Dear Readers, I am back at IDA from a semester dedicated to research as a Documentary Film Fellow at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy. A year prior, I applied for the fellowship because it became clear to me that the challenges facing documentary filmmakers all over the world, including in the U.S., were increasing instead of decreasing, even though there are more distribution streams than ever before. I wanted to think through the question of why. And if we understood the why, what could be done to make the world a better place to make and to circulate
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I ended my last Notes , back in August of last year, by writing that these are treacherous times for documentary film and all truth-seeking art. It is getting harder to make work and let people see it. Policy decisions, business practices, and other aspects of our field’s infrastructure prevent brilliant, vital films from reaching the audiences that want them. More and more people are looking for remedies. During her fellowship at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy last fall, Abby Sun investigated some of these structural challenges and explored potential
Largely composed of artful, meditative shots that relish in quotidian minutiae—meal prep, bathtime, daily prayer—Sam Abbas’s Europe’s New Faces is a striking and emphatically humanizing portrait of African migrants residing in a specific Paris squat. Though the film’s 159-minute runtime seems somewhat daunting on its face, the filmmaker’s eye for exquisite detail quickly quiets the viewer’s roving mind. Below, our conversation covers his initial encounter with Parisian squats, how he acquired access to shoot an emergency C-section, and the process of enlisting The Beast and Nocturama director Bertrand Bonello for the score.
Congratulations to the five IDA grantees who have world premieres at SXSW 2025.
Documentary is happy to debut the poster and a clip from Eleanor Mortimer’s first feature, How Deep Is Your Love. The film premieres on Friday at True/False, the doc showcase in Columbia, Missouri, beloved by audiences and industry. Mortimer, who also shot her film, focuses on taxonomists studying the myriad creatures and ecosystems in the deep ocean and addresses the potentially harmful impact of deep-sea mining. The pic is produced by Jacob Thomas, who previously co-produced Mortimer’s short film Territory (2015), a prizewinner at Hot Docs. On the clip, Mortimer explains, “This is from a
“Why even have a contest if you’re going to disregard the votes?” Founded four years ago, Decentralized Pictures is a nonprofit organization that gives awards to filmmakers through its platform based, in part, on the scores they receive from the platform’s users. The company—whose mission is “democratizing the film industry”—has some big supporters. In addition to filmmaker Roman Coppola and his family’s American Zoetrope studio, which helped found DCP, their board includes veteran indie agent Bart Walker and director Sofia Coppola. While some filmmakers who have participated in Decentralized’s contests have been enthusiastic about the company and the funds they’ve received, the Sidewinder Films Award revealed some deeper issues at the company.
Interviews with sales agents, sales news, project announcements, and industry trends at DocSalon panels at the 2025 European Film Market (February 13–19). The 2025 edition of the Berlinale has been one of the coldest in recent memory, with the German capital covered in snow for almost ten days and the thermometer occasionally hitting -10°C. The A-list gathering, which ran from 13–23 February this year, saw a brand-new management team take over the festival direction. The festival’s American director Tricia Tuttle appointed German-French executive Tanja Meissner to head the EFM.
Angelo Madsen’s (North By Current) newest film, A Body to Live in, is an ode to body piercer, performance artist, and photographer Fakir Musafar (1930–2018). Madsen, who befriended Musafar in the last 14 years of his subject’s life, utters offscreen near the end of the film that he wishes he had begun this project when the founder of the “Modern Primitive” movement was still alive, to speak with Musafar directly about his westernization of Indigenous spirituality from a contemporary perspective. Both a critique and love letter to the divisive “Gender Flex” symbol, A Body to Live In is a sonic immersion of what it means to find community and be human. Ahead of its world premiere at True/False, Documentary chatted with Madsen over Zoom to discuss his friendship with Musafar, respect for Musafar’s legacy through a critical lens, and the difficulties of financing and marketing “niche” trans stories.
It’s tempting to pick nits about the relative merits of prizewinners and other films, and even more tempting to take a handful of the 346 new films as somehow indicative of the festival as a whole, but the truth is that a slate the size of IFFR’s can make proclamations about its strength difficult: two different attendees can carve distinct paths and have dissimilar takeaways. That’s one reason why a festival is more than just the films one watches.
Lisa Jackson is an Anishinaabe documentary maker working across multiple genres—film, XR, and installations—to share Indigenous stories and knowledge. Her most recent work, Wilfred Buck’s Star Stories, is a dome presentation bringing to life four star stories, gathered and told by renowned Cree astronomer, star knowledge expert, and author Wilfred Buck. It also features excerpts from her 2024 documentary Wilfred Buck, which explored the astronomer’s life, work, and philosophy. Documentary talked to Jackson about creating for different genres, reciprocity, and using technology in the context of sharing Indigenous knowledge. Star Stories, created in collaboration with the Macronautes, premieres at the 2025 Berlinale in the Forum Expanded section.