Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Premiering tonight, February 26 on Independent Lens is Theo Anthony's Rat Film. A unique blend of history, science and sci-fi, poetry and portraiture, the film explores how racial segregation, discriminatory lending practices, and environmental racism built the Baltimore that exists today. Premiering tonight on Smithsonian Channel (and streaming on the website) is The Lost Tapes: Malcolm X. Presented entirely through his speeches, newscasts, and rarely seen archival footage
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One of the five films nominated for Best Documentary Short Subject at this year's Academy Awards, Frank Stiefel's Heaven Is a Traffic Jam On the 405, takes its title from its protagonist's unusual description of bliss. The 57-year-old artist Mindy Alper perceives her environment differently than those around her, channeling all manner of anxiety, depression and trauma into vivid, intensely human sketch drawings and large-scale papier-mâché sculptures. Stiefel's film is an intimate portrait of a complicated individual, attuned to the ways that art-making can assist the sometimes painful process
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, Cara Buckley reports on two Oscar doc nominees facing different kinds of Russian meddling. Fayyad said that malignment of his film Last Men in Aleppo began soon after its premiere last year at Sundance, where it won a grand jury prize, and has only intensified since. In the Russian media, Mr
For journalist-turned-filmmaker Laura Checkoway, Edith + Eddie was supposed to be a heartwarming love story. Inspired by a photograph she saw online, Checkoway traveled to Alexandria, Virginia to profile America's oldest interracial newlyweds, aged 96 and 95, who married after ten years together. However, the story took a turn when the happy couple was forcibly separated by a court order, mandating that Edith go live with her daughter in Florida. In the year since the short film's premiere at the 2017 True/False Film Festival, Edith + Eddie has inspired and infuriated audiences, introducing us
Overview Culture paints a portrait of what we celebrate and who is worthy of our attention. As cultural critic and journalist Mary McNamara stated, "When we praise and reward certain stories or images, whether by big box office or gold statuary, we reveal what we as a society value, the kinds of people we find interesting, the characteristics we revere and revile. We show the paths we hope to choose or avoid and the lessons we have learned, or not learned, from history." Through artistic expression, documentary films provide a portal into real lives, stories and social challenges. It is not
Across America, but most pervasively in small industrial towns across the country, decades of excessive opioid prescriptions have led to a national epidemic of heroin overdoses. In no place is this struggle on view more pointedly than in Huntington, West Virginia, an Appalachian city with an overdose rate 10 times the national average. When a film focuses on one of the nation's most vilified drugs, how can a filmmaker break through the cynicism and judgment audiences often place on those unable to free themselves from its grasp? One way is the road taken by Peabody Award-winning filmmaker
Academy Award nominated documentary Last Men in Aleppo; its director, Feras Fayyad and the protagonists in the film, The White Helmets, are under a sustained and withering online disinformation attack from a legion of Russian, pro-Russian and pro-Assad trolls. This smear campaign, similar to one waged against the Oscar-winning The White Helmets in 2017, labels Fayyad a terrorist sympathizer, a spy, a liar and much worse. In addition, The Guardian's Olivia Solon, who recently reported on the campaign, is now a target herself. We also received word today that the U.S. has denied the visa for one
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Newly streaming at Independent Lens is Stanley Nelson's Tell Them We Are Rising: The Story of Black Colleges and Universities, which tells the powerful story of the rise, influence and evolution of HBCUs. Newly streaming at HBO is Kate Davis' Oscar-nominated short Traffic Stop, which tells the story of Breaion King, a 26-year-old African-American school teacher from Austin, Texas, who is stopped for a routine traffic violation that escalates into a dramatic arrest. Newly
Since IDA's DocuClub was relaunched in 2016 as a forum for sharing and soliciting feedback about works-in-progress, many DocuClub alums have premiered their works on the festival circuit over the past year. 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 Lisa F. Jackson and Sarah Teale's Patrimonio, which they presented at DocuClub NY in October 2017. We caught up with
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, Anna Holmes writes about biracial identity and the experience of the "Loving Generation," the subject of a new documentary series from Topic. But after you're accepted, then what? What does it mean that many prominent self-identified black people in America today were born to a white parent