In August, ITVS welcomed new CEO and President Carrie Lozano to lead the San Francisco-based nonprofit that has, for over 30 years, funded and partnered with a diverse range of documentary filmmakers to produce and distribute stories that would otherwise be untold. Before ITVS, Lozano built her credentials with varied roles stewarding programs that provide funding, creative labs, fellowships, and artist support. Most recently, she served as the director of Sundance Institute’s Documentary Film and Artist Programs, previously as the director of IDA’s Enterprise Fund, and as an executive at Al
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In the crowded landscape of UK documentary production, Grain Media is managing to steer a very difficult path. The company is completely independent and committed to making cinematic films about the issues of our day, films which they unabashedly hope will have an impact and improve the world. In a series of conversations with Documentary, von Einsiedel and his team candidly discussed the ways they work in a climate where budgets are getting much tighter and commissioners are increasingly risk-averse.
Documentary is happy to debut an exclusive clip from Sonia Kennebeck’s latest documentary Reality Winner , which will open at Laemmle Royal and NoHo in LA for special preview screenings on Wednesday, October 18, followed by a weeklong run at Laemmle Glendale. Grasshopper Film will release the film on streaming VOD starting October 31. Reality Winner , on the prosecution of former NSA translator Reality Winner for leaking a Russian election hacking document to the Intercept , is an investigative film five years in the making. Following a SXSW world premiere and subsequent festival run in 2021
Documentary is happy to debut an exclusive clip from David P. Zucker’s documentary Your Friend, Memphis , which will be available to stream on Amazon and Apple TV tomorrow, October 6. This longitudinal documentary takes a vérité approach to recording the life of a young man with cerebral palsy, whose big dreams are not matched by his family’s expectations. On the film, Zucker says, “ Your Friend, Memphis is a coming of age odyssey, following Memphis—an aspiring filmmaker with cerebral palsy—over the course of five years as he pursues a crush on his best friend and strives to build an
Memphis DiAngelis is a young man in his early 20s, living in Austin, Texas. Like many millennials, he is struggling to find a steady job and reliable income; dreaming of following his dreams of becoming a filmmaker; and pining for his best friend, Seneca. To complicate matters, Memphis has cerebral palsy, a condition that can seriously affect mobility and speech. He’s also in a difficult position: he can walk, which in Texas, disqualifies him from state support and medicare. In 2015, filmmaker David P. Zucker took a PA gig working on a Hallmarkesque film that was shooting outside Austin. On
In November 2020, a group of filmmakers met via a Directors Guild of America Zoom panel to discuss a harrowing commonality: missing films. On this panel—aptly titled “ The Unstreamables ”—were several acclaimed filmmakers, including Nancy Savoca, Ayoka Chenzira, and Ira Deutchman. Also present was Amy Heller, co-founder (along with Dennis Doros) of Milestone Films . Founded in 1990, Milestone has been an industry trailblazer in the restoration and distribution of films beyond the scope of mainstream Hollywood, frequently rediscovering films for general audiences. Its catalog is now being
Dear Readers, We are galvanized by the gains for writers (and the precious few documentarians) who are members of WGA made from the new tentative agreement with the AMPTP. However, we should not let down our guard: yesterday, over a dozen streaming services, including the behemoths of Netflix, Amazon, and Disney, announced that they formed a “Streaming Innovation Alliance” to lobby for US government policy that favors streamers. It is time that independent documentary filmmakers, film advocacy organizations, financiers, and those who are invested in a diverse media ecosystem band together to
Featuring a strong relationship to essayistic, nonfiction filmmaking and artists’ moving images, the Open City Documentary Festival has carved a unique place for itself in the United Kingdom. Thematically, the festival shares the creator-focused community spirit that makes the Courtisane Festival and Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival engaging, and sits quite differently from Sheffield DocFest, which has a much more standardized industry feel. As opposed to larger festivals, where Open City’s style of programming might only exist in a tucked-away “experimental” strand, the festival champions
Last week, BRIC announced the 2023–2024 BRIClab artists-in-residence in film and tv, video art, and contemporary art. The film and tv year-long residency incubates innovative and ambitious documentary filmmakers working on short-form, episodic, and feature-length non-fiction films. The video art year-long residency provides support through free courses, video and audio equipment, 80 hours of access to BRIC’s community media studios, editing suites and laptops, and mentorship. Both of those residences include a capstone public screening of the work in 2024. The film and tv documentary project
Full of archival footage and interviews with players from then and now, ‘Copa 71’ is a historical addition to the legacy of women's soccer. Documentary talked to Ramsay Erskine about the making of the documentary and what might never be resolved.