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
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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
Editor's Note: Although I did not attend the summit, my colleagues Simon Kilmurry and Claire Aguilar did. This report is based on the very thorough transcription by Abigail Prade of IDFA. I thank her for providing it to us. In an unprecedented convening of documentary advocacy organizations from around the world, IDA, working in concert with Israeli Documentary Filmmakers Forum and International Documentary FilmFestival Amsterdam (IDFA), spearheaded a summit of 40 leaders to start the conversation about the issues that the global community is grappling with. The summit, entitled Building
True to its tagline, "America's largest documentary festival," DOC NYC concluded its eight edition last month, having presented more than 250 films and panels throughout New York, with more than 350 filmmakers and special guests among the thousands of attendees. As I was about to head across the pond to attend IDFA in Amsterdam, I was only able to attend two films. The festival kicked off with the New York premiere of Greg Barker's The Final Year. The film presents a unique insiders' account of President Barack Obama's foreign policy team during its last year in office. Barker was afforded
December 9, 2017 (Los Angeles, CA)—The 33rd Annual IDA Documentary Awards, hosted by Iranian-American actor and comedian Maz Jobrani, took place earlier tonight at the Paramount Theatre. The evening’s top honors went to Dan Sickles and Antonio Santini’s “Dina” for Best Feature, and Laura Checkoway’s “Edith+Eddie” for Best Short. "The Best Feature and Best Short award winners both represent unlikely love stories, each one tender, tragic, and ultimately life-affirming,” said IDA Executive Director Simon Kilmurry. “Dina and ‘Edith+Eddie’ are both distinguished by their unforgettable lead
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Newly streaming at Filmstruck is Bill Morrison's Dawson City: Frozen Time, which pieces together the bizarre true history of a collection of some 500 films dating from 1910s - 1920s, which were lost for over 50 years until being discovered buried in a sub-arctic swimming pool deep in the Yukon Territory. The film won an IDA Documentary Award for Best Editing. Currently streaming on MUBI is Jeff Malmberg's Marwencol. After a vicious attack leaves him brain-damaged and broke
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 IndieWire, the filmmakers behind Icarus respond to Russia's Olympics ban for "state-sponsored doping system." Fogel and producer Dan Cogan have now issued a statement in regards to today's announcement, which reads: "We applaud today's decision by the International Olympic Committee. As we learned in the making