Now in its 15th year, Columbia, Missouri’s True/False Film Festival is widely recognized as the most prominent American showcase for documentary as a distinct art form. It does its best to treat docs as intentional works of cinema, temporarily sequestering them from concerns about market value and measurable "impact." Those who return year after year recognize True/False as somehow both the most welcoming and most radical of fests. Despite a name that suggests a cavalier attitude towards truth, True/False might also be the festival most committed to the responsibilities and ramifications of
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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! At Filmmaker, Sergio Andrés Lobo-Navia shares the nuts and bolts of delivering your film to a festival. Format. Codec. Audio. DCP. You've worked on your movie now for some time and have been eagerly waiting for acceptance emails from festivals. One lands in your inbox, and you excitedly read through the letter
When I was a sophomore in college, I saw Roger & Me, Michael Moore's moving and often darkly comedic romp through General Motors' exodus from Moore's hometown of Flint, Michigan. My love of the documentary genre was born in that moment. Yes, it was the storytelling, but it was also the anthropological voyeurism and access to intimate human moments that hooked me. Beyond the story form itself, where and how I experienced the film was meaningful—that is, in the context of a sociology course that focused on jobs and socioeconomic inequality. The class backdrop and discussion reinforced the film's
The 2018 Sundance Film Festival kicked off for me at the Firelight Media party at the Kickstarter Lodge, with a fired-up crowd anticipating the Women's Marches taking place across the country the next day. Firelighters Stanley Nelson, Marcia Smith and Sonya Childress addressed the attendees, then introduced activists and attorneys from around the country, who reminded the crowd of the long and difficult fight ahead. And the next day, such rebel legends as Jane Fonda and Gloria Allred exhorted the protesters at the "Respect Rally." Conceived as an alternative to the Women's March in Park City
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Premiering on Netflix Friday, May 4 is Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman's End Game. Facing an inevitable outcome, terminally ill patients meet extraordinary medical practitioners seeking to change our approach to life and death. Premiering on PBS Friday, May 4 is The Jazz Ambassadors. Beginning in 1955, when America asked its greatest jazz artists to travel the world as cultural ambassadors, Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington and their racially diverse band
What do you see at a film festival? At Tribeca Film Festival, that would be television programs, online episodes, online video, installations that incorporate virtual reality, 360 video and games. And films—especially the documentary films. The documentary lineup at #Tribeca2018 was rich in handsome, well-produced options and issue films were everywhere. On the environment, you could go for uplift/inspiring, Neil Gelinas' Into the Okavango, which features a National Geographic expedition into the extraordinary Okavango Delta to catalog its native species, and The Serengeti Rules, which with
The 15th Docudays UA International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival (March 23-30) presented 62 films from 36 countries, and brought together over 200 participants to the architecturally eclectic city of Kiev. This was my first trip to Ukraine, and I'll admit, I wasn't expecting a country that had just had a revolution four years prior, and was currently embroiled in a no-end-in-sight war on its border, would prove to be such an inspiring environment to watch and talk docs. Yet after a heady five days of soaking in the surrounding sights, and the festival's engaging panels and strong
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! At The New York Times, Liz Garbus shares the story behind her upcoming Times-centered doc The Fourth Estate. Still, why did The Times open itself to anyone in such a way? There were so many reasons for it not to. It might be that the organization's leaders understood that at a time when journalism was under attack
When filmmaker Dawn Porter was approached to produce and direct a new documentary about Robert F. Kennedy and his 1968 presidential campaign, she thought back to an interview she had done for her first feature documentary, Gideon's Army, with former Attorney General Eric Holder in his office at the Department of Justice. Holder was seated at Kennedy's old desk that he used when he was attorney general; above the desk was a portrait of Kennedy. Holder told Porter that, as a boy growing up in Queens, he was captivated by seeing the Kennedy brothers on television and was drawn to the idea of a
Over the coming days, hundreds of filmmakers and industry professionals from across the globe will land in Toronto, Canada, to participate in the Hot Docs Canadian International Film Festival—North America's largest documentary festival, conference and market. Documentary film, widely celebrated as Canada's national art form, has found a welcoming embrace in Toronto, and the upcoming edition, which runs from April 26 to May 6, marks an impressive quarter-century of preeminence in the documentary community. Founded in 1993 by the Documentary Organization of Canada (formerly the Canadian