When a young filmmaker named Diego Echeverria brought a small production crew to Brooklyn's South Williamsburg neighborhood in the early 1980s, he wasn't intending to create a time capsule. Echeverria, who was born in Chile but grew up in Puerto Rico, visited the largely Puerto Rican and Dominican community to document the spirit and creativity that thrived among the abandoned buildings and run-down streets. At the time, South Williamsburg—then informally referred to in Spanish as "Los Sures" — was one of the poorest areas in New York City. "When I was doing [the film] 33 years ago, I wasn't
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The first time I met Oscar-winning documentary director Roger Ross Williams was in the lobby of the W Hotel on Hollywood Boulevard. It was 2014 and we were both attending the inaugural IDA Getting Real Conference. He was standing next to prolific documentary producer and founder of Motto Pictures, Julie Goldman. They were both dressed head to toe in black and were in no mood to chit-chat. They had an important meeting to get to. It was with Disney executives, and the outcome would dictate the fate of their latest producer-director collaboration, Life, Animated. "That was the second meeting
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! In the continuing wake of the devastating massacre in Orlando, Casey de la Rosa of Sundance.org offers a selection of docs for required viewing. Despite this tragedy, there’s a lot for us to be proud of this LGBT Pride month — including the fact that this is a community of fighters. We’ve had to fight for every
“The harder they hit me, the higher I bounce.”—John R. Brinkley “Without anything resembling a real medical education, with licenses purchased and secured through extraordinary manipulations of political appointees, and with consummate gall beyond anything ever revealed by any other charlatan, Brinkley…continues to demonstrate his astuteness in shaking shekels from the pockets of credulous Americans.”—Morris Fishbein, M.D. “The most creative criminal this country has ever produced.”—Pope Brock, author, Charlatan In an age of search engines, digital digressions and bytes of virtual knowledge
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! Filmmaker Marshall Curry blogs in the Huffington Post about Anthony Weiner, subject of Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg’s Weiner, Cory Booker, subject of Curry’s Street Fight, and the challenges of finding the real person behind the candidate. One of the most challenging things about making any documentary is
Our friends at The Redford Center are offering IDA members a special preview of the organization’s new Redford Center Grants program, which will launch on Wednesday, June 22. IDA thanks our guest funder, Melissa Fondakowski (Program and Development), for answering the questions we’re most curious about, and giving our members an exclusive look at their latest exciting endeavor. How Did Redford Center Grants Come About? As a small nonprofit, The Redford Center’s organizational model has been to produce one film at a time about an issue on the verge of a tipping point. Since we were founded, we
Over the past five years or so, the Los Angeles Film Festival called Downtown LA its home, after decamping from its previous digs in Westwood Village, near UCLA. Whereas the Village afforded a truly festive context for LAFF, with its cluster of cinemas and eateries within walking distance of one another, making for a self-contained celebration of independent film, the festival seemed lost in its downtown digs amid the whizz-bang flashiness of LA Live and the Staples Center, and the sleek ritziness of the surrounding luxury hotels and soon-to-be-tallest building West of the Mississippi. Even
Editor's Note: Kartemquin Films has been celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, and the celebration culminates June 24 in Chicago, with the 50th Anniversary Gala. We asked founder/artistic director Gordon Quinn to share his thoughts on the ethical challenges he has faced over his rich and illustrious career. The following appears in the forthcoming Summer 2016 issue of Documentary magazine. Over our 50 years at Kartemquin, we struggled with many ethical challenges while making films, but we did not start speaking publicly and qualifying these struggles as “ethical” until our documentary
We are proud to introduce three amazing women who are helping us serve the documentary community through their IDA internships: Katie Huang (Web and Information Technology Intern), Sara Cárdenas (Events Intern) and Dilara “Bristy” Sultana (Events Intern). Katie’s and Sara’s internships have been generously sponsored by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission. Katie has recently finished her senior year at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and is currently studying Computer Science with a minor in Ethnic Studies. She has just
Twenty years seems to be the appropriate time frame for historical events to transform into history, and for historians, pundits, journalists and we the people to look back on how we’ve grown and changed, and how we haven’t; what we’ve learned, and what we haven’t learned. In the mid-1990s, just on the cusp of the digital revolution, America was gripped by the so-called Trail of the Century. OJ Simpson, who nurtured and cultivated his iconic status well beyond his football days, was tried for and acquitted of the double murder of his ex-wife and her friend. This was the culmination of nearly