“I don’t think of myself as a documentary filmmaker”: Documentary spoke with Kienitz Wilkins to discuss his methodology, his thoughts on documentary’s relationship to his work, and the festival landscape at large.
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At IDA, we honor July as Disability Pride Month with deep respect for the invaluable contributions of disabled nonfiction filmmakers.
At this moment in our industry, when everyone is trying to find a solution to the distribution crisis, BAVC Media continues to adapt in order to support filmmakers’ visions through radical access and strong community-building, as it has been doing since 1991. The long-running MediaMaker Fellowship , co-led by BAVC Media Director of Youth and Artistic Development Programs Dawn Valadez, MediaMaker Fellowship Co-Director Jin Yoo-Kim, and Associate Director of Artist Development Brittney Réaume, focuses on supporting documentary filmmakers that have bold cinematic language and innovative impact
With a flurry of announcements in the last six months, the Doris Duke Foundation’s Building Bridges program has stepped squarely into the film funding space in a concerted effort to broaden the pipeline of Muslim-American filmmakers in media and entertainment. The program is partnering with a handful of film institutions, most notably the Islamic Scholarship Fund, the Center for Asian American Media, Sundance Institute, and the Muslim Public Affairs Council’s Hollywood Bureau, on a series of public activations, funds, and fellowships. The programs have taken place in a variety of spaces, from Sundance festival to IDA’s own Getting Real. The activities caught our attention.
Two luminary filmmakers whose short films were highlighted at this year’s Cinemalibero, Sarah Maldoror and Nicolás Guillén Landrián, both emerged in the 1960s and were products of the anticolonial revolutionary movements that swept the Global South in the postwar period. Although Landrián’s work has received little exposure outside of Cuba up to this point, Maldoror has been well-known in certain circles for years, especially following the restoration and re-release of her landmark feature Sambizanga (1972) in 2020.
"Block Party": Veteran game developers Navid and Vassiliki Khonsari of iNK Stories are building an open world that reflects their own community of Brooklyn, NYC, populating it with AI-powered NPC avatars in the likeness of the duo’s real-life neighbors. Documentary spoke to the duo about this experiment and its profound implications for the documentary field.
Director Song Won-geun discusses historical documentary filmmaking and storytelling with specificity in relation to his film, “Panmunjom: The Front Lines of Ideology.” Song wanted to “explore Panmunjom as a truce site that hasn’t changed much for 70 years, without necessarily taking sides or seeing it through the lens of another powerful country.”
Documentary is happy to debut an exclusive clip from siblings Rebecca and Pete Davis’s Join or Die . Their debut feature documentary examines civic duty and democratic participation in the U.S. through the continued relevance of Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone . After the film’s world premiere at SXSW last year, Abramorama picked it up and is releasing Join or Die in theaters tomorrow. Regarding the clip, the co-directors write, “It is hard to wrap our arms around a topic as big as ‘American community.’ However, Harvard professor and Bowling Alone author Robert Putnam has, perhaps better than
The global IDA membership includes professionals from diverse roles within the non-fiction field. We are documentary workers, professionals, thought leaders, and innovators from around the world, united by our passion for the non-fiction form. We celebrate the work of our members during the festival season and every day! With the upcoming BlackStar Film Festival, we are excited to celebrate our members who have films in the festival as directors, writers, producers, and in various other roles.
Rebecca Day and Malikkah Rollins speak with Documentary magazine about the ever-present need for mental health resources for documentary filmmakers: “What we are really trying to focus on here is the filmmakers’ key role, rather than the hierarchical structure that puts them in this massive power game.”