Largely due to the ongoing efforts of disabled artists and activists, ensuring art is accessible—to both audience members and artists—has moved from the margins to a central topic in creating, producing, and staging immersive nonfiction. We’ve seen the conversation reach major stages through initiatives like the 2022 Film Festival Accessibility Scorecard , a step toward institutionalized accountability and rewritten best practices for showcasing accessible art. From including CART and ASL transcriptions in live events (like this one) to including content warnings in depictions of triggering
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Member Spotlight highlighting Dani Wieczorek, a Brazilian, LA-based creative producer. Born with a disability, Dani has a journey where unimagined things were proven possible. She believes her incredible capacity to solve problems to be a special power brought to her by her disability. She has defied the odds and found ways to hack life from a young age. Nothing seems impossible to her.
We asked the IDA team for their favorite documentaries to watch during Disability Pride Month.
In January, factual program-making veteran Emma Hindley has been appointed to head the BBC strand Storyville , overseeing the BBC’s flagship slot showcasing international feature documentaries. Before Storyville , Hindley build her credentials with many years in different roles in the U.K. factual television industry, most recently as creative director at Brook Lapping where she, among other things, exec produced the Storyville doc Deborah James: Bowelbabe in Her Own Words (2023, directed by Sara Hardy). Established in 1997 by Nick Fraser, Storyville has earned a reputation for amplifying
Morzaniel Ɨramari, an Indigenous documentary-maker from the Amazon rainforest, is traveling with his third film, Mãri Hi - The Tree of Dream, in order to raise awareness about his people’s current plight. He is the first filmmaker from among the Yanomami, an ethnic group of roughly 35,000 foraging agriculturalists stewarding a Nebraska-sized swathe of the Amazon, who live in equilibrium with nature. During Bolsonaro’s reign, through a calamitous combination of state neglect and an influx of illegal miners hungry for gold, the Yanomami suffered what President Lula da Silva terms “an attempted genocide.”
Documentary’s Spring 2023 issue launches as the more industrial sides of our field continue to crater. This issue doesn’t offer clear solutions but spotlights some exemplary filmmakers, films, and projects that are intervening in how even the independent sectors of our field are sliding toward oblivion.
Member Spotlight: Agniia Galdanova and Igor Myakotin
An Interview With Natalia Almada: For over two decades, Natalia Almada has combined artistic expression with social inquiry to make films that are both personal reflections and critical social commentaries, focusing on topics ranging from contemporary Mexico to our relationship with technology. Her work straddles the boundaries of documentary, fiction, and experimental film. On the occasion of the theatrical release of her latest feature Users (2021), New York’s BAM Film is presenting a complete retrospective of Almada’s work, running June 9–15, 2023.
Sheffield DocFest has survived operating as a carousel, rotating through festival directors and programmers every couple of years for the last decade. (Through the tumult, a mostly-local operations and industry programming staff remained relatively constant.) One sign of the festival’s continued relevance to UK nonfiction film production is that Brits simply refer to the festival as “DocFest,” as if no other documentary festival in the festival could be confused for this one. Sheffield also maintains global aspirations to be a major launch pad for festival creative documentaries. The prolonged
Happy pride month! We asked IDA team for their favorite queer documentaries and rounded them up in this article for you.