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! The Guardian's Steve Rose assesses the plethora of Trump docs as the midterm elections loom. Rather than a test for Trump’s presidency, this could turn out to be a testing time for documentary itself. The intention for these films to sway hearts, minds and voting intentions. But let’s also admit that Trump sells
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Alain Resnais said about Night and Fog, "I want to address the viewer in a critical state…to create a space for contemplation." In the Getting Real session entitled "Creative Courage in Nonfiction Storytelling," filmmakers Yance Ford, Jenni Olson and Jennie Livingston showed us how to do just that. Taken together, their personal essay films—Ford's Strong Island, Olson's The Royal Road and Livingston's work-in-progress, Earth Camp One—reflect many of the formal choices that distinguish Renais' film. He insisted on concentration camp inmate and poet Jean Cayrol as the author of the narration
Alexandria Bombach's On Her Shoulders opens with a scrum of photographers. Everyone is trying to get the shot. Many are going for selfies. They want to share the frame with a notable person. For the first few moments, we cannot see who the center of attention is. A young woman emerges from the crowd. This is our first glimpse of 2018 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Nadia Murad Basee Taha. We see her next in a quiet moment, writing in a notebook. We learn that Nadia is a Yazidi survivor of ISIS genocide and sexual slavery. This juxtaposition—the mass of media demanding access set against the young
Getting Real 2018 used complementary sessions to examine documentaries as tools for public knowledge and action as well as the policies, best practices and standards that enable documentary-making and distribution. In her "mini-keynote" that she delivered the day before "The Role of Documentary in the Public Sphere," ITVS CEO Sally Jo Fifer called on the field to project the standards and values of independent documentary in an increasingly commercialized, dynamic and blended marketplace by holding true to the long-held commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion. "Our purpose stays clear
Part home movie, part activist doc, Rudy Valdez's The Sentence is that rare film that can bring even the most jaded filmgoer (yes, that would be me) to tears. Indie cinematographer Valdez spent nearly a decade shooting hundreds of hours of footage to create a portrait of his own close-knit family in the aftermath of his sister Cindy Shank's incarceration—the consequence of what's colloquially referred to as "the girlfriend problem." Shank, who'd never before been in trouble with the law, was sentenced to 15 years—the mandatory minimum—on conspiracy charges after her boyfriend, a drug dealer
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. In the IDA Award-winning series Making A Murderer, filmmakers Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi followed, for over a decade, the twists and turns of the cases of Steven Avery and his nephew Brendan Dassey, two Wisconsin men convicted of the brutal murder of photographer Teresa Halbach, uncovering along the way the possibility of a massive miscarriage of justice. The filmmakers are back for Making A Murderer Part 2, premiering October 19 on Netflix. Demos and Ricciardi have
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! Rebecca Day reflects on Getting Real '18 and the 'Therapeutic Interventions in Documentaries' panel ahead of World Mental Health Day in the Scottish Documentary Blog. When IDA first asked me to host a panel at Getting Real, coming up with the title seemed to be the hardest part. Remarkably, this could have been
I work as both a cinematographer and a director/cinematographer; I find the latter to be especially challenging. I need to be able to have the tools I feel most comfortable with, physically and technically, since my mind is working on lots of things at a time—not just what’s happening in the picture. I prefer to work with small crews. The part of my job I hate the most is carrying stuff, so I’ve figured out a setup that works for me on most films, where I have as little as possible. There are two things I cannot live without on a shoot. One is a padded camera strap. This strap costs about $20
Long-term success in documentary-making is best supported by a good grasp of legal basics. This Legal Q&A answers one question: What are some of the key areas of legal understanding that are important to a sustained career as a documentary producer? Creating a Business Entity Producers often form business entities to run all of their productions, rather than doing so as an individual person. Or, they might set up a single-purpose business entity for each production, or a combination of both. These entities employ individuals (often including the individual who founded the entity), and they
For 14 years, the fall season has meant, for me, the Camden International Film Festival (CIFF) in Camden, Rockport and Rockland, Maine—three picturesque small towns nestled between the mountains and the sea, just 17 miles south of where I grew up. Camden specifically has long thrived as a gathering place for the meeting of the minds, away from it all and in an environment that naturally encourages inward contemplation and a shedding of social trappings and pretense. Since 1988 the Camden Conference has lured foreign affairs experts to brave the harsh Maine winters to discuss pressing issues of