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Conceived by a group of high school students in 1997, the Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival (Ji.hlava IDFF) marks its 25th anniversary this year, having emerged as Czech Republic’s most important documentary film festival and one of the largest such events in Central and Eastern Europe. Committed to its motto, "Thinking through Film," Jihlava has been championing creative documentary cinema, bringing to audiences some of the best artistic and socially relevant films that both question and reflect on the current state of the world. Over the past quarter-century, Ji.hlava IDFF has

Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. It’s the season for scary movies! Even as real life continues to be scarier than fictional tales of ghosts and ghouls, David Stubbs’ Belief: The Possession of Janet Moses manages to spook the most steel-hearted of audiences. The film follows the 22-year-old Janet Moses who, believed to be cursed, is made to undergo a most horrific exorcism ritual that later came to be known as “the Wainuiomata exorcism.” Watch it on Apple TV with the lights on. Although “The Rumble in the

Introducing the shortlist for Best Feature and Best Short categories at the 37th Annual IDA Documentary Awards.

Allison Carden Hanes is a primatologist and an environmental filmmaker. Her work focuses on human-wildlife conflict, community-based conservation, ecotourism, deforestation, and Indigenous rights. Her Masters study of disease transmission between mountain gorillas and tourists in Uganda at Oxford Brookes University inspired her journey into filmmaking and Gorilla Trekking Film (Uganda). She also has a decade of experience in the nonprofit world and runs a women-led production company, One Health Productions. Hanes’ mixed European and Filipino heritage lends her a unique sense of empathy with

Diane Weyermann left us last week, but what she left behind—a staggering body of work that she oversaw, that has transformed the conversations on so many social issues; a formidable documentary program at Sundance; the preeminence of Participant Media as an impact strategist—has inspired the community to share their memories of her, and express their gratitude for her indefatigable fusion of passion, wisdom, verve and kindness that she brought to the hundreds of films and filmmakers she worked with. Diane traveled many thousands of miles in her career, seeking out the next wave of

"When I look from my chair in the edit room, when I’m at a celebration, I’m very troubled by what I see. The collection of the material that is us, I think, is not going to tell the story we think we’re trying to tell when it comes to race," the late editor Lewis Erskine said during his speech at the Karen Schmeer Fellowship’s Art of Editing Lunch at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival. "I want to know if you see what I see when I look at this community. I want to know if you see how white we are as a community—how few people of color, how few Black people [make up this community]. Not just [those

How do you make nostalgia visible? Or a house you only dream about? It took Óscar Molina a long time in the editing room to answer those questions. But ultimately he did so in the opening sequence of La Casa de Mama Icha, his documentary about a migrant grandmother’s homecoming. Molina has been a migrant himself. After graduating from journalism school in Colombia, he moved to Japan to do factory work. There he befriended many immigrants from around the world who shared the same dream: send enough money home to build a house in their native land with those remittances. By the time he moved to

Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. October is Filipino American History Month. Here at IDA we’re forever in awe of our Filipino American colleagues who continue to make our worlds richer with their stories. We are also big fans of Maria Ressa, who was the recipient of our 2020 Truth to Power Award, and is now a Nobel Peace Prize laureate! This week’s Screen Time is dedicated to Ressa, her amazing colleagues at the Philippines-based online news network Rappler, and to all our other Filipino colleagues. Make

Completing and promoting a film under "normal" circumstances is difficult enough, but imagine the impossibility of pulling this off in the midst of a pandemic! That’s exactly what our IDA Documentary Screening Series grantees managed to do. This year, IDA supported 11 filmmakers from historically underrepresented communities through its in-kind grants, in an effort to help minimize the financial costs associated with pursuing a film awards campaign, and support a more equitable documentary culture. Here is a short conversation with some of our 2020-2021 grantees. What was the most challenging

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 New York Times’ Devika Girish interviews Haile Gerima about his long-standing rejection of the larger Hollywood industry. Haile Gerima doesn’t hold back when it comes to his thoughts on Hollywood. The power games of movie producers and distributors are "anti-cinema," he put it recently. The three-act structure is akin to "fascism"—it “numbs, makes stories