Morzaniel Ɨramari, an Indigenous documentary-maker from the Amazon rainforest, is traveling with his third film, Mãri Hi - The Tree of Dream, in order to raise awareness about his people’s current plight. He is the first filmmaker from among the Yanomami, an ethnic group of roughly 35,000 foraging agriculturalists stewarding a Nebraska-sized swathe of the Amazon, who live in equilibrium with nature. During Bolsonaro’s reign, through a calamitous combination of state neglect and an influx of illegal miners hungry for gold, the Yanomami suffered what President Lula da Silva terms “an attempted genocide.”
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Documentary’s Spring 2023 issue launches as the more industrial sides of our field continue to crater. This issue doesn’t offer clear solutions but spotlights some exemplary filmmakers, films, and projects that are intervening in how even the independent sectors of our field are sliding toward oblivion.
Member Spotlight: Agniia Galdanova and Igor Myakotin
An Interview With Natalia Almada: For over two decades, Natalia Almada has combined artistic expression with social inquiry to make films that are both personal reflections and critical social commentaries, focusing on topics ranging from contemporary Mexico to our relationship with technology. Her work straddles the boundaries of documentary, fiction, and experimental film. On the occasion of the theatrical release of her latest feature Users (2021), New York’s BAM Film is presenting a complete retrospective of Almada’s work, running June 9–15, 2023.
Sheffield DocFest has survived operating as a carousel, rotating through festival directors and programmers every couple of years for the last decade. (Through the tumult, a mostly-local operations and industry programming staff remained relatively constant.) One sign of the festival’s continued relevance to UK nonfiction film production is that Brits simply refer to the festival as “DocFest,” as if no other documentary festival in the festival could be confused for this one. Sheffield also maintains global aspirations to be a major launch pad for festival creative documentaries. The prolonged
Happy pride month! We asked IDA team for their favorite queer documentaries and rounded them up in this article for you.
Attending the Getting Real conference last year, I was inspired by Nanfu Wang’s keynote and Jessica Beshir’s and Payal Kapadia’s talks in the iconic “Here’s What Really Happened” sessions. I felt a strong resonance with these three filmmakers, especially because of their honesty in revealing knowledge acquired through their own film journeys. There are many parallels between the issues they discussed and documentary filmmaking in my region of the world, Central America. Sometimes I feel that Central America is an incorporeal piece of land, contained between Belize and Panama, floating in the
Documentary is happy to debut an exclusive clip from Irene Lusztig's Richland ahead of its premiere in the Documentary Competition at Tribeca 2023 this weekend. This scene is filmed during the 75th anniversary of the Hanford Site, which the New York Times affirmed "is the largest and most contaminated" of all former nuclear weapons production sites in a feature article from last week. As part of the weekslong celebration, the nearby city of Richland, Washington, restaged Atomic Frontier Day, an annual nuclear pride parade event held from the 1940s through 1960 that included a parade, military
After conferring the inaugural Vanguard Award to Jessica Devaney in 2022, Doc10 selected Oscar-winning producer Shane Boris as this year's recipient for "documentary producers and filmmakers who are at the forefront of creating and cultivating innovative and important documentary filmmaking." Earlier this year, Boris was nominated twice for the Academy Award for Best Documentary as a producer of both Daniel Roher's Navalny (the winner) and Sara Dosa's Fire of Love, and was first nominated in 2020 for Petra Costa's The Edge of Democracy. At an awards ceremony on the evening of Saturday, May 6
A Conversation With Jamie Shor and Sky Sitney Washington, DC, is getting its newest documentary showcase with the launch of DC/DOX Film Festival, which will run June 15–18, 2023. Described on its website as bringing together “innovative visions, bold voices, and truth seekers in celebration of documentary cinema,” the festival’s full slate includes 31 doc features and 21 shorts showing at seven venues throughout the District. The heavy-hitter slate is composed mostly of well-received films coming off world premieres at Sundance, Berlinale, SXSW, True/False, and the nearly contemporaneous