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
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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 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
Hillary got it wrong. Her campaign slogan, "Stronger Together," embossed on a sea of campaign signs at the Democratic convention and emblazoned across banner ads in The New York Times, has the right idea, but, in my mind, puts the two words in reverse order. At least that's the argument I began constructing when I realized that the slogan we coined months ago for the Getting Real 2016 documentary film conference was almost identical to hers. "Together. Stronger." That's our slogan. Of course, the two messages are so similar, why quibble? The difference is subtle, but for those of you not that
Labels are slippery. When used as a catch-all term for formally ambitious documentary filmmaking, "hybrid" hardly suffices. All fiction films contain aspects of documentary, and no documentary is devoid of fiction. Yet, it's often helpful to apply labels, to bow to a natural tendency to compartmentalize and divide in order to make something more comprehensible and approachable. The hybrid, then, refers to a documentary that moves between two modes. At the most simplistic level, this means the blending of elements and techniques associated with narrative fiction with traditional documentary
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! For Sundance Institute, Robert Greene goes behind the scenes of the Documentary Edit and Story Lab. I’d come to the mountain full of doubts and skepticism and, after countless moments of cinematic discovery and genuinely felt camaraderie, I left with the zeal of a convert. The word "community" can be nauseating
When speaking with filmmaker Barbara Kopple, you find yourself in the company of a woman with more verve, passion and lust for knowledge than many artists half her age. Yet here she is, about to turn 70, as her latest film, Miss Sharon Jones!, is about to premiere. Kopple got her start as an intern with the Maysles Brothers on Gimme Shelter (1970). Her first directorial effort, Harlan County USA, in 1976, took the Oscar for Best Feature Documentary. Not content to work only in nonfiction, she has helmed both feature films and television, earning a Director's Guild America Award in 1998 for an
Hooligan Sparrow. Courtesy of POV." src="http://www.documentary.org/sites/default/files/images/articles/HooliganSparrow.jpg"> Nanfu Wang feels safe in New York. Surveillance, that essential preoccupation of the documentarian in America, is a chokehold from which she has been temporarily released. From her Brooklyn apartment, the Chinese filmmaker prepares for the release of her debut feature documentary, Hooligan Sparrow. Titled after its eponymous central subject, women’s rights activist Ye Haiyan, the film takes on, among other things, government censorship, police brutality and civil rights