This year's Berlin International Film Festival presented a special screening of Life on the Border, a gripping project initiated and produced by Kurdish filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi. Over the past years Ghobadi has tirelessly narrated stories of the Kurds, the largest ethnic group without a state; their population spans from southeastern Turkey to northwestern Iran, northern Iraq and northern Syria.
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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! From the Los Angeles Times, columnist Michael Hiltzik weighs in on the hot discussion this week about the Tribeca Film Festival's decision to screen the anti-vaccine doc Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Conspiracy, from physician-turned-director Andrew Wakefield. Careless actions such as those of the Tribeca Film Festival
I knew I had found a place in the documentary world that I could call home when, on the Friday night of the True/False Film Fest (March 3 – 6) in Columbia, Missouri, I found myself at an event called Campfire Stories, punctuated by campfire cuisine: in front of me, a table piled high with s’mores; on the other side of the room, another table laden with local moonshine. I used to think I was weird for recognizing the divine in the culinary pairing of beer and chocolate cookies. Enter T/F, where moonshine and s’mores co-exist happily and rule the day. Besides s’mores and moonshine (and Harold’s
The final chord of "the Blackfish effect" has finally resounded, with a stunning and unprecedented corporate policy announcement from SeaWorld. In January 2013, the documentary Blackfish premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, telling the story "about Tilikum, a performing killer whale that killed several people while in captivity," according to the official film synopsis. Three years later—a period marked by sustained activism, multi-platform distribution and unrelenting media coverage— SeaWorld officially announced on March 17, 2016, that it will officially end its orca breeding program and
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! Following SeaWorld's announcement this week that it would stop breeding orcas, the Los Angeles Times spoke with Blackfish filmmaker Gabriela Cowperthwaite about the major impact her doc has made on changing perceptions and behavior. "It was constant, the amount of information I had to learn every day to continue
At SXSW this year, you could find great pleasure in films at two extremes of the commercially viable spectrum: the idiosyncratic passion project at one end, and the big and shiny, well-crafted work that may already be linked to a brand name. Both were a lot of fun to find, and they shared the ability to deliver a sense of discovery, of seeing past the obvious, while offering respect to both subject and audience. On the passion-project side, one of the quirkiest was Irish film critic Mark Cousins' I Am Belfast. Cousins, a film lover who seems to want to give the form a bear hug at every
We’ve spoken to quite a few of you who are excited to apply to the freshly launched Miller / Packan Film Fund, so we went straight to the source and asked Hugh Rogovy, Founder and President of the Rogovy Foundation, to answer a few questions about their latest philanthropic endeavor. In this #FunderFriday installment, you will hear directly from Hugh what inspired the grant’s creation and how your project can get noticed amidst the many fantastic films applying for this highly competitive doc fund. What inspired the Foundation to create the Miller / Packan Film Fund? Documentary films can have
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! The Los Angeles Times' Steven Zeitchik reports from True/False on four venturesome trends in the documentary form. These new anti-documentaries are in a sense more fundamental shifts, since they're crafted as feature films, sometimes with scripts to match. But their issues are also more complicated, since they're
Another year means another chance to get funds for your documentary! Below is your essential guide to grants, awards, open calls, and opportunities to be had in the first half of 2016. GRANT DEADLINES ITVS - INDEPENDENT LENS Independent Lens is currently seeking submissions of films in advanced rough cut or fine cut stage or completed films to broadcast during the October 2016 - June 2017 season. Independent Lens films are often character driven stories, and are known for compelling storytelling, innovation, and diversity. Independent Lens welcomes individual expression and is committed to
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! From the San Francisco Chronicle, Bay Area docmakers Dawn Porter and Pete Nicks, among others, weigh in on #OscarsSoWhite and the need for diversity: It's a lesson that Nicks, 47, and other African American filmmakers from the Bay Area say is often left out of the heated conversations about Oscar inclusion: that