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, comedian W. Kamau Bell argues that net neutrality is crucial for both artists and activists. The exchange of information and ideas that takes place on the internet is more important now than ever. To protect it, we need to keep the current net neutrality rules in places. We need them to
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Merely a week after 9/11, San Franciscans Jay Rosenblatt and Caveh Zahedi teamed up to address the national crisis, putting out a call to 150 of their fellow filmmakers to create short films or videos as a response to the mainstream media coverage. The result, Underground Zero, a feature-length omnibus consisting of 11 short works, went on to play on both HBO and the Sundance Channel (and with the participating filmmakers receiving an honorarium, along with $10K of the proceeds going to charity). Now, over a decade and a half later, a new national crisis has emerged in the form of "a real
Editor's Note: Sara Taksler was working as a senior producer at The Daily Show when her best friend unexpectedly died. She found her laughter again by making Tickling Giants , a documentary about people creating satire in the heart of the Arab Spring. Six years ago this week, I'd never heard of "the Egyptian Jon Stewart" and I had no idea who Bassem Youssef was. But a devastating turn was about to lead me to spend years of my life making a movie about him. "I hope you feel better soon," a little Superhero called out to me. It was late afternoon on Halloween. In the midst of his candy
November 1, 2017 (Los Angeles, CA)—The International Documentary Association has announced the Best Feature and Best Short nominees, as well as the recipients of Creative Recognition awards, for the 2017 IDA Documentary Awards. The 33rd edition of the annual ceremony will take place Saturday, December 9 at the Paramount Theatre in Los Angeles. All other nominees were announced on October 16. In the competition categories, the nominees for Best Feature include City of Ghosts, Matthew Heineman’s urgent account of ground-level resistance in Syria, Dina, Antonio Santini & Dan Sickles’ intimate and
It will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the incisive filmmaking of Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady ( Jesus Camp; 12th & Delaware; The Education of Mohammed Hussein) that the focus of their latest film is a fervent religious group. In One of Us, which premiered October 20 on Netflix, the filmmakers have turned their lens on a conservative Hasidic Jewish community in Brooklyn, one that will go to great lengths to keep its members within the fold and away from the modern world. What truly sets their new film apart from their previous work is its central question: When you want out, what
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Coming to DVD and VOD tomorrow, October 31 is Bill Morrison's Dawson City: Frozen Time, a meditation on cinema's past that pieces together the bizarre true history of a long-lost collection of 533 nitrate film prints from the early 1900s. Variety writes, "The true magic that Dawson City captures is, simply, the mystery of film itself: a medium that turned people into shadows that burned brighter than life." Newly streaming at Netflix is Griffin Dunne's Joan Didion: The Center
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! From IndieWire, Liz Manne, executive producer on such documentaries as Lucky, Heart of the Game and Fall from Grace, recounts her days at New Line/Fine Line, another toxic hotbed of sexual harassment. What I realize now, and didn’t then, was that my exit contract from New Line—garden-variety corporate legalese
"Going to Africa, living with animals—that's all I ever thought about," Jane Goodall discloses in Oscar-nominated director Brett Morgen’s latest doc, Jane, which employs over 100 hours of never-before-seen footage (recently discovered in 2014) shot in Tanzania's Gombe Stream National Park half a century ago. Back then, the 20-something female scientist, whose main qualification seemed to be her love of animals over the comforts of human civilization, was at the very beginning of realizing her lifelong dream come true. So it seems nearly preordained that the cameraman that National Geographic
Double Exposure Investigative Film Festival (DX), now in its third year, puts a spotlight on journalistic documentaries. The newbie DC festival is a project of an investigative nonprofit, 100Reporters, which publishes and offers to other publishers investigative journalism about government corruption. "We want to call attention to the exciting, burgeoning relationship between film and journalism," says Sky Sitney, the festival's co-director (with journalist Diana Jean Schemo, one of 100 Reporters' founders). "These films—examples of the best of the form—show how journalists work in the visual
Metaphors on VisionBy Stan BrakhageRepublished by Anthology Film Archivesand Light Industry, September 2017 "Sex is a touchstone but not a foundation." So says Stan Brakhage in the opening interview by P. Adams Sitney in Metaphors on Vision, first published by Jonas Mekas in 1963 as a special issue of Film Culture. Brakhage, considered one of the most influential figures in avant-garde cinema, reveals his most intimate thoughts on sex, love and death as realized both in his life and in his films. What emerges here is, to some extent, a portrait of the artist as much as it is a treatise on the