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
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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
Chicken & Egg Pictures, which was founded in 2005 by Judith Helfand, Julie Parker Benello, and Wendy Ettinger to support women documentarians, is the recipient of this year’s IDA Amicus Award, which goes to an individual or organization that has been a great supporter, financially or otherwise, of documentary filmmaking. Documentary spoke with Wolfson via email about how she came to Chicken & Egg, the future of the organization, and how Chicken & Egg has impacted the film industry.
Editor’s note: In celebration of National Native American Heritage Month, we invited Rebekka Herrera-Schlichting, now formerAssistant Director of one of our Organizational Members, Vision Maker Media, to select films that help indigenous filmmakers practice their right to narrative sovereignty. Vision Maker Media envisions a world changed and healed by understanding Native stories and the public conversations they generate. Watch and share these great films! List last updated in November 2021. Lake of Betrayal (Paul Lamont, 2017) Lake of Betrayal, from director Paul Lamont, explores the
This year’s Courage Under Fire Award recipients, director Stephen Maing (High Tech, Low Life) and the whistleblowers of the NYPD 12 that he documented in his exquisite doc Crime + Punishment, may not at first glance seem as likely honorees as, say, journalists facing down the daily guns and bombs of the war-torn Middle East.
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Premiering November 12 on HBO and streaming through the month on HBO Now and HBO Go, The Price of Everything, from two-time Academy Award nominee Nathaniel Kahn, examines the role of art and artistic passion in today’s money-driven, consumer-based society. Featuring collectors, dealers, auctioneers and a rich range of artists, the film exposes deep contradictions as it holds a mirror up to contemporary values and times, coaxing out the dynamics at play in pricing the
Veterans Day and Transgender Awareness Week fall at the same time each year. Despite recent setbacks and debate, over 15,000 transgender people actively serve in the United States military today. We've curated a list of documentaries highlighting extraordinary soldiers who defend the freedoms of all Americans while waging a war at home against forces of fear and bigotry. We hope you enjoy these remarkable stories. TransMilitary (Gabriel Silverman and Fiona Dawson, 2018) Transgender Americans were banned from serving in the United States military until recently. Silverman and Dawson's