This year's Full Frame Tribute honoree, Jehane Noujaim, is no stranger to the 21-year-old Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, having brought both her very first film, Startup.com (co-directed with Chris Hegedus, and produced by DA Pennebaker) to Durham over a decade and a half ago, and three years later, 2004's prescient Control Room. Since then, of course, the Harvard-educated, globetrotting director (she splits her time between the US and Egypt) has gone on to be nominated for an Academy Award (for 2013's The Square), as well as winning the TED Prize (which allowed her to create the
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Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Now streaming at Amazon Prime is Parvez Sharma's A Sinner in Mecca . For a gay filmmaker, filming in Saudi Arabia during the hajj presents two serious challenges -- filming is forbidden and homosexuality in Saudi Arabia is punishable by death. With nothing more than his iPhone, Sharma joins four million fellow Muslims on the pilgrimage to Mecca. Premiering Wednesday, April 25, on KCET Link is the new season of Earth Focus, produced in partnership with Thomson Reuters
Single-use plastic items account for more than 40 percent of plastic waste that ends up in landfills or natural environment. They are non-biodegradable, killing over 100 million marine animals each year. In celebration of Earth Day 2018 and this year’s focus on ending plastic pollution, here are a few documentaries to spur you into action and reduce your impact. BBC Blue Planet II The follow-up to 2001’s documentary series is available in beautiful 4K and narrated, of course, by Sir David Attenborough. The series not only takes the viewers on a journey around the world’s marine ecosystems, but
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, Lauren Wissot reports from the #DocsSoWhite "Gatekeepers" panel at Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. After Rana explained that Kartemquin primarily funds Chicago and Midwest filmmakers, Walker moved the conversation on to the subject of class. Statistically, she said, documentary filmmakers
The Center for Media at Risk is the brainchild of Barbie Zelizer, Ph.D, professor of communication at the Annenberg School for Communication at University of Pennsylvania. The aim of the Center is to bring together media practitioners and scholars to address the real threats to the journalism profession—ranging from killings and kidnappings to trolling and hacking. The 2016 presidential election spurred Zelizer to think about how the media needs to transform itself in a wholesale fashion. The Center itself officially launches this month, highlighted by a two-day conference this weekend
The 25th annual Hot Docs Festival is just one week away. If you are headed to Toronto, you can catch a whopping 20 IDA-supported films on the big screen. Our Executive Director, Simon Kilmurry, Director of Programming and Policy, Claire Aguilar, and Filmmaker Services Manager, Toni Bell, will also be in attendance, make sure to say hello! 93Queen A group of tenacious women are shattering the glass ceiling in their Hasidic Brooklyn neighborhood to create the first all-female volunteer EMS corps in NYC. Tickets Amal Adolescence in the time of post-revolution Egypt that’s shifting around an angry
Can documentary filmmaking be taught? Like most art forms, it requires more than just technical skill. The curiosity—and in many cases, obsession—that great doc filmmaking requires can’t be outlined on a dry-erase board. And these days, with higher education becoming increasingly unaffordable and the cost of making movies becoming more affordable, the financial commitment of an MFA is not a decision to be taken lightly. More philosophically, does the rigor and focus of a Master of Fine Arts degree outweigh what a filmmaker can learn out in the world (or as a working apprentice on a film set)
On February 18, 2004, I received a phone call from the Musée de l’Homme in Paris informing me that Jean Rouch had died unexpectedly in an automobile accident while filming in Niger. The information was meant to be forwarded on to my boss, John Marshall, Rouch’s dear friend, fellow filmmaker and occasional collaborator. Although Rouch was 85 years old, the news still came as a shock. We had known him to be robust and full of the same creative spirit that produced over 120 films, starting in 1941 when he arrived in Niger as a French hydrology engineer to supervise a construction project. While
Among the early stakeholders in your documentary career are your teachers—whether at the high school level, to provide that crucial early spark of inspiration; or in college, to broaden and deepen your understanding of and appreciation for the genre; or in graduate school, when your career aspirations are more or less solidified but your heart and mind are ever open to transformative work to set your artistic journey in motion. Your teachers—by and large, filmmakers themselves who abide by an essential and evolving canon of work to keep their creative instincts sharp—are your mentors and your
Dear Readers, Since the last education-themed issue that we tackled, back in Fall 2013, we launched a column, Doc University, in which we spotlight documentary education programs across the country, some of which were launched very recently. What’s more, many of these programs have spawned a steady stream of innovations and transformative studies. In addition, media arts nonprofits have continued to expand their educational offerings and partner with these venerable higher places of learning. So, while the costs of pursuing a documentary education can be considerable, the opportunities to