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 Daily Beast, Natalia Winkelan interviews filmmaker Rachel Lears, whose doc-in-progress, Knock Down the House, includes among her protagonists Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose stunning upset this week in the Democratic primary in New York City made national headlines. Herein lies the mission behind Knock
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Getting Real ‘18, a three-day conference presented by the International Documentary Association (IDA) in partnership with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, is the largest gathering of its kind in North America. The 2018 edition will take place September 25-27, 2018, in Los Angeles, California.
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Premiering tonight on HBO, HBO Go and HBO Now, Don Argott's Believer follows Mormon Dan Reynolds, frontman for the Grammy Award-winning band Imagine Dragons, as he takes on a new mission to explore how the Mormon Church treats its LGBTQ members. With the rising suicide rate among teens in the state of Utah, Reynolds' concern with the church's policies sends him on an unexpected path of acceptance and change. Also premiering tonight, on PBS' POV, Hyewon Lee's Singing with
Some of you may know me as the Enterprise Documentary Fund’s Project Coordinator. Beginning this funding cycle, I am thrilled to assume the position of Program Officer. In this role, I will be managing both of IDA’s major grant programs - the Pare Lorentz Documentary Fund and IDA Enterprise Documentary Fund. On June 11, IDA launched the open call for the Pare Lorentz Doc Fund. I revisited the life and work of Pare Lorentz to help better explain the fund to applicants. I quickly learned Lorentz was not afraid to piss people off, especially people in power. As a journalist and film critic in the
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 IndieWire, David Ehrlich talks to filmmaker Michael Moore about Bowling for Columbine and his struggles to make an impact with his documentaries. “For almost 30 years, I’ve been trying to sound a warning siren that the wealthy in this country are on a rampage to take whatever they can from the middle class. I
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 Juliane Dressner and Edwin Martinez' Personal Statement. We caught up with director Dressner and co-director Martinez via
June 20 th is World Refugee Day. It has been 18 years since the United Nations General Assembly declaration and 67 years since the 1951 Refugee Convention, and yet the crisis of displaced populations persists around the world. And as long as refugees have been uprooted from their homelands and forced into an unending journey of hope and despair, filmmakers have captured their stories for the rest of us to experience. We at IDA have assembled a selection of docs that take you on wrenching treks across deserts and seas to new, strange lands--sometimes welcoming, sometimes hostile. 4.1 Miles
AFI Docs, held in Washington, DC in June, has come into its own as a smart, topical documentary festival for a place addicted to public issues, media manipulation and power. In Trump's town, the burning question this year was how documentaries raise critically important issues and address polarization. Shocking, but Routine Several of the docs that premiered at AFI Docs gave big issues a human face and voice, and some brought home terrifying realities about the Dickensian, even dystopian realities of daily life in today's America. The opening-night film, Julianne Dressner's Personal Statement
The 2018 FIFA World Cup has already caused a mini earthquake in Mexico City with Mexico’s stunning defeat of defending champion Germany, Iceland shocked the world by tieing Argentina, Brazil failed to topple the Swiss, Japan snatched victory from Colombia, we can go on. To keep your competitive spirit going between games, here are some football (or “soccer,” for the non-qualifying Americans) documentaries to watch. The Workers Cup (Adam Sobel, 2017) In 2022, Qatar will host the FIFA World Cup. But far from the bright lights, star athletes and adoring fans, the tournament is being built on the
Airing tonight on HBO, with an encore airing June 20 in conjunction with World Refugee Day, It Will Be Chaos, from directors Lorena Luciano and Filippo Piscopo, sheds an important light on the refugee crisis facing Europe, the US and the world today. Life in Southern Italy is thrown into a tailspin when refugees arrive by the thousands and the locals are left to fend for themselves. Aregai, an Eritrean refugee who survives a major shipwreck off the shores of Lampedusa, is trapped in the Italian faltering immigration system and goes underground to reach Northern Europe. Through his journey