Over the past week, IDA collected tributes to Nancy Buirski from those who knew her and were supported, inspired, and encouraged by her artistry, infectious energy, and skill in creating spaces to bring together documentarians and uplift our work. These written memorials are introduced by Simon Kilmurry, who wrote a piece that outlines Nancy’s many contributions to the documentary field, from founding of Full Frame to her insightful filmmaking and deep interpersonal generosity. Nancy Buirski was a visionary in the documentary field—a champion of countless filmmakers when she founded Full Frame
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Dear Readers, We are gearing up for the fall festival and awards bonanza soon, but we’re also doing our best to resist that gravitational pull and focus on films that are made in a defiantly independent spirit.
Black Public Media announced a new partnership with The Redford Center for its upcoming 2023 open call for production funding. BPM will award a total of $230,000 in funding for feature-length documentaries and documentary or scripted shorts in all stages of production. This year, the fund is focused on stories of how the climate crisis impacts people of African descent. According to the press release, “eligible projects may focus on how the crisis is being managed, climate education, environmental racism, health impacts, sustainable industries, climate policies, and solutions. We also
Today, the Berkeley FILM Foundation (BFF) announces that it has awarded a total of $200,000 in its 2023 grant cycle to 20 independent filmmakers and 5 student filmmakers who live, work, or attend school in the East Bay cities of Richmond, El Cerrito, Berkeley, Albany, Emeryville, or Oakland.
Though staying in her home region of Appalachia, documentarian Elaine McMillion Sheldon departs from her vérité beginnings in her latest feature, King Coal . Coming from three generations of coal miners, Sheldon has a personal interest in the wakes left behind from the industry that built the region, previously investigating the rise of black lung in her PBS Frontline/NPR collaboration “Coal’s Deadly Dust” (2019) or shining a light on the battle against the opioid crisis in her Oscar-nominated short film Heroin(e) (2017). But while collecting footage of rituals surrounding the legend of coal
Film at Lincoln Center’s recent retrospective, “The Dirty Stories of Jean Eustache,” brought more attention to The Mother and the Whore (1973)—the most iconic entry in Eustache’s small canon and short existence—which was recently restored after decades spent in a kind of limbo, with only the very occasional screening. And yet the retrospective is also a demonstration that the cinema of Eustache amounts to more than fiction films with documentary undertones. Perhaps the most vital strain of his work, his nonfiction films, are characterized by rich tension and reflexivity when his camera meets
Gita joined FilmAid as the Director after decades of producing, programming, and fundraising for documentary films. She spent many years with Kartemquin Films, a Chicago-based film collaborative that empowers documentary filmmakers who create stories that foster a more engaged and just society.
Narcissa Wright is best known for breaking the world record for speedrunning 'The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time' in 2014. Speedrunning, the practice of using glitches in a game to bypass huge segment sections and play through the entire game as quickly as possible, has a huge online fan base and viewership on Twitch, a popular live-streaming platform.
Many media depictions of Chicago don’t resonate with me. As someone raised in its northern suburbs, I’m happy to watch works such as "The Dark Knight" (2008), "Widows" (2018), or one of the Kartemquin documentaries shot in the city. However, most of them focus on the city’s corrupt politics or have a strong crime element in the story. In a saturated media market where (true) crime sells, a story’s criminal and political attention-grabbing subject can overshadow the aspirations of real-life residents.
In films like 'Hoop Dreams' (1994), 'Stevie' (2002), and 'The Interrupters' (2011) and television series like 'America to Me' (2018) and 'City So Real' (2020), Steve James has established himself as one of the preeminent observational documentarians in the US. Over nearly 30 years, he’s chronicled social change in Chicago via various ordinary citizens, from aspiring basketball players to antiviolence activists. In a departure for James, his latest film, 'A Compassionate Spy,' is a real-life espionage thriller about Theodore Hall, a young physicist on the Manhattan Project.