Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Over the past few years, America has been experiencing a crushing series of crises—a global pandemic; an increasingly divided citizenry; the virulence of white supremacy and its encroachment into the mainstream through media outlets, and state and federal legislations; and the rapid demise of democracy in concert with a systematic dismantling of civil rights. This past weekend, we witnessed a horrific, hate-fueled massacre of Black Americans at the alleged hands of a teenager
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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 The New Yorker, Richard Brody writes about how nonfiction filmmakers like Andrea Arnold often manage to "erase themselves and their processes." Scott specifically talks about Arnold’s latest, Cow. Cow filters out the basic personal element. It doesn’t show the crew’s interactions with the farm workers, who seemingly pretend that the crew and equipment aren’t
Sometimes the right people win the big awards. Certainly, that’s the case with John Zaritsky, a fiery, truth-telling filmmaker, who garnered the Best Feature Documentary Academy Award in 1982 for Just Another Missing Kid. The Oscar, which, in later years, he would use as a door-stopper for his legendary parties at a ski chalet in Whistler, British Columbia, was far more useful as a passport that got him from being an angry filmmaker at the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) to independence as a freelancer working for PBS’ FRONTLINE and other outlets in the US, Canada and Great Britain
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Right on the heels of Mother's Day, the new New Yorker documentary, artist Titus Kaphar’s I Hold Your Love, is a “quiet vignette” that reminds us just how frightening it is for women of color to give birth in the US. Kaphar’s most recognizable series shows Black mothers holding a blank space meant to symbolize their babies. Featuring Kaphar’s friend Serena Williams and others in his family, the documentary is a celebration of Black motherhood as much as it is a reminder of
In 2014, Claude Motley got shot in the face during an attempted car-jacking in Milwaukee. The shooter was 15-year-old Nathan King. A few days later, Nathan would himself get shot by Victoria Davison as he tried to steal her car. That bullet paralyzed his legs. When Claude Got Shot toggles among these three protagonists in a deep dive into the juvenile justice system and the lasting physical and psychological effects of being shot. Director Brad Lichtenstein had been close friends with Motley for 20 years when the shooting occurred. They met through a daycare center in which they both had kids
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 new volume of World Records journal is out. While we’re yet to read all the essays, Genevieve Yue’s " The Accidental Outside" is already a favorite. The whole issue is a treat and full of extremely stimulating arguments. Experimental documentary generally takes aim at politics out there, but it is rarely directed inward, toward the institutions that support and
August 15, 2021 marked the Taliban’s capture of the Afghan capital of Kabul, culminating a shockingly swift offensive that began in May. The Taliban surged back to power following a nearly two-decade-long insurgency against allied NATO and Afghan armed forces, just weeks before Washington was set to complete its troop withdrawal. As the country fell into Taliban control and the Afghan government collapsed, scenes of chaos unfolded at the Kabul airport. Within days, harrowing images of Afghans running along the tarmac and clinging to departing US military planes became emblematic of panic and
Founded in 2021, amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, Prismatic Ground is a glimmer of hope for experimental nonfiction cinema in a tumultuous period. Inney Prakash, a programmer at the Maysles Documentary Center in New York, launched the film festival, creating a series, as Prakash says, “centering on experimental documentary that seeks to break down various hierarchies.” Shorts and feature films appear alongside each other; movies made by veteran and first-time directors are in conversation with one another. This goal of eliminating boundaries even reaches to the very notion of “documentary” and
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. At IDA, we believe in championing stories that are about protecting people’s freedoms—be it someone’s sexuality, their decision to give birth (or not), or their decision to marry their partner of choice. The last 24 hours have been harrowing for us, as they should’ve been for anyone who believes in human rights. With the leaked draft of a Supreme Court majority opinion calling for the overturning of Roe v. Wade, this week’s Screen Time is dedicated to the organizations and
In this 40th anniversary year of the International Documentary Association, and on the eve of the IDA Enterprise Documentary Fund 2022 open call, it seems an apt moment to reflect upon the fund’s history. Launched at Sundance in 2017, the IDA Enterprise Documentary Fund was the realization of extensive research, ideation, and collaboration between IDA’s then Director of Funds, Carrie Lozano; former Executive Director Simon Kilmurry; and our liaisons at the John T. and Catherine D. MacArthur Foundation. The intentional collaboration and rigorous research that brought the Fund to life set a