From Bernardo Ruiz' Reportero. Photo: Bernardo Ruiz/Quiet Pictures "Let them kill us all, if that is the death sentence for reporting this hell," veteran reporter Javier Valdez Cárdenas tweeted on March 25, in response to the murder of a fellow journalist in Mexico. "No to silence." Less than two months later, Valdez was pulled out of his car and shot more than ten times in broad daylight. Valdez, who was recognized for his courage by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) with an International Press Freedom Award in 2011, became the sixth journalist to be killed in Mexico this year. Soon
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Based in Copenhagen and run jointly by Signe Byrge Sørensen, Anne Köhncke, Monica Hellström and Heidi Elise Christensen, Final Cut for Real is one of the world's leading documentary production companies. Their slate includes such award-winning titles as Joshua Oppenheimer's path-breaking films The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, and Pervert Park by Frida and Lasse Barkfors. During CPH:DOX, I stopped by the company's cozy offices in a modest, stylishly Danish old building to chat with co-founder and two-time Oscar-nominated producer Signe Byrge Sørensen about Final Cut for Real's
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 this year. 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 winding their way through the festival circuit. Following their DocuClub screening last year, director Mark Hayes and producer Gabriele Hayes will be premiering their film Skid Row Marathon at the Los Angeles Film Festival on June 17. Synopsis: When a
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Currently streaming at Filmstruck is Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives, the groundbreaking 1977 documentary in which a group of gay and lesbian individuals share their personal stories about identity, prejudice, and acceptance. The Village Voice called it "extraordinary...still enormously powerful today." Starting its four-night run on Showtime Monday, June 12 at 9pm is Oliver Stone's The Putin Interviews, in which the controversial filmmaker sits down with 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! In Huffington Post, filmmaker Michael Moore announces the debut of TrumpiLeaks. Today, I’m launching TrumpiLeaks, a site that will enable courageous whistleblowers to privately communicate with me and my team. Patriotic Americans in government, law enforcement or the private sector with knowledge of crimes
Going into this year's Cannes Film Festival, it was clear no documentary would win the Palme d'or, the festival's top prize. Not a single nonfiction film made the cut for competition, rendering the Palme possibility moot. One documentary did earn recognition as an "Out of Competition" selection— Visages Villages (Faces Places), co-directed by Agnès Varda and the French artist/photographer known simply as JR. Several critics— The New York Times' Manohla Dargis among them— argued the film should have been programmed in competition. Dargis hailed it as "an exquisite, achingly moving nonfiction
In our stratified American society, one's level of education is a major determinant of economic status, providing the credentials that can turn a job into a career. Night School, a new documentary from the Emmy-winning filmmaker Andrew Cohn, takes a humanistic, character-driven approach to the experience of 21st century urban poverty by focusing on adult students in Indianapolis—a city with one of the lowest graduation rates in the country—who belatedly attempt to earn high school diplomas while juggling a whole host of extracurricular challenges. Night School concentrates its lens on the
Margaret Byrne's Raising Bertie (executive produced by J. Cole) is an intimate, six-year journey into the lives of three young, African-American men. Like others their age, Davonte "Dada" Harrell, Reginald "Junior" Askew and David "Bud" Perry face such daunting tasks as finishing high school, finding steady employment and navigating the rollercoaster ride into adulthood. That they attempt to do all this in rural Bertie County, North Carolina—where every odd is stacked against them—is both admirable and enlightening (at least to those of us residing in our urban and coastal bubbles). And it’s
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. If You're Not in the Obit, Eat Breakfast (Dir.: Danny Gold; Prod.: George Shapiro), currently available on HBO Now and HBO Go, celebrates the joy of ageing, as related by some of the most vital nonagenarians in the business—Carl Reiner, Norman Lear, Mel Brooks and Dick Van Dyke for starters, along with a host of runners, skydivers and woodworkers who live to stay off the obituary page. Marie-Hélène Rebois' In the Steps of Tricia Brown, available on DVD through Icarus Films
Letters from Baghdad, a new feature-length historical documentary that is coming to US theaters on June 2, chronicles the story of a woman who participated in the establishment of the state of Iraq, yet whose name has been written out of history. The film, co-directed by Sabine Krayenbuehl and Zeva Oelbaum, reconstructs the life of English political officer and archaeologist Gertrude Bell, who, due to her influence in the Middle East following World War I, became informally known as the "female" Lawrence of Arabia and one of the few representatives of the British powerhouse "remembered by the