Media attention is short-lived and fickle, with incessant news waves and tweets washing over us every day, perpetually snatching away our focus from the most pressing issue of our time—climate change. The year 2019 was a hopeful one for climate activism, and it was a big one for environmental reporting on massive protests around the world. But the critical focus on the climate crisis would soon be overshadowed by the COVID-19 global health emergency. Yet, as many scientists and activists have concurred, the climate crisis is not going away; it’s taking on a new urgency, especially in light of
Latest Posts
Tamana Ayazi and Marcel Mettelsiefen’s In Her Hands follow the unlikeliest of protagonists, with a backstory that practically begs for Hollywood to come calling. (Though Hilary Rodham Clinton and Chelsea Clinton, co-founders of HiddenLight Productions and the film’s EPs, did answer the call.) While still in her 20s, Zarifa Ghafari became one of Afghanistan’s first female mayors and the youngest to ever hold that job. And she was appointed by the recently deposed President Ashraf Ghani to the leadership role—not in relatively tolerant Kabul, but in Maidan Shahr, in the conservative province of
With the festival circuit continuing to reclaim its preeminence in the in-person space—and opening up its virtual space to the stay-at-homers—the final third of the year, known to the cognoscenti as Awards Season, roared into being like it was 2019. With the power quartet of Telluride, Toronto, Venice and New York reclaiming September—along with the formidable nonfiction troika of Camden, Gotham Week and Getting Real—the cinema world was chasing the COVID clouds away. The Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) returned to its full glory, and although I caught the coronavirus there, my
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! The Jihad Rehab conversation continues with an article by Moustafa Bayoumi from The Nation. Bayoumi explains that the questioning of the ethics and execution of the film dates back a few years, and that the issue is not the fact that a white, non-Muslim woman made the film, but rather that filmmaker Meg Smaker put participants in dangerous and incriminating situations
Los Angeles, CA – The International Documentary Association (IDA) announced the nominations in 18 categories for the 38th annual IDA Documentary Awards, which will be held on December 10, 2022, at the Paramount Theater on the Paramount Studios Lot in Los Angeles.
Noriaki Tsuchimoto is a towering figure in Japanese documentary cinema, but only known by name and reputation in the West. Beyond festival screenings, his films rarely show here. That is about to change, however. Following a program held at the Open City Documentary Festival in London, the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, New York will host a retrospective dedicated to Tsuchimoto’s work; the series runs from November 12-27. Before this rare opportunity occurs, it’s time to take a hard look at just what makes his documentaries special. With a body of work spanning six decades and over 100
The only film festival in the US dedicated to investigative storytelling, Double Exposure Film Festival returned this year for a hybrid eighth edition. This year’s festival included a lineup of 11 feature films and 15 symposium panels, all taking place in Washington, DC. A selection of films was available on their online screening platform, while all the symposium panels were livestreamed for virtual attendance. Double Exposure Film Festival is known for their focus on the interconnectedness between journalism and documentary as a source of seeking out and exposing the truth for the betterment
Screen Time Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. It’s Election Day in the US, so in the voting spirit, most of these documentaries in this week’s Screen Time delve into the struggles and challenges of voting—the harm of gerrymandering to the vulnerability of the electoral system. The Emmy-nominated documentary The Great Hack, from Karim Amer and Jehane Noujaim, investigates how the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica used data to influence people’s perspectives on political issues prior to the 2016
Editor’s Note: At the Doc Congress that SFFILM presented as part of its Doc Stories this past week, Carrie Lozano, Sundance Institute’s Director of Documentary Film and Artists Program, delivered a keynote address to the community on collaboration, which we are sharing with you. Hello everyone! It’s amazing to be in this room with all of you, physically and virtually. Thank you to SFFILM for inviting me here today. I like to acknowledge that I was the copyeditor for the San Francisco International Film Festival in 1999. It was my first paid gig in the industry, and ever since, I’ve been in a
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! PBS’s Julia Ingram and Putin’s War at Home director and producer Gesbeen Mohammad and producer Vasiliy Kolotilov discuss how the Frontline documentary highlights the opposition to war in Ukraine within Russia. This was challenging, as in Russia, opposition to the war can result in 10 to 15 years of imprisonment. Because of this, Mohammad and Kolotilov felt it was