Editors’ Note: Doc10 is Chicago's only all-documentary film festival and this year, the festival honored filmmaker Jessica Devaney with its inaugural Vanguard Award, for being “at the forefront of creating and cultivating innovative and important documentary filmmaking.” We are grateful that Devaney shared her acceptance speech with us. And a very special thanks to our friends at Doc 10. The speech has been edited for length and clarity. When I first heard the name of this award, I thought, That's a lot to bite off… a “Vanguard Award”—what does that mean? As I sat with it for a little bit, I
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Filmmakers have a special place in their hearts for film festivals hosted in small theaters, in idyllic local neighborhoods, with thoughtful Q&As, and crowds as interesting as the films themselves. In many ways, that’s the kind of festival QDoc, The Portland Queer Documentary Film Festival offers itself as. QDoc is the only festival in the US dedicated solely to LGBTQ+ nonfiction, and it makes space, like no other, for queer and trans documentarians. As with many good things, small festivals like this one were among the most impacted by COVID, but now, after a two-year hiatus and much
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. It’s been a hard week to fish out hope, to feel like there is a future that rests on able, progressive, equitable shoulders. As we watched Linda Goldstein Knowlton and Katie Flint’s We Are The Radical Monarchs, we drew inspiration from the young girls of color in Oakland, who are members of Radical Monarchs, “an alternative to the Scout movement for girls of color, aged 8-13.” We suggest you watch these young social activists on POV, and take heart in the fact that our world
Kill the Documentary is a brilliant, angry book. An honest book. A brave book. Guggenheim Fellow and award-winning filmmaker Jill Godmilow has written a stirring call to arms in a form she calls “a letter.” I rather agree with Bill Nichols, who writes in the foreword that he prefers to call it “a manifesto.”
World-premiering at the 2021 Tribeca Festival, Emily Branham’s Being BeBe is a revealing walk (uh, sashay) down memory lane with the titular BeBe Zahara Benet, the very first winner of RuPaul’s Drag Race, back in 2009. Well, not exactly. Rather, BeBe’s equally charismatic conjurer—a Minnesota transplant from Cameroon named Marshall Ngwa—actually takes the lead in guiding us through 15 vérité-captured years of the artist’s creatively fulfilling/financially devastating (though fortunately, family-supportive) life—from her humble amateur drag beginnings in Minneapolis in 2006 (when Branham, whose
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Forty years ago, Vincent Chin—a young Chinese American man—was murdered by a white American autoworker who went on to confess but never served any time. Christine Choy and Renee Tajima-Peña’s Oscar-nominated and IDA Documentary Award-winning Who Killed Vincent Chin? was released in 1987 and continues to raise questions about race, the American legal system, and justice in ways that remain ever-pertinent and relevant. Catch the film as it plays on POV, as a part of a special
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! Over at IndieWire, Eric Kohn questions the ways film festivals have been treating their programmers. “While the industry relies on programmers, they have never been treated as more disposable. What would it take to change that?” he asks. Meanwhile, so many programmers stitch together their profession in piecemeal that festivals build their budgets around the notion
By Bedatri D.Choudhury AND Tom White Tom White: The Hot Docs Canadian Documentary Film Festival reclaimed its in-person status after a three-year, pandemic-fueled hiatus. We had the fortune to attend the Toronto-based confab, and we reacquainted ourselves with that high-octane festival vibe: the thrill of engaging with art on the big screen, the stimulating energy of Q&As and sessions, and the invigorating jolt of impromptu conversations with old and new friends. A month into spring, Toronto still felt like winter, and the brisk walks from the hotel to the Varsity Cineplex, and the TIFF Bell
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. It’s Pride Month here in the US, and while we celebrate the work and art of our queer colleagues all year, we wanted to use this week’s Screen Time to showcase some of our favorite documentaries on queer participants, down the ages. We hope these films bring out the intersectionality and the many joys and struggles of living as queer people in this country. Back in 2012, David France, who reported extensively on the AIDS crisis as a journalist, made How to Survive a Plague to
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! Marking the 50th anniversary of Okinawa Prefecture officially reverting from American to Japanese control, Japan Society in New York programmed the recently-concluded “Okinawa in Focus” series. Hyperallergic’s Dan Schindel delves deeper. The NDU’s two documentaries in the program, 1971’s Motoshinkakarannu and 1973’s Asia is One, bookend the Okinawan reversion, with