Editor's Note: After we went to press with the Summer 2016 issue, the Brooks Institute announced that it would close on October 31, 2016. The Brooks Institute was originally founded in 1945 by Ernest Brooks as the Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara, California. Relocating this summer to nearby downtown Ventura for the fall 2016 semester, Brooks offers a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Film and a Bachelor of Science in Visual Journalism, or documentary photography and film. Graduates in both programs complete 120 semester credits in four years. To find out more about Brooks Institute's
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In 1990, Alek Keshishian was an unknown 26-year old music video director when the most famous woman in the world decided to get in touch. "I literally picked up the phone and heard: 'Hi, it's Madonna.' As if that's the most normal call you could get." She told him she liked the way he filmed dancers. "Four days later, I was on my way to Japan." What was supposed to be a trip to collect backstage footage for an HBO special about Madonna's groundbreaking "Blond Ambition" tour turned into Truth or Dare, a multilayered concert film that became one of the highest-grossing documentaries of all time
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 Keyframe, Yoana Pavlova considers the new politics of "docufiction." It is noteworthy that two new docufictions - both of which problematize the act of performance and our perception thereof - premiered simultaneously earlier this year, amid the ultimate political show that is the U.S. presidential election
I want to call Cinefamily's upcoming Frederick Wiseman retrospective one of the key documentary events of the year, but that would be selling it short. The 43-film series will actually run over the course of four years - every late summer and early fall from now through 2020 - taking Los Angeles viewers through the complete filmography of the Cambridge, Mass.-based nonfiction icon. Wiseman's documentaries follow a subtly recognizable house style. They are immersive and famously unobtrusive studies of mostly American institutions, capturing the interplay between people and structures while
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! Part three of the Realscreen special report on doc financing focuses on commissioning and distribution. "Docs will always be the strange hybrid of something that people love, but they get made in a borderline miraculous fashion and there really isn’t any way of industrializing them, because if they’re any good
Robert Greene’s Kate Plays Christine, which nabbed this year’s Sundance Film Festival US Documentary Special Jury Award for Writing, continues the Actress (2014) director’s exploration of female thespians and their process. Taking the 1974 on-air suicide of TV host Christine Chubbuck - itself the inspiration for Sidney Lumet’s Network - as a jumping-off point, Greene casts Kate Lyn Sheil (who’s made waves outside her indie film world in Netflix’s House of Cards) as Christine in his own version of this infamous, yet little known, story. And then the director deftly tosses aside all our
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 Elle, Samantha Leach profiles Karina Longworth, whose Hollywood deep-dive podcast "chronicles a place so mythologized it seems like Oz itself." It's fascinating to think that Longworth could imagine You Must Remember This before she created it, because it has such a uniquely cinematic quality. Each episode
In an open letter to the documentary community published today at The Talkhouse, filmmaker David Felix Sutcliffe describes a disturbing pattern of citizen journalists - those who document police killings of black and brown civilians - being targeted and arrested by law enforcement in response to their reporting. Most recently the pattern includes Diamond Reynolds who livestreamed the aftermath of Philando Castile's shooting, Abdullah Muflahi who documented Alton Sterling's shooting, and Chris LeDay who uploaded a video of the shooting. Other targets of arrest - and harassment - include Kevin
The Israel Broadcasting Authority, the state’s longtime public broadcasting network, was scheduled to close this coming fall, making way for an independent, ambitious new Broadcasting Corporation. But last month, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is also the acting communications minister, announced that he was delaying the transition to the new network until 2018. He suggested that the corporation’s management—which has recruited many prestigious writers and editors—is not ready to begin broadcasting, though critics have contested this claim, saying that Netanyahu is wary of the network
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 Oscilloscope Musings, Andrew Lapin considers the aesthetics of "issue docs" in a look back at The Island President. The film’s greatest irony is that, by giving us less world-changing goodness to latch onto, it communicates the need to change far more urgently than any other documentary before or since. If