The Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice has responded to the IDA's recent Statement in Support of #RightToRecord, which called for an investigation into a disturbing pattern of citizen journalists being targeted and arrested by law enforcement in response to their reporting. The DOJ's response can be read in full here. Ramsey Orta (who documented Eric Garner's death) began a 4 year prison sentence on October 3rd. He's currently at Rikers Island Correctional Facility, where he found rat poison in his food during a post-Garner filming stint in 2015. In light of that, he's
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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 Filmmaker, Anthony Kaufman reports on the current state of digital distribution. Is online distribution a boon to independent filmmakers or a boatload of false promises? Given that streaming/downloading is the primary way that many audiences are now consuming content, this may be the most pressing and important
There's a lot about Hot Springs, Arkansas, that might seem unexpected—or even quirky, as outsiders sometimes see it. Specifically, the city was neutral ground for gangsters in the 1920s and 1930s, when Al Capone and his cronies were regulars around town. During the same time, Babe Ruth and other Major League Baseball players descended on Hot Springs for spring training, which continued until the 1950s. It's also where former President Bill Clinton grew up. Today, Hot Springs is the home of Arkansas' only horseracing track, a national park, vast lakes, crystal mines and countless historic
Docs are getting better than ketchup. The Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) showed 57 documentaries - the full Heinz variety pack - premiering films in Canada by such auteurs as Steve James, Morgan Spurlock, Raoul Peck, Werner Herzog and Jonathan Demme. That's by far the largest number of docs ever screened at TIFF, a festival that has rarely highlighted documentaries despite Canada's international reputation for excellent nonfiction films. While the majority of TIFF 2016's documentaries were screened in programmer Thom Powers' TIFF Docs section, nonfiction features appeared in wildly
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 Center For Media & Social Impact, Caty Borum Chattoo reveals the results of a 2016 survey of documentary industry members. Despite new opportunities for documentary filmmakers and audiences, particular challenges are persistent. Questions about sustainable systems and sources of revenue that can support career
Dear Readers, The first Getting Real conference in 2014 bore all the resonance and impact of a stunning first film. Billed as a filmmaker-to-filmmaker event, the conference inspired and galvanized the documentary community into taking action about the issues that concerned us most. The demand for the next Getting Real was immediate. And so, after two years of planning, traveling around the country and beyond to listen to the concerns and goals of the community, and creating a program that would build upon the foundation that was laid in 2014, Getting Real returns—not as a sequel, exactly, but
Editor’s Note: The complete PDF of this Survey, conducted by the Center for Media & Social Impact in collaboration with IDA, is available at both documentary.org and cmsimpact.org. OVERVIEW: The Documentary Field at a Moment of Opportunity & Challenge While documentary storytelling has long enjoyed a vibrant space in the media ecosystem - crossing fluidly between journalism and entertainment - the industry may be enjoying the early days of an evolving digital golden age. Documentary production, distribution and consumption practices have changed, in some ways radically, over the past few
Editor’s Note: A previous version of this story contained a misquote that improperly identified the film’s editors. Post-production on The Lovers and the Despot had stalled due to lack of funding, and the London-based editors—Charlie Hawryliw, Ollie Huddleston and David Charap—had committed to other projects. Jim Hession came to The Lovers and the Despot via the Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program, as did Victoria Chalk. Hession is the editor of The Lovers and the Despot , and Chalk is credited as co-editor, and they worked with directors Rob Cannan and Ross Adams at the Sundance Edit
Dear IDA Community, As we have been working these past few months to prepare for the biennial Getting Real ’16 documentary conference, I’ve been struck by the broad range of challenges that the documentary community is facing. The themes of Getting Real—career sustainability, diversity and the evolving craft of documentary storytelling—came from a series of meetings with filmmakers around the country. They are big, all-encompassing themes that can sometimes feel overwhelming. Can you really build a life-supporting career in this odd business where filmmakers are often driven not by financial
I first saw Marlon Riggs' documentary Tongues Untied in 1990 as a young staff producer at WNET/Thirteen. I had been asked to organize a New York-San Francisco LGBT town-hall meeting around the June broadcast of a series of films that culminated in Tongues Untied's premiere on PBS' POV. Tongues Untied was a life-changing event for me. It was the first time I had seen such an honest, raw and powerful film that uncompromisingly tackled the interplay of desire, race and racism, homophobia, sexuality, gender, HIV and class—from a Black Queer perspective. Formally, the film was groundbreaking. It