Dear Readers, Thanks to the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, IDA is well into Year One of its Enterprise Documentary Fund, a program designed primarily to provide development and production support for projects that infuse journalistic practices with documentary storytelling. But beyond the grants program, Fund Director Carrie Lozano has assembled a formidable advisory committee of representatives from law, academia and media to provide guidance and counsel to our community. Carrie worked closely with the Documentary magazine team to develop ideas for a series of interrelated
Latest Posts
Once considered the red-headed step-child of the academic film world, documentary has become popular in academia, where experience with nonfiction filmmaking is providing students with a skill-set that is increasingly in demand by social and news-based media providers. Documentary spoke with the New York Film Academy's Andrea Swift, current chair and founder of NYFA's Documentary Conservatory on the East Coast, and Sanora Bartels, recently appointed chair of NYFA's Documentary MFA Program on the West Coast. Full disclosure: I teach screenwriting at the NYFA's high school program in Burbank
In the face of perceived dominance in the documentary marketplace by such major SVODs as Netflix and Amazon, an international coalition of broadcasters, led by ro*co films international, is pooling its resources to acquire and co-produce a small number of high-profile documentaries that otherwise might have been gobbled up by the giant digital platforms. Formed just prior to the 2016 Sundance Film Festival, the coalition is made up primarily of European Public Service Providers, along with a smattering of commercial broadcasters and satellite networks. At Sundance 2016, the coalition acquired
Since its inception in 2015, the Double Exposure Investigative Film Festival in Washington, DC, has served as a rare meeting ground for investigative journalists and documentary filmmakers, two breeds of storytellers who sometimes differ in goals and methods but face many of the same challenges. The festival, which operates in the literal shadow of the White House, enters its third year with a renewed sense of purpose, given the state-sanctioned hostility to reporters and the daily drumbeat of hard-hitting scoops from The Washington Post and The New York Times. In addition, over the past few
Talal Derki is making a film in an area so dangerous, he and his wife must treat each departure as if it might be his last. After all, he explains, "I don 't know if I will be back." Such solemn regard is hard-earned. Derki 's current project follows a father and son who are both active Al Qaeda members. His 2014 Sundance Grand Jury Prize-winning Return to Homs was also set in a war zone, shot entirely on the front lines of the Syrian Civil War. High-risk projects have forced Derki to become an expert in working in hostile environments. Likewise, producer/cinematographer Singeli Agnew, an Emmy
From Black Lives Matter to Standing Rock, the question of who has the "right" to tell a community’s story has been endlessly debated this year, with no clear answer in sight. Sure, everyone can pretty much agree that "drive by" doc-making—usually involving a white journalist/filmmaker swooping down on a community of color, nabbing some sensationalistic footage over a few days, then quickly returning to an editing home base far, far away—is not the way to go about getting to any sort of deep truth surrounding an issue. But exactly how much on-the-ground time is required to be a so-called
The second part in a trilogy exploring interrelated systems within the wider Oakland community, The Force, for which Peter Nicks nabbed the Best Directing, US Documentary award at this year's Sundance Film Festival, is a riveting cinema vérité look inside the Oakland Police Department as it struggles to implement the reforms deemed necessary to lift it out from under federal oversight. Filmed over an adrenaline-fueled two years, the film is also, unfortunately but honestly, a powerful portrait of best-laid plans gone dangerously awry. Documentary was lucky enough to catch up with the OPD's own
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. New to Netflix is Gaga: Five Foot Two, which goes beyond the glitter and the glam to learn more about the pop star Lady Gaga. Entertainment Weekly says the film "has a noirish glamour...Conversely, there are moments of raw and casual power." Now available for rental at Vimeo is (IDA's own) Carrie Lozano and Charlotte Lagarde's The Ballad of Fred Hersch, an intimate portrait of one of today's foremost jazz pianists and composers and his extraordinary work. Unseen Films says it
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 the Village Voice, which published its final print edition this week, Bilge Ebiri interviews nonagenarian indie impresario/renaissance man Jonas Mekas—filmmaker, archivist, exhibitor…and the Voice’s first film critic. "My films are about the present moment. You cannot film a memory. But yeah, how I film is
I first met the Danish director Elvira Lind at the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival (where I help program the features). This was back in 2014, the year before she won the CPH:DOX New Talent Award, before she launched her queer docuseries, Viceland's Twiz and Tuck. Lind was at the spa town to present Songs for Alexis, her extraordinarily nuanced portrait of Ryan Cassata, a teenage musician transitioning into adulthood (and into another gender. Ryan also happens to be trans—and in love with the titular Alexis, his cisgender girlfriend). When Ryan treated the audience to a post-screening