For over 16 years, veteran producers Jedd and Todd Wider have proven their mettle in the documentary film community. Together, the brothers have produced a series of critically acclaimed documentaries tackling weighty topics like environmental contamination cover-ups ( Semper Fi: Always Faithful), torture and interrogation in the US military ( Taxi to the Dark Side), political scandal ( Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer) and child abuse in the Catholic Church ( Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God). The three latter films, directed by famed documentarian Alex Gibney
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Launched at this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam, the Propellor Film Tech Hub is an ambitious, country-spanning, joint initiative from the IFFR, the Berlinale’s European Film Market (EFM), the Copenhagen International Documentary Festival ( CPH:DOX), and the "innovation studio" Cinemathon (based in Berlin). Basically, the idea behind Propellor is to transfer start-up world ideas to the film industry, upending cinema's barely functioning, stodgy old business models in the process. To learn more, Documentary reached out to Cinemathon's Erwin Schmidt, one of the founders, who
Los Angeles, California - The International Documentary Association (IDA) and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (RCFP) are partnering to support documentary filmmakers funded through IDA’s Enterprise Documentary Fund. Supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, IDA's Enterprise Fund will provide grants totalling $1 million annually for four years to support the production and development of documentary films taking on in-depth exploration of contemporary stories through a journalistic lens. The Reporters Committee will provide essential expertise to funded
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 Yorker, Jia Tolentino reflects on an Alabama-set documentary project in which citizens use Walt Whitman's poetry to speak about themselves. Crandall found her subjects slowly, in the course of two years. Friends and acquaintances gave her recommendations; she approached people sitting on their porches
URGENT! If you care about the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, you need to do more than click "like" on Facebook. You need to call your representatives in Congress - not just once, but often, even daily. Take five minutes and tell them why these institutions are important to you and your community. Click here to find your representative. Just type in your zip code to get your representative's number. find your representative
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 Atlantic, Sophie Gilbert outlines the impact that abolishing the NEA would have on rural and underserved communities. [The NEA's] grants are bestowed to all 50 states in the nation, in all congressional districts. Forty percent of the NEA's budget goes directly to states to spend for themselves, with the
The International Documentary Association expresses profound dismay at the recent proposed federal budget eliminating funding for the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The budget of these three agencies represent a tiny portion of the overall Federal Budget - just over $2 per person per year - yet they have an outsized impact on communities, organizations and artists. Both the NEA and NEH support artists, scholars, historians, arts organizations, and documentary filmmakers - in communities large and small around the country. As such
Since its establishment in 1999, the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival has given voice to those who are struggling to be heard. It has promoted social awareness and defended human rights. In March 2016, French film producer Elise Jalladeau took over as the general manager of the festival, succeeding Dimitris Eipides, who stepped down after a distinguished 24-year tenure. In Jalladeau's inaugural year, the festival showcased 213 films and launched a new International Competition section. The 12 films in the new strand are bold examples of filmmaking, including the international premiere of
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 Film Comment, Eric Hynes considers novel approaches to first-person filmmaking. In these films, the personal isn't just political - it's also pluralized. It's not that these new works are without precedent or breaking essentially new ground. Many of the most important first-person filmmakers have excelled at
The recently concluded Australian International Documentary Conference (AIDC) in Melbourne featured both cutting-edge and enduring features of the lively Australian documentary business, which depends on government grants to the creative sector, commercial TV's bottomless appetite for reality, international markets and of course, sweat equity. For 30 years, the AIDC has been, as former director Heather Croall puts it, "the annual pilgrimage" for Australian documentary directors and for international programmers, distributors and marketers who work with them. (She was there with a new personal