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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! Sahar Driver and Sonya Childress, writing for Filmmaker Magazine, discuss the evolution of documentaries and their power to instigate real social change, citing filmmaker Chelsea Hernandez, one of IDA’s 2022 Logan Elevate grantees, of being successful in that. The documentary impact enterprise has always focused on the power of particular films to build understanding

When opening her masterclass at Visions du Réel in Switzerland last April, filmmaker Kirsten Johnson named each member of the technical crew on set. “What I often find upsetting with cinema is that we forget to acknowledge all the people it takes to make these moments together.” Anyone who has worked in a film festival will also tell you that a festival’s “magic” is a lot of collective labor. It is the often invisibilized workforce that allows others to gather in celebration of cinema, and it is their labor that produces the cultural capital underlying every film festival. Twelve years ago

Back in 2019—before COVID-19, before the global reckoning on race and racial justice, before January 6, 2021 quickened and amplified the attack-in-progress on democracy—filmmaker Katerina Cizek and educator/author William Uricchio released Collective Wisdom, a field study report produced at Co-Creation Studio at MIT Open Documentary Lab. Cizek, the artistic director/co-founder/executive producer of Co-Creation Studio, and Uricchio, Professor of Comparative Media Studies at MIT and founder/principal investigator of MIT Open Documentary Lab and Co-Creation Studio, researched the field for

Screen Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. There is no rulebook for documentaries, and the form’s beauty derives itself from the infinite creative decisions filmmakers make when trying to artfully capture a narrative. This week’s selection highlights new releases that dont just tell a story, but question and redefine the documentary form as they present poetic visuals that captivate us and draw us in. All of these films have a dreamy filter to them, as they capture the ethereal in reality, however rough that

The 11th annual BlackStar Film Festival was back at the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Live Arts at the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts with a 76-film lineup representing 27 countries. The hybrid festival showcased many premieres including 16 world, eight North American, 12 East Coast, eight US and 25 Philadelphia premieres. The overall programming featured in-person and online screenings, live performances and events, and panels. BlackStar is known for honing in on Philadelphia’s legacy as a historically Black city and celebrating Black, Brown, and Indigenous filmmakers and

When Yolŋu filmmaker Ishmael Marika first found a 1970s recording of his grandfather speaking to his fathers as a small child, he was overwhelmed. He had never met his grandfather, but the recording couldn’t have come at a better time. Marika’s fathers 1 were heavily involved in leadership decisions for the community at the time, and the discussions had been tense. The fathers were starting to disagree, and tensions had sprung up that threatened to impact the community’s leadership unity. Marika burned a copy of the recording and walked it into the meeting and pressed play. His grandfather's

Dear Readers, As the community-wide conversation has, over the past several years, focused on decolonization, accountability, and ownership, we at Documentary have helped continue that conversation, calling attention to under-reported collectives around the world who are transforming what the documentary form ought to be, and how it ought to be seen and experienced. And so, the Summer 2022 issue decenters what has for so long served as the foci—in practice, in gatekeeping, in engagement—and brings the periphery and circumference to the core. Two ensembles that have taken artistic matters into

We’re in a moment in the world, and in the documentary field, where it’s become exceedingly clear that the dominant ways of working are not serving us well, and instead are perpetuating real harm. Current-day societal crises are mirrored in oppressive and extractive practices that have dominated the documentary industry its entire history. At Working Films, we have been asking ourselves honest and reflective questions about leadership and the ways power are held in our organization, including whether or not two white women should lead a documentary impact organization. To ensure that we don’t

Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Community is a universal necessity often taken for granted. Though lives are heavily influenced by those in close proximity, oftentimes struggles to feel individual. These documentaries are a reminder of the power of community and how interconnected our worlds are. From a New Orleans native and first-time filmmaker Edward Buckle comes Katrina Babies, an intimate look at the children who were affected by Hurricane Katrina. “In America, especially during disasters, Black

During the 2022 Academy Awards season, now overshadowed by the infamous slap, an Indian film became the first documentary from the country to get a nomination. Directed by Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh, Writing with Fire (2021) focuses on Khabar Lahariya, a rural media outlet run by Dalit women. Dalits are at the bottom of the country's brutal caste system, one of the oldest social hierarchies in the world. The film, which took five years to make, won several international awards, including an Audience Award and a Special Jury Award at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. Shortly before the Oscar