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
Latest Posts
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
In concert with IDA's Getting Real '16 conference, the Sundance Institute's Documentary Film Program, under the guidance of (now former) Film Fund Director Rahdi Taylor and former NYC Film Commissioner Cynthia Lopez, published the Doc Film Money Map, a state-by-state guide to tax incentives. A year later, the team, including Betsy Tsai, brings you the new and improved Doc Film Money Map 2.0. Following Taylor and Lopez's September 7th presentation at IDA's offices about tax incentive programs, and just prior to an NEA Webinar on the subject, we caught up with them for a few questions about how
By Katie Townsend & Adam A. Marshall Federal, state and local governments possess a wealth of current and historical information that can be of great use to documentary filmmakers. From emails to photos, and even video footage, public records can be valuable source material for documentarians. Moreover, there are generally few or no restrictions on the use of public records. While the process of obtaining such material under state and federal public records laws isn’t always easy, understanding your rights can improve your chances of getting what you need. Public Records 101 At the most basic
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Now streaming on Netflix is Jenner Furst's Time: The Kalief Browder Story, a series tracing the tragic case of a Bronx teen who spent three horrific years in jail, despite never being convicted of a crime. Premiering September 22 on Filmstruck is Errol Morris's Tabloid, which acquaints viewers with the eccentric woman at the center of the Mormon-sex-in-chains case, a story that lit up British papers in the seventies. The New York Times called it "astonishing." New to Amazon
A fact is a truth, that verifiable, reliable backbone of the documentarian's work. But in an era when information is filtered through the lens of belief and agenda, truth to one group may be heresy to another. Fact-checking has never been as complex or vital, whether to provide authenticity to a report or recapture a flailing public trust. Post 9/11, the documentarian has become a pivotal witness to a world in uproar, taking on many a journalistic mantle. But according to the Center for Media and Social Impact's report Dangerous Documentaries: Reducing Risk When Telling Truth to Power
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 Sundance Institute, Grace Lee shares learnings gleaned from working collaboratively with filmmaking teams on their rough cuts. In that first session, I saw how universal the editing process is, whether you're making a film in the U.S. or in China, as a first-timer or a seasoned pro. Everyone gets stuck with an