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 Film Comment, Eric Hynes reflects on a year of festival screenings, focusing on the material conditions of the viewing experience. Film Comment offers another poll ranking films currently lacking U.S. distribution, but neither tally takes into account what are often the year’s most truly theatrical experiences
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by Meena Nanji and Victoria Chalk A-Doc, a network of Asian American documentary filmmakers, is committed to foregrounding the voices of Asian Americans, people of color and diverse communities across the US and beyond. At the IDA Documentary Awards last month, a team of A-Doc representatives raised the issue of diversity in documentary with some of the attendees. How far have we come? How far do we have to go? How do we get there? A-Doc: How important is it for filmmakers termed as "diverse" to tell stories? Violeta Ayala, Director, The Fight (Nominee, Best Short Documentary): I think it's
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 Jennifer M. Kroot's The Untold Tales of Armistead Maupin. The film examines the life and work of one of the world's most beloved storytellers, following his evolution from a conservative son of the Old South into a gay rights pioneer whose novels have inspired millions to claim their own truth. Premiering Friday, January 5 on Netflix is the original docuseries Rotten, which travels deep into the heart of the food supply chain to reveal
The Governors Awards, presented in November by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, has for the past nine years served as an elegant appetizer to the frenzied smorgasbord of Awards Season. And given that the Academy Awards is the de facto coup de grace of this months-long feast of accolades and jostling for a place at the table du jour, the Governors Awards doubles down as a formal-wear—albeit untelevised—must-stop for the front-runners. But the essence and bona fide classiness of the Governors Awards is defined by the evening itself, set aside and magnified for a group of
I've had more than a passing interest in the splash arrival this month of Steven Spielberg's movie The Post, starring Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks, which covers the Washington Post's role, in 1971, in publishing the so-called "Pentagon Papers," a top-secret government study of United States involvement in the then-still-raging Vietnam War. Judith Ehrlich and I spent four years creating the on-screen story of the man who leaked that Pentagon study to the press, in our 2009 documentary, The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers. So I've been waiting with bated
Premiering at Sundance—and subsequently going on to win top honors at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, among other high-caliber fests, and an IDA Pare Lorentz Documentary Fund grant—is Jonathan Olshefski's Quest, a gorgeous portrait of a loving American family and their close-knit community. Filmed over an astonishing ten years, the doc follows Christopher "Quest" Rainey and his longtime wife, Christine'a, aka "Ma Quest," as they work hard, raise their kids right—and also find time to run a home music studio that simultaneously serves as a sanctuary in their hardscrabble North
December 9, 2017 (Los Angeles, CA) — The Jonathan Logan Family Foundation announced a new investment in documentary film with a $600,000 grant over two years to support the International Documentary Association (IDA). The grant will support IDA’s Enterprise Documentary Fund, which funds feature-length projects that integrate journalistic practice into the filmmaking process, and Getting Real ‘18, IDA’s biennial filmmaker-to-filmmaker conference, taking place September 25-27, 2018 in Los Angeles. As part of this initiative, the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation will also provide four grants of
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Premiering tonight, December 18 on Independent Lens is Jessie Auritt's Supergirl, about an Orthodox Jewish girl from New Jersey who broke a world powerlifting record at the age of ten. This intimate portrait follows her unique coming-of-age story as she fights to hold on to her title while navigating the perils of adolescence — from strict religious obligations to cyberbullying to health issues that could jeopardize her future in powerlifting. Premiering tomorrow, December 19
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 Senses of Cinema, Carmen Gray reports on a year of European documentary film festivals. Hearing critics talk about European documentary festivals you could often be fooled for thinking they start and end with Amsterdam's IDFA and its sexier (in its all-out embrace of the blurred lines of the fiction-doc hybrid
"I was born in 1948; I am a creature of post-war America," says Academy Award- and IDA Career Achievement Award-winner Errol Morris. Morris is the director of such films as The Fog of War and The Thin Blue Line, and the inventor of the revolutionary interview device known as the Interrotron. His latest work, Wormwood, will be running as a six-part series on Netflix beginning December 15; a limited theatrical release, launching the same date, was deemed "too episodic" to be eligible as a "film" for Oscar consideration. Further complicating just what this four-hour project is, Morris has taken