A Conversation with Gordon Quinn and Amir George For over 50 years, Chicago’s Kartemquin Films has been at the vanguard of social issue nonfiction. “Sparking democracy through documentary since 1966,” as it states on the KTQ website, the group is known for such cinéma vérité milestones as Inquiring Nuns (1968) and Chicago Maternity Center Story (1976); their most famous chronicle of American inner-city struggle, Hoop Dreams (1994); more recent Oscar-nominated breakouts Minding the Gap (2018) and Abacus: Small Enough to Jail (2016); and a boatload of other penetrating, consciousness-raising
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IDFA, the largest documentary film festival in the world, sprawls throughout Amsterdam in mid-November. It’s also an industry mecca, where you might not only attend the high-profile Forum (the grandmother of all pitch forums), but also pop into one room and find aspiring Korean filmmakers doing pitches, turn around and find a group of Palestinian filmmakers doing the same, to their interested funders. Or you might revel in IDFA DocLab, the bleeding-edge, experimental zone of XR/immersive. Since its origins with founder Ally Derks in 1988, IDFA has proudly celebrated the role of documentary in
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Older Than the Crown, from Derrick Lemere, investigates the trial of Rick Desautel, a Sinixt tribal member who, while hunting elk on his ancestral land in Canada, was charged with hunting without a permit and being a non-resident. In 1956, Sinixt people were said to be extinct by the Canadian government. The documentary delves into the limits of law and its unjust origins as Sinixt tribal members demand their rights. Available to watch on PBS. The two-time Emmy-winning
In 1994, workers demolishing an old toy shop in Blackburn, Lancashire found three milk churns stuffed with hundreds of spools of film. The negatives—bound for the junkyard but deposited at a local video library that happened, fortuitously, to be on the way—turned out to have been the work of Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon. Pioneers of early commercial cinema, the Mitchell and Kenyon Film Company roamed the British Isles at the turn of the 20th century and documented everyday life in the Edwardian age. Subsequently restored and preserved by the British Film Institute, the rediscovered trove
Miroslava is an indigenous, Mexican-American mother and storyteller on a journey to reclaim her indigeneity. Throughout her life, Miros’ insatiable curiosity was nurtured by the wealth of oral culture and traditions passed down to her from her ancestors. As such, she has always been a storyteller with a desire to share stories reflecting her cultural richness, a point of view integral to the world and our humanity, although often grossly underrepresented. Miros began her journey as an emerging filmmaker with her first project, The Bears On Pine Ridge (Co-Producer and Executive Producer). This
Media attention is short-lived and fickle, with incessant news waves and tweets washing over us every day, perpetually snatching away our focus from the most pressing issue of our time—climate change. The year 2019 was a hopeful one for climate activism, and it was a big one for environmental reporting on massive protests around the world. But the critical focus on the climate crisis would soon be overshadowed by the COVID-19 global health emergency. Yet, as many scientists and activists have concurred, the climate crisis is not going away; it’s taking on a new urgency, especially in light of
Tamana Ayazi and Marcel Mettelsiefen’s In Her Hands follow the unlikeliest of protagonists, with a backstory that practically begs for Hollywood to come calling. (Though Hilary Rodham Clinton and Chelsea Clinton, co-founders of HiddenLight Productions and the film’s EPs, did answer the call.) While still in her 20s, Zarifa Ghafari became one of Afghanistan’s first female mayors and the youngest to ever hold that job. And she was appointed by the recently deposed President Ashraf Ghani to the leadership role—not in relatively tolerant Kabul, but in Maidan Shahr, in the conservative province of
With the festival circuit continuing to reclaim its preeminence in the in-person space—and opening up its virtual space to the stay-at-homers—the final third of the year, known to the cognoscenti as Awards Season, roared into being like it was 2019. With the power quartet of Telluride, Toronto, Venice and New York reclaiming September—along with the formidable nonfiction troika of Camden, Gotham Week and Getting Real—the cinema world was chasing the COVID clouds away. The Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) returned to its full glory, and although I caught the coronavirus there, my
Essential Doc Reads is our curated selection of recent features and important news items about the documentary form and its processes, from around the internet, as well as from the Documentary magazine archive. We hope you enjoy! The Jihad Rehab conversation continues with an article by Moustafa Bayoumi from The Nation. Bayoumi explains that the questioning of the ethics and execution of the film dates back a few years, and that the issue is not the fact that a white, non-Muslim woman made the film, but rather that filmmaker Meg Smaker put participants in dangerous and incriminating situations
Los Angeles, CA – The International Documentary Association (IDA) announced the nominations in 18 categories for the 38th annual IDA Documentary Awards, which will be held on December 10, 2022, at the Paramount Theater on the Paramount Studios Lot in Los Angeles.