Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. To continue our celebration of documentaries around Hispanic heritage, we wanted to make sure you’ve watched María José Cuevas’s Bellas de Noche. An exploration of Mexico’s burlesque culture of the 1970s and 1980s, the documentary, playing on Netflix, introduces us to fascinating protagonists who were former showgirls living up the disco lifestyle. In Lali Houghton’s Dead Woman’s Pass, join Maxi Manuttupa, a single mother from Cusco, Peru, and an Indigenous woman, who helps
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Iliana Sosa is a documentary and narrative fiction filmmaker based in Austin, Texas. Her documentary short An Uncertain Future premiered at the 2018 SXSW Film Festival, where it won a Jury Award for Best Texas Short. She was a Berlinale Talents participant and the recipient of a Firelight Media Impact Producer Fellowship, and was named a 2018-2019 Sundance Institute Development Fellow with her first feature documentary, What We Leave Behind (Lo que dejamos atrás). Iliana has participated in the 2019 True/False Catapult Retreat, the 2020 IFP Documentary Lab, and the Jacob Burns Residency with
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! IndieWire’s Eric Kohn speaks to former TIFF Director Piers Handling, who recalls having to decide whether he’d cancel the rest of the festival after the news of 9/11 reached him and his team. The reality didn’t really set in until right after the towers fell. I was watching TV with a group of staffers in the press office at the Four Seasons Hotel. Of course we were
In a time of uncertainty, there is one thing that COVID-19 made clear: hybrid film festivals are the wave of the future. On August 3, Sundance Festival Director Tabitha Jackson announced that Utah will no longer be the sole home to the Sundance Film Festival. Instead, the next incarnation of Sundance will take place from January 20–30, 2022—not only in Park City, Salt Lake City and the Sundance Mountain Resort, but also digitally via 10 satellite partners stationed across the United States. And while in-person screenings in Utah will happen next year, doors will only be open to those who have
Letting Amazon buy MGM studios would be bad for independent filmmakers, and the people who love their films. It could make today’s bad situation worse. The proposed merger is before the Federal Trade Commission, now headed by Lina Khan, a fierce supporter of revitalizing antitrust enforcement. Now, the Strategic Organizing Center, a major labor coalition, has submitted a letter to the FTC explaining why it is a bad idea. The International Documentary Association contributed knowledge to the letter, as did I, as well as other scholars, distributors, filmmakers and producers. Here’s why every
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Maya Cade, who works as an Audience Strategist at The Criterion Collection, has painstakingly pulled together a collection of Black films made between 1915 and 1979, that are currently streaming. It's called the Black Film Archive and as it says on the website, “Every word on Black Film Archive is thoroughly researched and lovingly written by her.” It is a treasure trove and also a testament to how limited our viewing habits are. Thanks to Cade, changing that is easier than
It is no secret that the Fourth Estate has been under attack in recent years. Journalism, once perceived as a noble profession, has been dragged through the muck by right-wing pundits and politicians, its integrity and efficacy called into question by those with little or no integrity of their own. Enter the summer of 2018, when an unlikely and unexpected ally emerged: Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist bequeathed $20 million to the Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. Newmark was quoted as saying: “In this time, when trustworthy news is under attack
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 interviews TIFF’s documentary programmer, Thom Powers, and other filmmakers with films in this year’s lineup. While many docs submitted for consideration this year were pandemic-related, Powers decided to keep the lineup COVID-free. “I felt like we had a great film about COVID last year in 76 Days” says Powers. “The challenge for films about
For over four weeks, a small team of colleagues from the D-Word online community has been frantically working to help our list of 75 Afghan nationals; some are documentary professionals, some are extremely high-risk young people, some are single women who have worked in TV journalism and women’s rights, and some are folks who collaborated closely with the US and are in deep danger. Over these four weeks, many of us have worked 18-hour days without a break to build pathways of aid. We have become deeply versed in the challenges, the evacuation options, the legal processes. We count as new
Each year, the Outfest Los Angeles LGBTQ film festival hosts some of the best queer and transgender cinema in the world. It’s a chance to catch films that were misunderstood by straight programmers or rejected by festivals because they were “niche.” But more than any of that, festivals like Outfest provide a much-needed space for community, both for filmmakers and enthusiasts. This year, more than ever, we needed this space to celebrate the stories that don’t fit neatly in a box and reject straight sensibilities. Erased Histories and Reframing Narratives Each year a new powerful slate of