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 film community stormed the Twitterverse this week, following the announcement from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Science, under pressure from ABC/Disney over declining ratings of the Oscars telecast, announced major changes, including a new category for most popular film and a proposal to relegate the
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Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. The early days of documentary yielded a handful of now-classic "city symphony" films, including Walter Ruttmann's Berlin: Symphony of a City. Influenced by the early work of Dziga Vertov, the film is structured to follow the life of Berlin and its inhabitants across the course of a single day, from dawn to dusk, to create “a symphonic film with the thousandfold energies that make up the life of a great city.” Now streaming on Mubi. Premiering August 6 on POV, Joan Fan's Still
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 staff at Current, headed by Karen Everhart, Mike Janssen and Steve Behrens, have created a timeline documenting the history of public broadcasting in the US. Public broadcasting in the US has grown from local and regional roots at schools and universities into a nationally known source of news and
Call For Entries For Best Audio Documentary (Radio/Podcast) are now open! In recognition of the continued expansion of the nonfiction form, we are introducing two new categories for the 34th Annual IDA Documentary Awards. As radio storytelling and podcasting have staked out bold artistic territories, we are debuting the award for Best Audio Documentary. And, as the community has witnessed an impressive body of adventurous work in music documentaries over the past few years, IDA will create a special category devoted exclusively to this genre. "The IDA is proud to support the documentary
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Rest in Power: The Trayvon Martin Story, directed by Jenner Furst and Julia Willoughby Nason and written and produced by Jay-Z, re-examines the life and legacy of Trayvon Martin, whose death in 2012 became a catalyst for the Black Lives Matter movement. The six-episode series airs July 30-August 12 on Paramount Network and BET. Whose Streets?, directed by Sabaah Folayan and Damon Davis, makes its PBS premiere July 30 on POV. When unarmed teenager Michael Brown was killed by
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! From The New York Times, William Yardley reflects on the passing of Bill Loud, the patriarch of the Loud family, the stars of the prototypical nonfiction series, An American Family. But the Louds became a cultural touchstone anyway. Decades before characters on reality programs like The Osbournes and Dance Moms
My name is Cecilia Mejia Morales, but the filmmaking community knows me as Cecilia MeMor. This summer, I am working as an intern for IDA in the Filmmaker Services department through the Los Angeles County Arts Commision (LACAC), Paid Arts Internship Program. During my first week at the IDA, I was invited to attend the National Association of Latino Independent Producers (NALIP) Summit with my supervisor, Toni Bell, Filmmaker Services Manager. While she moderated the “Pitching to Perfection” panel and took meetings with documentary filmmakers, I attended several panels. What follows are my
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Editor's Note: I didn't know Jonathan Gold personally. And I'm not a hardcore foodie. But Jonathan Gold, whose shocking death on Saturday night of pancreatic cancer, was not simply a Pulitzer Prize-winning food critic. Food, to Gold, was the port of entry to a richer appreciation of culture, of which cuisine was as essential an ingredient as language, music, history and folklore. Gold was an amiable populist, more at home sampling taco-truck fare on the sidewalks on East LA
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! From TVreal, Sara Alessi talks to gatekeepers about the true crime genre phenomenon. Audiences find true-crime so gripping because the traditional whodunits and longer explorations tap into "universal themes of betrayal, lust, greed, revenge and overcoming adversity," says Laura Fleury, A+E Networks' senior VP
Leah Smith defiantly refuses to believe she needs to be "fixed." A media and entertainment advocate for the Center for Disability Rights, who holds degrees in both public relations and political science (as well as a master’s in public administration), Smith is one of several preconceived notion-upending characters in Emmy Award-winning documentarian Rachel Dretzin’s Far From the Tree. An adaptation of Andrew Solomon’s widely lauded 2012 bestseller Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity, the film is a lovingly rendered deep dive into the lives of families with