Dear Documentary Community, It has been about four months since I assumed the role of Executive Director of IDA. What excites me most about this position is the opportunity to help usher in a new era in the documentary field―a period committed to advocacy and equity, while continuing to embrace and celebrate all that we love about the form, the vast range of styles and perspectives, and its growing popularity with audiences around the world. For IDA, this means deepening the intent to further advance systemic change through all our programs. It informs how the grants team is currently
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Though abolishing the police is still viewed as a fringe idea here in America, what happened to a Black female student in South Carolina is exhibit A for doing just that, in at least one public institution. Pulled from her desk and dragged across the floor by a white officer, the shocking act was immortalized in a viral video back in 2015. Which in turn sparked outrage, but also changed lives. And one life in particular—that of healer-activist Vivian Anderson, who subsequently left New York City for Columbia, South Carolina. And there she stayed, single-handedly taking on the Herculean task of
One of the most powerful, timeless documentaries I've ever seen is When We Were Kings (1996), directed by Leon Gast and produced by Taylor Hackford and David Sonenberg, about the 1974 heavyweight championship match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, held in the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire). Since the documentary's release, several fiction films have been made on the same topic, but this is still the best film, across genres, that I've seen on the subject because it has something that the other films don't have: the real Muhammad Ali, up close and personal. What strikes
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. At IDA, we deeply mourn the passing of Melvin Van Peebles, the “the godfather of modern Black cinema.” Van Peebles was an actor, poet, artist, filmmaker and playwright, among other things. Celebrate his humbling legacy with filmmaker Joe Angio’s How to Eat Your Watermelon in White Company (and Enjoy It) on Amazon Prime. In Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue, filmmaker Jia Zhangke speaks to three authors who, like Jia, all hail from China’s Shanxi province. Through their
International Podcast Day is just around the corner! With more and more people tuning in to podcasts every year—especially as COVID-19 has kept us all at home for perhaps longer than we’d hoped—many of us count on podcast storytelling to stay both informed and entertained while taking our much-needed screen breaks. For this year’s Docs to Listen, we’ve put together a list of podcasts telling true tales of the past that have captured listeners’ attention: Bangalore in Stories (PodMacha Studios) “Made in Bangalore, for the world.” From snakes on the dance floor, to the first Asian heavy metal
BY Steven C. Beer & Neil J. Rosini
"From Pre-Pandemic Flashback to Post-Pandemic Visions of Documentary Distribution" was the long and winding title of a thankfully succinct, nuts-and-bolts discussion held during this year’s edition of CPH:DOX’s all-digital CPH:CONFERENCE. Occurring on the day designated REDISTRIBUTE:ECONOMY (the other four themes were REBUILD:DEMOCRACY, REPRESENTATION:POWER, REBELLION:CLIMATE and RESILIENCE:CULTURE), this insightful, all-white and primarily Scandinavian panel nevertheless included an array of diverse perspectives. And leading the talk was moderator Karolina Lidin of Norway’s Nordisk Film & TV
The overwhelming interest in the first Flaherty book and the comments received by MacDonald and Zimmermann from those who had actually "been there" painted a much fuller picture of the impact The Flaherty Seminar had made on them.
This is a tale of taking our old films and meeting the brave new world of distribution. A lot of ingenuity is called for to keep our films before the public. We want to share with fellow filmmakers what we did and what we learned about taking back your work and repurposing or repositioning it vis-a-vis the new market realities. I made the documentaries Berkeley in the Sixties (1990), an Academy Award nominee and a well-loved classic; A Fierce Green Fire (2012), a big-picture exploration of the environmental movement; and Evolution of Organic (2017), the story of organic agriculture told by
In 2018, a junior soccer team and their assistant coach went into a nearby cave in Thailand’s Chiang Rai province. It was a week before the cave was to close for monsoon season, but that year the rains came early, trapping them inside. The world spent the next 18 days watching a life-and-death rescue mission that involved 10,000 people and more than 100 divers. The Rescue tells this story in full detail. Directors Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin partnered with National Geographic, for whom they’d made the Oscar-winning Free Solo, which documents Alex Honnold’s attempt to climb El Capitan