Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Premiering tonight on National Geographic is Brett Morgen's Jane, which draws on over 100 hours of never-before-seen footage to tell the story of Jane Goodall's revolutionary research on chimpanzees. The film was awarded Best Documentary of 2017 by the National Board of Review. Tonight on HBO, catch Traffic Stop, Kate Davis and David Heilbronner's Academy Award-nominated short about an Austin-Texas-based African-American schoolteacher who is pulled over for speeding, then
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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 Sub-Genre Media, Brian Newman details the ways that Heaven Is a Traffic Jam on the 405 took an unusual path to win the Oscar for Best Documentary Short. Along with so many others in the doc community, I'm super happy for everyone who was nominated – even those I don't personally know – and even happier for the
Back in 2001, audiences were mesmerized by the ephemeral creations made of ice, twigs or leaves, captured poetically in Thomas Riedelsheimer's Rivers & Tides, about land artist Andy Goldsworthy. Nearly two decades later, Riedelsheimer revisits Goldsworthy, following him to various countries, as he makes art with a variety of natural materials, ranging from rocks, stone, clay, to petals and even rain. On the phone from Munich, the director spoke with Documentary about his new film, Leaning into the Wind. You made the highly acclaimed Rivers & Tides in 2001. How did you come about making your
The line that traditionally separated documentary filmmakers from journalists increasingly is becoming blurred, if not erased. As the disciplines converge, the challenge for filmmakers is to learn to navigate the professional, legal and ethical terrain that is second nature for most working journalists. The issues at stake were reinforced for Stacey Woelfel while attending last fall's Double Exposure Film Festival in Washington, DC. "There was a discussion among filmmakers—and these were not young filmmakers—asking the most basic questions that most students coming out of journalism school
It’s no small challenge to go on record to talk about your very important new job when you’ve only been at it a handful of weeks. But like everything else that comes his way, Orwa Nyrabia rose to the challenge when Documentary magazine asked him to weigh in on his new post as artistic director of the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam ( IDFA), Europe’s largest (and arguably, most important) documentary film festival and marketplace. As it frequently does whenever I speak to this highly engaged, passionate, brilliant human being, our conversation veered into broader topics surrounding
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Newly streaming at Hulu is Adam Bhala Lough's The New Radical. Uncompromising millennial radicals from the United States and the United Kingdom attack the system through dangerous technological means, which evolves into a high-stakes game with world authorities in the midst of a dramatically changing political landscape. Premiering tonight on A&E is Divided States, an original documentary series about how racial tensions and hate crimes are impacting communities in the US and
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 Charlie Phillips reflects on the power of short docs. Online distribution has offered a big boost for the visibility of documentaries, and not just feature-length ones. In recent years, the most interesting innovations in the form have often been seen in the less risk-averse short-form length
March 1, 2018 (Los Angeles, CA) - Today, the International Documentary Association and National Endowment for the Arts, in partnership with the Jonathan B. Murray Center for Documentary Journalism at the University of Missouri, announced the creation of a resource guide for documentary filmmakers working on journalistic projects. The guide, “Mapping the Documentary-Journalism Landscape,” is now available on University of Missouri’s website. “When the Enterprise Fund was launched, we were committed to creating tangible documentary-journalism resources for all nonfiction storytellers,” said
Journalists and documentary filmmakers often follow parallel paths when stalking their similar prey. They interview witnesses, build stories around characters, dig into the past and compile facts. Along that landscape, they often encounter the same obstacles, and a common path can help get them to their destinations. This guide is designed to help filmmakers find information and make decisions that journalists make every day. Whether it be questions of what rights the First Amendment guarantees, what rights to privacy people can expect or what ethical decisions must be made when telling the
Opening a restaurant is always a challenge, and a Cleveland fine-dining establishment called EDWINS decided to make it extra difficult. The proprietor, Brandon Chrostowski, aimed to open the greatest French restaurant in the United States, while managing a staff composed almost exclusively of untrained cooks transitioning out of prison. Thomas Lennon's clear-eyed, soulful Oscar-nominated documentary short Knife Skills follows the EDWINS staff beginning six weeks prior to opening night; the former inmates' trial-by-fire demonstrates the difficulties of reintegration and the pressures of a