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
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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
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. This week, we spotlight a few terrifying real-world stories. Streaming at Hulu is Joshua Zeman and Barbara Brancaccio's Cropsey, which investigates an urban legend surrounding the disappearance of five children on Staten Island. Variety wrote that it "has all the trappings of a true-crime TV special, but with an undercurrent of cultural exposition that is intelligent, profound and unsettling." Streaming on Netflix (and for 99 cents on iTunes) is Rodney Ascher's The Nightmare
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, Hannah Beech reports on newly declassified files showing that U.S. officials allowed an anti-Communist bloodbath to take place in 1960s Indonesia. The legacy of the massacre continues to divide Indonesia. For decades, under Suharto's rule, Indonesians dared not call for justice. Even after
Los Angeles, CA – October 20, 2017– Last night, at the Double Exposure Investigative Film Festival, the International Documentary Association (IDA) announced that eleven feature-length documentary films have been selected as the inaugural production grantees of the IDA Enterprise Documentary Fund. The Fund, with major support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, supports feature-length explorations of original, contemporary stories that integrate journalistic practice into the filmmaking process. The films have been selected to receive a total of $850,000. In addition to
Editor's Note: Lauren Wissot had interviewed Sterlin Harjo for the article she wrote for the Fall 2017 issue, entitled " Whose Story? Five Doc-Makers on (Avoiding) Extractive Filmmaking," but she and I both felt that this interview would work better as a stand-alone complement to that article. “If I had a dollar every time a white guy asked me to b a 'producer' on their standing rock doc I'd be able to fund my own standing rock doc" That quote is a tweet from veteran indie filmmaker (and one of the founders of Native comedy troupe The 1491s) Sterlin Harjo, a member of the Seminole Tribe with
The Belgian-born filmmaker Agnès Varda was the only female director associated with the French New Wave, and for decades she has been referred to as "the grandmother" of the movement. It's a condescending if well-meaning title, and though Varda is universally beloved, she is still more of a adventurer than a traditionalist. The semi-autobiographical documentaries she's made in the past two decades, The Gleaners and I (2000) and The Beaches of Agnes (2008), are works of restless ingenuity that pose consistently intriguing questions about form and process. For her newest film—and potential swan