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For decades now, the Emmy and Peabody Award-winning team of Kate Davis ( Girltalk; Southern Comfort) and her producer and sometime co-director David Heilbroner ( Stonewall Uprising) have been giving voice to marginalized communities by listening closely to individuals, allowing their characters to express their own complicated truths—and thereby correcting the easy stories too often assigned to them by the media at large. And now with their latest Oscar-nominated short, Traffic Stop, the duo have turned their lens—and once again upended accepted narratives—on the hot topic of police brutality

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 few months. 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 director Alina Skrzeszewska's Game Girls, which she presented at DocuClub LA in January 2017. We caught up with

February 15, 2018 (Los Angeles, CA) - Today, the International Documentary Association announced the appointment of Kevin Iwashina as the new President of the Board of Directors, replacing Marjan Safinia, who termed out this year. "I could not be more honored to be appointed the President of the IDA at this critical moment in documentary film,” says Iwashina. “Technology is expanding access to non-fiction storytelling in long form, series and audio formats and my new role at the IDA will ensure that we are maximizing our resources around advocacy and education to support the art form of the

By Caty Borum Chattoo and Will Jenkins Center for Media & Social Impact Contemporary social-issue documentary films are available to the public through multiple forms of distribution, well beyond TV and theaters. On the local level, community screenings often present the most strategic route and opportunity to engage with the public and policymakers. For filmmakers and film strategy teams who aim to raise awareness of an issue, or even to help change it through public policy—that is, creating, changing and enforcing laws—the greatest potential for momentum is often found within town and city

Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Premiering tonight, Monday February 12 on HBO is Rebecca Cammisa's Atomic Homefront, which probes the devastating impact of the illegal dumping of radioactive waste in North St. Louis communities, and the moms-turned-advocates fighting for answers. Premiering tonight on POV is Craig Atkinson's Do Not Resist, a vital and influential exploration of the rapid militarization of the police in the United States. The film won the Best Documentary Feature award at the 2016 Tribeca

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, augmented reality offers a new way to look at four of the world's best Olympians. In person, the Olympics are all about speed, height and consequence, especially in winter. They are about flinging a body out of control in the hope and expectation that it can be contained and transformed into

LOS ANGELES, April 11, 2013 — The International Documentary Association announced today the launch of the IDA Documentary Screening Series, invitation-only screenings of fifteen documentary features to take place annually between September and January. The new series will replace IDA’s DocuWeeks™ Theatrical Documentary Showcase, a program designed to help filmmakers qualify their works for Oscar® consideration. IDA is making these changes in response to both the evolving needs of documentary filmmakers and recent changes in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ (AMPAS) qualifying

Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia, made for the 1936 Olympiad held in Berlin, is the first film that comes to mind when the topic of Olympic films is mentioned. For many of us, even for those most devout followers of Olympic competition throughout the years, Riefenstahl may be the only filmmaker we can name connected to what is arguably the longest running global event representing human athletic achievement. Even what we think we know about Olympia is only a fraction of that history. But thanks to the painstaking research that began with a conversation in 1996 at a bar in the Algonquin Hotel in

My career in documentary film began when I was brought on as a production assistant for Lyn Goldfarb and Alison Sotomayor's Bridging the Divide: Tom Bradley and the Politics of Race, about the former mayor of Los Angeles. During the four-year period on which I worked on the film, I ended up taking on the role of primary archival researcher. The work came at a perfect time for me: I had only been in Los Angeles for a short time, so working on the film gave me the opportunity to learn about the history of my new city. I have since researched several films at various stages of production, as well

Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Monday, February 5 is TCM's Day of Documentaries, devoted to docs that won or were nominated for Academy Awards. Set your DVRs! Screening at 8pm is Davis Guggenheim's An Inconvenient Truth, a look at former Vice President Al Gore's commitment to expose the myths and misconceptions that surround global warming and inspire actions to prevent it. The film won the 2006 Oscar for Best Documentary, and is also streaming for free on VUDU. Screening at 9:45pm is Rob Epstein's The