Dear IDA Community, I would like to address the recent resignations of four IDA staffers. I am deeply disappointed that they chose to leave. I cannot provide insight into why they made their decisions. To do so would be speculative or divulge confidential personnel information. I can say that I am disappointed that in resigning they relinquished an opportunity to respectfully engage in a constructive dialogue with me, the IDA’s Executive Director, to resolve their concerns. I can also say that I have a 20-year history in our community as a filmmaker, program designer, funder, advocate and
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Swedish filmmakers Maria Loohufvud and Love Martinsen’s children had friends over when they received an email from the Sundance Film Festival programmers. The couple was nervous. “What could they possibly want to know?” The programmers had some questions regarding their submission Calendar Girls and would call within a half-hour. The first-time filmmakers put the kids in front of the TV and braced themselves. “The only question we have is, Do you want to be in the World Cinema Documentary Competition?” Corks were popped, oysters were shucked, and ice cream was devoured with the news that
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. With just a little less than a month in, 2022 has already been a difficult year, and we’ve lost far too many cultural icons. The larger-than-life former editor-at-large at Vogue, André Leon Talley, passed away last week. You can celebrate his life and career by watching Kate Novack’s The Gospel According to Andre, which is streaming on Hulu. Featuring the likes of Anna Wintour, Marc Jacobs and Whoopi Goldberg, the film gives us a deep insight into Talley’s fascinating legacy
Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh are this year’s recipients of IDA’s Courage Under Fire Award. Their film Writing With Fire is the story of Khabar Lahariya (meaning, “Waves of News”), India’s only all-women news publication. Set in Bundelkhand, a rural town in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, and within a context of dwindling personal freedoms and rising Hindu nationalism, Writing With Fire follows Dalit (deemed the lowest in the Hindu hierarchy of castes) journalists Meera Devi, Suneeta Prajapati, Shyamkali Devi, and their co-workers as they take on the mining mafia, inept police force and
De’Onna "Tree" Young-Stephens is an award-winning writer and director based in Los Angeles, California. She was born and raised in Walkertown, North Carolina where she developed an interest in film at age eight while enrolled at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. After earning a BS in Public Relations at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, Tree moved to Atlanta and got her first job working as a day player on the film 42. She later went on to work as a personal assistant for Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, and Janelle Monáe on Hidden Figures and as
Dear beloved IDA, You are 40 years old! How time flies. Time, consciousness, and cinema are like friends who hold mirrors up for each other. As I am now some 32 years into a life of film work, I think about the three threads that tangle and untangle with each other to affirm how time itself is more than simply linear. The three threads I attempt to acknowledge when I work are these: the history of filming, history itself (not a monolith but a maxilith!), and personal history (of each and all of us). The history of filming is now clocking in at about 130 years. History itself? If we date it to
In 1991, Marlon Riggs made history with the POV premiere on PBS of his groundbreaking film Tongues Untied. It was at the height of the culture wars as well as the AIDS pandemic, and Tongues Untied intersected both crises. It became a lightning rod for conservatives who were looking to maintain the old-world order; they denounced the film on the floor of the US Senate. It also became a beacon and a call for action for those communities and voices marginalized and stigmatized by the status quo of white supremacy and homophobia. In this personal and performative documentary, Riggs comes out not
Brown Girls Doc Mafia (BGDM) started as a secret. It was built to be a safe place for BIPOC women and non-binary filmmakers and industry professionals working in the documentary field, where we could set down our masks, shed our armor, and take a breath in an industry that often felt hostile to communities of color. This was 2015, when the needs of these communities largely weren’t being met by industry initiatives due to a lack of intersectional approaches and a dearth of BIPOC leadership with decision-making or culture-building power at prominent documentary institutions. Over the next six
The founding of FWD-Doc (Filmmakers with Disabilities-Documentary) can be traced to IDA’s 2018 Getting Real conference in Los Angeles. After a panel that highlighted the work of several documentary filmmakers with disabilities, about 40 of us, and our allies, went into an adjacent room for what was more than likely the first-of-its-kind get-together. For many of us, it was the first time that we would meet or talk to another filmmaker who had a similar lived experience of having a disability. A few of us had learned how organizations like A-DOC and Brown Girls Doc Mafia came into being and how
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! As the implications of the January 6th insurrection continue to metastasize over a year later, Deadline’s Matthew Carey talks to filmmakers Malachy Browne, David Botti and Haley Willis about their Academy Award short-listed doc Days of Rage, a painstakingly executed reconstruction of the events of that catastrophic day. "I think there’s a very great value in simply