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! Now Then’s community correspondent and editor Philippa Willitts evaluates how accessible the recently concluded Sheffield DocFest was. In the article, Willits concludes that “all of the barriers [they] faced were avoidable.” I explained that saying somewhere “has disabled toilets” is not adequate accessibility information, that last-minute venue changes have a
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Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Mark Moormann’s documentary The Day the Music Died: The Story of Don McLean's “American Pie” marks the story of the eponymous song that is considered “one of the great musical touchstones of the 20th century,” 50 years after its release. As Don McLean explains the story and history behind the iconic song, we see a recounting of his life and career, and many of those whose lives were touched by the song. Watch the film on Paramount+ Speaking of music documentaries, make sure
Directors/producers Lisa Riordan Seville and Zara Katz came to their first documentary project, A Woman on the Outside, through separate, but converging, career paths. Seville, an award-winning investigative journalist in both broadcast and print platforms, and Katz, a photo editor, producer and curator for NBCnews.com, The New York Times, The Guardian and other outlets, collaborated in 2014 on the Instagram project Everyday Incarceration, which examined 40 years of mass incarceration in the US prison industrial complex. The project garnered attention online, as well as from such museums as
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home.
There is something called the Paris Syndrome, under which, tourists—mostly Japanese and eastern Asian tourists—experience a deep sense of dismay and disappointment when they visit the city of Paris, because what they see doesn’t quite live up to the expectations they had had of the city. Watching Alice Diop’s documentaries does the opposite for me. They reveal something I have never known about Paris and its suburbs. And it leaves me in awe. Diop, who made her first film, La Tour du Monde, in 2005, was born to Senegalese immigrants and grew up in the banlieues—the suburbs of Paris. The world
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Kicking off POV’s 35th Season is Yung Chang’s Wuhan Wuhan, which premieres July 11, then will be available for streaming through August 11 at pbs.org. The film takes viewers to the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic, in its early months, through the frontline perspectives of medical workers, patients and ordinary citizens doing extraordinarily magnanimous work. Chang and his crew were afforded remarkable access to hospitals and homes alike, as doctors, nurses, patients
By Patricia Aufderheide AND Bedatri D. Choudhury The 2022 Tribeca Festival was finally back in person, and there was much hugging, partying and clustering to make up for lost time. As a FOMO machine, it’s pretty good; there’s way too much going on at any one time. Films, of course, but also games, television, immersive installations and projects, audio, live performance, and a daily round of panels. Tribeca’s huge doc selection (70 films) included plenty of celebrity and performance works, as well as films sure to attract the obsessed and sensation-seeking. Mixed in were films that left us
Margaret Byrne’s Any Given Day is a half-decade-long ride on the roller coaster that those living with a mental illness face—on “any given day”—through the stories of four distinctly riveting individuals, three of whom the director met while investigating the treatment of detainees at Chicago’s Cook County Jail, which in 2014 had the dubious distinction of being the largest single-site mental health facility in the country. And these individuals are participants in the city’s diversionary mental health court probation program. (Which, unfortunately, is itself problematic, since a guilty plea
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. July is BIPOC Mental Health Month, and it provokes us to have a conversation about mental health, of course, but specifically within the context of BIPOC communities who have been left out of the conversation. They have been denied access to mental healthcare that is administered in culture-sensitive ways, while they have had to negotiate with what is tabooed and often ignored within their communities. For this week’s Screen Time, we include some documentaries that can help
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!