Documentary is happy to debut an exclusive clip from Dan Covert’s Geoff McFetridge: Drawing a Life , a SXSW Audience Award-winning biodoc about the prolific artist whose work has been exhibited in museums and blue-chip galleries, and who is a frequent collaborator with brands (Hèrmes, Vans, Patagonia) and filmmakers (title designs for Sofia Coppola and Spike Jonze films). Gravitas Ventures is releasing the film in NY theaters on Friday and on VOD on July 2. Regarding the clip, the director writes, “This clip comes a quarter of a way into the film and shows a key turning point in Geoff’s career
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In 2018, to an audience of a dozen or so people at the Spectacle Theater in Brooklyn, Zia Anger gave a presentation of some of her abandoned work, including her first feature film Always All Ways, Anne Marie . To the clips she presented on her laptop, Anger added her own commentary via TextEdit, examining the complicated ethics and unexpected repercussions of DIY filmmaking. The one-off performance would go on to become a touring work of expanded cinema called My First Film , which took Anger on the road across North America and eventually online when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, therapeutically
The Islamic Scholarship Fund (ISF) has received $500,000 from the Doris Duke Foundation’s Building Bridges Program to provide multi-year support through a collaborative fellowship with the Sundance Institute, attendance at industry events (including April’s Getting Real conference), and unrestricted funding to filmmaker grantees. It’s the largest single grant the ISF has ever received. The ISF Building Bridges Program prize activities started earlier this year. The Sundance collaboration supported six U.S.-based filmmakers focused on telling Muslim-related stories and will continue for the
In 2005, Wu Wenguang, a founding figure of China’s independent documentary movement, joined forces with choreographer Wen Hui to create the Beijing-based Caochangdi Workstation. The collective’s first initiative, the Village Documentary Project, selected ten villagers from nationwide applicants who’d come across newspaper ads about the project. The villagers were trained to use DV cameras over three days and returned to their respective villages with their new tools to gather materials. With no specific instructions on what to capture, they were free to film whatever they saw fit. After a
Rodolfo Castillo-Morales is a Mexican filmmaker and programmer. He has participated in several fiction and documentary short films, video art installations, feature and documentary series, and has photogpraphed documentaries with directors from Mexico, Spain, El Salvador and Serbia. He was the programmer of DocsMX and co-creator of Plataforma MX in Mexico City. Today he’s the Programming Director of the Guadalajara International Film Festival (FICG) and the FICG Cinematheque as well as General Coordinator of DocuLab: Documentary Laboratory. Currently, he is preparing two documentary features as director, writer, and Cinematographer.
It’s been 23 years since Sandi DuBowski’s groundbreaking Trembling Before G-d, which uncloaked the lives of Hasidic and Orthodox gays and lesbians, made its Sundance debut. Since that time DuBowski has built a career at the intersection of religion and queerness, social activism and filmmaking, always avoiding the binary choice in favor of the “and.” This insistence is a bond shared by the director-producer and the riveting Israeli-American star of his latest feature Sabbath Queen—a doc over 21 years in the making focused squarely on Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie, a descendant of 38 generations of Orthodox rabbis.
If you don’t already know what the Swahili word amani means, we won’t spoil it here, as Nicole Gormley and Debra Aroko’s Searching for Amani treats it as a final reveal, after their documentary has also searched for a killer, a motive, and the manner in which climate change and the descendants of colonialism have caused conflict and death in Kenya. The American Gormley and Kenyan Aroko tell their story through the eyes of Simon, a 13-year-old whose father was murdered while working as a guide at a wildlife conservancy in Laikipia, Kenya. Simon longs to be a journalist when he grows up, and his
“No one enters trucking from charm school,” notes Desiree Wood, star of Nesa Azimi’s long-haul road trip film Driver , which follows the founder of REAL Women in Trucking as she works her minimum wage on (18) wheels job from coast to coast. Indeed, Wood, a forty-something who retired from stripping and now finds herself in a financially precarious gig (that puts her at far greater risk of sexual assault to boot), serves as our no-nonsense guide to a sightseeing-cinematic world hidden in plain sight. As another seasoned trucker attests, it’s a beautiful country and she gets paid to see it
Tommaso Santambrogio’s Oceans Are the Real Continents (2023), which opens on a black-and-white shot of an older Cuban woman sweeping her doorway, reminiscent of the indulgent, and seemingly quotidian scenes in Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma and Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days , is a film that captures the human condition in all its humor, pain and joy. Santambrogio’s debut docudrama feature, which premiered at Venice Days in 2023, is a triptych that follows three generations of characters in San Antonio de los Baños, where time seemingly stands still. Entrancingly poetic, Oceans Are the Real Continents
Whether we are unemployed creatives, overwhelmed freelancers, or underpaid employees, it can often seem like everyone else has figured it out. Social media is a constant stream of people announcing new jobs, festival screenings, and prestigious grants and awards. Yet more often than not, the filmmaker who had the big premiere, received all the accolades, and even successfully sold their film is still struggling to get by, just like the rest of us. So how are filmmakers actually making a living?