwa Nyrabia, who first became inspired by the power of documentary in his home country of Syria, has structured the fest as an annual gathering place for a movement that aims to inspire and act toward inclusion. You could see it in the opening night film, Kabul, City in the Wind, by Aboozar Amini, which won a Special Jury Prize for First Appearance. Like some other festival choices, it didn’t fit a three-act, high-production-values, emotionally cathartic model of
Mixed reality, artificial intelligence and other innovations are rapidly shifting the landscape of media and society. As storytellers, we have a central role to play in envisioning and catalyzing what the future holds. The Getting Real conference addressed emerging media technologies and creative praxis at a number of different sessions. These presentations showcased exciting applications of new media in documentary and other creative domains, but also shared an emphasis on the sweeping social impact—both positive and negative—of new technologies. What are the creative potentials and the
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Premiering November 26 on Independent Lens, An Honest Liar, from Tyler Measom and Justin Weinstein, follows magician-turned-detective James “The Amazing” Randi as he deploys his singular wit and legerdemain to track down and expose fraudulent faith healers, fortune-tellers and psychics. An eerie, eye-opening work of science nonfiction, Maxim Pozdorovkin’s The Truth About Killer Robots, which airs November 26 on HBO, considers several automation cases, from a factory in
Documentary in 2018 is an embarrassment of riches. The field overflows with talent, stories, and disruptive dealmaking that rewards audiences and filmmakers alike. Few young storytellers have emerged on this scene as fortuitously and forcefully as Bing Liu, the 29-year-old Chinese-American director of this year’s breakout Minding the Gap. Liu’s character-driven, vérité documentary—about vulnerabilities of modern masculinity, cycles of intimate violence, and the pleasure and solidarity of skateboarding—couldn’t be more relevant and surprising. For capturing our zeitgeist, it has earned hundreds
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Erika Cohn’s The Judge, premiering November 19 on Independent Lens and streaming through November, tells the story of the first woman judge in Palestine's religious courts. With the support of a progressive Sheik, Kholoud Al-Faqih assumes her appointment and adjudicates domestic and family matters with a subtle perspective informed by her early professional life as an attorney representing battered woman in both criminal and Shari’a courts. Every four years, the Navajo Nation
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! DOC NYC premiered the much-anticipated Aretha Franklin doc Amazing Grace this past Monday, and The New York Times’ Wesley Morris was there. We’d gathered Monday, with the Franklin family’s blessing, to behold a trove of all kinds of genius — physical, musical, oratorical, sartorial, tonsorial, metaphysical — the
The International Documentary Association (IDA) believes that documentary storytelling expands our understanding of shared human experience, fostering an informed, compassionate, and connected world. But in addition to supporting documentary filmmakers around the world, we must denounce and call attention to international movements and legislation that constitute a threat to freedom of expression. In Poland, the government has taken steps to soften a controversial law that would imprison anyone who would say that Poland was complicit with the Holocaust. Now it is proposed that the 3-year