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BY Maori Holmes & Imran Siddiquee

As IDA celebrates its 40th anniversary, we at the MacArthur Foundation are also reflecting on our 40+ years in the documentary field and how independent creators have shaped our program. We funded our first documentary film in 1979, one year after we were established. During the ’80s, we funded 10 more films, and then between 1990 and 2015, we directly supported 250 independent documentary projects and hundreds more through partner organizations. From the very beginning, and still true today, MacArthur’s investments in documentary films were motivated by an appreciation for the role that

IDA and the Black Documentary Collective go waaaay back. BDC’s founder, filmmaker St. Clair Bourne, was an IDA member and served on its board for many years. He was a prolific filmmaker who told stories that celebrated the accomplishments of Black people and our untold history. He was also a mentor to countless filmmakers—myself included—and an activist and organizer at heart. Part and parcel to his leadership was being a disruptor and agitator. I remember him on many panels—often the only person of color—asking the uncomfortable questions, challenging us to interrogate issues of

The 36th season of PBS’ American Masters premieres today, January 11, with Jamila Wignot’s Ailey, the definitive documentary about the life and works of dancer Alvin Ailey, who founded the influential studio Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in 1958, at age 27. The film is a celebration of the beauty and radicality of the Black body that Ailey centered and wove magic with. As we begin to navigate a world without the legendary Betty White, we are grateful for Steven J. Boettcher’s PBS documentary, Betty White: First Lady of Television, which documents and celebrates the legacy of White, who

Not too long ago, filmmaker/editor Jean Tsien kicked off a meeting of Asian American documentary filmmakers by lighting sage and paying tribute to our ancestors. Alongside immigrants and family elders, we remembered the filmmakers and media activists who came before us. A-Doc (Asian American Documentary Network) is the newest incarnation of that lineage, wielding what filmmaker PJ Raval has named “our collective power” to blast through the gates and create the new. Those ancestors extend as far back as 1916, when Marion Wong and Sessue Hayakawa countered the anti-Asian onslaught of the time

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! Variety’s Addie Morfoot speaks to American Experience Executive Producer Cameo George about the show’s new, 34th, season. "I have always thought of American Experience as the single most important history series in the doc world, and the chance to build on the incredible legacy of the series, freshen it up a bit, and open the door to a wider range of filmmakers and

This past year, a respected colleague who had attended many industry events with executives from public television noted to me how, "They choose not to see you." That observation stuck with me as emblematic of what many have recounted to me, and unfortunately, what I too have experienced in my decades in the system. As recently as February 2020, as we were delivering our series Asian Americans, a promo editor who worked on many national PBS productions willfully refused my feedback notes, believing it was not necessary to listen to an Asian American executive (on a series about Asian American

Dear IDA Community, February 6, 2022 marked IDA’s 40th anniversary. In 1982, filmmakers-turned-psychotherapists Linda Buzzell and Larry Saltzman, among many other filmmakers and allies, identified the need to start an organization "...to encourage and to honor the documentary arts and sciences; to promote nonfiction film and video; to support the efforts of nonfiction film and video makers all over the world." While the original mission of IDA is fundamentally unchanged today, the documentary world itself has profoundly transformed since the organization’s founding. As IDA enters its fourth

Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Start your year with the magical Aretha Franklin performing songs from her best-selling gospel album. Alan Elliott and Sydney Pollack’s Amazing Grace unearths Franklin’s 1972 performance at Los Angeles’ New Temple Missionary Baptist Church, and resurrects it into this breathtaking documentary that leaves us glowing in the aftermagic of the vision that is Aretha Franklin. Watch the film on YouTube. Over at the Criterion Channel, you can now watch a fantastic curation of the

I find the term “gatekeeper” discomforting. I cringe every time it is mentioned in reference to someone in a position of power in our industry. Even though I prefer the term “decision maker,” that is just playing around with semantics. I am a gatekeeper and I struggle with it. In the past two years, people of color have risen to positions of power across our documentary field—from public media, to platforms and studios, to nonprofit organizations like IDA. It would be fair to deduce that certain events expedited our rise to these positions. The intersectional reckonings of the past year, and