Vietnam looms large in the American psyche. It was a war with no news blackouts or selectively embedded journalists, and it was discussed at the dinner table in nearly every home. We sat rapt in our living rooms as the news broadcast the faces of weary young soldiers, Buddhist monks aflame, and dead and wounded bodies littering rice paddies and roads. It was, for many of us, among our first memories of television, a jarring juxtaposition to The Brady Bunch and Batman. The war remains so polarizing and lingers so heavily, that 40 years after its end, it continues to agitate. In 2016, Senator
Latest Posts
Los Angeles, CA (September 12, 2017) – The International Documentary Association (IDA) announced today the honorees to be feted at its 33rd Annual Documentary Awards. The ceremony will be held on December 9, 2017, at the Paramount Studios Backlot. This year’s awards will honor several outstanding individuals: Abigail Disney will receive the Amicus Award; Lourdes Portillo will receive the Career Achievement Award; and Yance Ford will receive the Emerging Documentary Filmmaker Award. Notably, IDA’s Courage Under Fire Award—which is given from time to time to a filmmaker who demonstrates
In his latest film, Ex Libris: The New York Public Library, Frederick Wiseman takes his camera into the boardrooms, auditoriums, classrooms and reading nooks of the various branches of the titular institution as it struggles to adapt to a digital present. The nation's flagship city library needs to strategize not only how to digitize rare books for future scholars, but also how to provide crucial connectivity to the three million New Yorkers who lack access to broadband Internet. Though the three-hour-plus film, in properly rigorous Wiseman style, refrains from editorializing about the library
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Premiering tonight, September 11 on POV is Jin Mo-young's My Love, Don't Cross That River, which captures the twilight days of a South Korean couple that has been married for 76 years. The Los Angeles Times calls it a "moving tribute to the beauties and mysteries of life and death." Premiering Wednesday, September 13 on KCET and KCET's website is City Rising, which looks at the history of discriminatory housing laws and analyzes six California communities undergoing
Since IDA's DocuClub was relaunched in 2016 as a forum for sharing and soliciting feedback about works-in-progress, four DocuClub alums have premiered their works on the festival circuit over the past few months. In an effort to both monitor and celebrate the evolution of these films to premiere-ready status, we reached out to the filmmakers, as they were either winding their way through the festival circuit, or gearing up for it. In this edition of "The Feedback," we spotlight The Judge, which, following its DocuClub screening last spring, director/producer Erika Cohn will premiere at the
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 IndieWire, Kate Erbland considers how Film Forum's expansion plans could impact indie distribution. The addition of a single new screen will likely have a marginal impact on the overall movie-going scene in the city and beyond, but the specialty market is a different story. A fourth screen doesn't just mean
Almost a decade ago, a charismatic young candidate for US President, Barack Obama, stirred and inspired the crowds with the phrase "Yes, We Can." But few people are aware that this confident, hopeful slogan started out in the fields of California, as "Sí, Se Puede," and was originally coined by Dolores Huerta. Huerta, together with Cesar Chavez, was the co-founder of the United Farm Workers (UFW) union. She fought tirelessly to improve the rights of farm laborers, helped organize the Delano grape strike in 1965, and was the lead negotiator in the workers' contract that was created after the
Jeffrey Tuchman, filmmaker, educator and former IDA Board member, passed away Saturday night, September 2, following a short battle with pancreatic cancer. He was surrounded by friends and family at Cedars Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles. Tuchman's career—as documentary director, producer, enabler and mentor—spanned three decades, during which he earned Peabody and Emmy Awards for Voices of Civil Rights, an oral history of the civil rights movement. Other works include the four-part series Mavericks, Miracles & Medicine, about the history of medicine; and The Man from Hope, which he created for
Since its launch in Australia in 2008 as a DVD distributor in the academic market, then as a streaming platform two years later, Kanopy has rapidly secured preeminence in the VOD world. Having gained an early foothold in New Zealand, Hong Kong and Singapore, Kanopy set its sights on the US and the UK. The company soon moved its main offices to San Francisco, and just shy of a decade after its birth, Kanopy now streams 26,000 titles to over 3,000 university campuses around the world. And this year, Kanopy staked out another territory: public libraries. Having lured the Los Angeles and New York
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Currently streaming on Netflix is James Keach's Glen Campbell: I'll Be Me, a chronicle of the recently departed country music icon, who embarked on a farewell tour after receiving an Alzheimer's diagnosis. The Washington Post calls the film "important and triumphant." Premiering September 8 on Filmstruck is Barbet Schroeder's General Idi Amin Dada, in which the filmmaker turns his cameras on the infamous tyrant, revealing the dynamic, charming, and appallingly dangerous man