Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Premiering tonight, Monday, January 22 on Independent Lens is Peter Nicks' The Force, which presents a fly-on-the-wall look deep inside the long-troubled Oakland Police Department as it struggles to confront federal demands for reform, a popular uprising following events in Ferguson, Missouri, and an explosive sex scandal. Premiering Friday, January 26 on Netflix is Dirty Money, an investigative series that exposes blatant acts of corporate greed and corruption. Episode
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The International Documentary Association (IDA) has announced thirteen grants to films through its Enterprise Documentary Fund and Pare Lorentz Documentary Fund totaling $205,000.
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 Moviemaker, Ryan Stewart lists the best big cities to live and work as a filmmaker. Whether you're a contented Southerner who'd like to get out of dodge but continue living and working below the Mason-Dixon line, or you've got your hot new passport in hand and are weighing the pleasures of life in Vancouver vs
Editor's Note: This article was originally published in January 2018, on the eve of the world premiere of Minding the Gap , at the Sundance Film Festival. 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
Visual communication is always an unreliable universal language… — Annette Danto Whatever happened to the credo “If I can see it, it must be true?” This deeply held belief has been espoused both by mystics and hardcore scientists, and was reinforced by the invention of photography nearly 200 years ago. It has now been called into question in the cacophony of the digital age. As the US president tweets daily accusations of #Fake News aimed at any information he simply does not like, and while rich, white males in positions of power are dropping like flies in a sea of sexual harassment claims, a
Dear IDA Community, I’m sad to say that this will be my last time filling this little corner of Documentary magazine. After nine years of service on the IDA Board, six of them as president, I have fulfilled my term limit and will be cycling off the board at the end of the year. Our resident historian, Tom White, editor of this publication, tells me that I am the longest-running president in IDA’s herstory. I can hardly believe it. The time has flown by, and this remains one of the things in my life of which I am most proud. I took on this role from Eddie Schmidt with some trepidation, to tell
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 Raoul Peck's Oscar-nominated and IDA Award-winning I Am Not Your Negro, which envisions the book James Baldwin never finished, a radical narration about race in America, using the writer's original words, as read by actor Samuel L. Jackson. Premiering Friday, January 19 on American Masters is Tracy Heather Strain's Lorraine Hansberry: Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart, the first in-depth presentation of the Raisin in the Sun author's complex
When she was a teenager in the late '70s growing up in the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania suburbs, filmmaker Tracy Heather Strain was taken by her grandmother to see the play To Be Young, Gifted and Black, based on the unpublished writings of Lorraine Hansberry. That experience deeply affected Strain and stayed with her as she sought, over the course of many years, to give Hansberry the feature-length film treatment that she felt she deserved. A creative journey that was inspired four decades earlier reaches its conclusion with the upcoming broadcast premiere of Strain's new documentary, Sighted
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 Slate, Frederick Wiseman explains to Sam Adams why he's finally making his entire film catalog available for streaming. "The honest answer is that I think any movie looks better on a big screen. But I'm excited to have the movies available, because not everybody can watch them on a big screen, and they're not
This past October, the Brooklyn-based nonprofit UnionDocs convened a weekend workshop called "Speculations in the Archive," a sold-out gathering that explored the archive's potential to spur imagination and invention. The idea was to widen the parameters of archival filmmaking by considering "multiple practices of truth-making," including the sorts of speculation that cross over into fiction. Though conventional documentary makers have diversified the range of materials used in docs since the days of the newsreel, many would be taken aback by more openly speculative use of archives. But in