I've been doing quite a bit of chairing lately. Early in March I was chair of the Directors Guild of America's documentary committee, which gave its award to Steve James for Hoop Dreams. A month earlier, I chaired the blue ribbon panel for Toronto's documentary festival, called Hot Docs. It was interesting to see that the organizing committee divided the festival into two sections: one for straight documentaries and another for journalistic documentaries made for television. It is a difference between apples and mushrooms. One taste of TV's flashing, jazzy opening teases, the palaver of the
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For five months in 1989 an abandoned newspaper office in Manchester, England, was taken over by a Granada TV film crew in pursuit of a sombre assignment. The object of the exercise was to make a 90-minute drama documentary showing the events leading up to the destruction of Pan Am Flight 103 over Scotland on December 21, 1988, with the loss of 270 lives. Why Lockerbie?, or The Tragedy of Flight 103 as it was called in the States, is the la rest work of Leslie Woodhead, one of Britain's most noted documentary filmmakers. Woodhead joined Granada TV directly after graduating from Cambridge in
COMPLAINTS OF A DUTIFUL DAUGHTER Producer, Director, and Writer: Deborah Hoffmann Cinematography: Frances Reid Editors: Jennifer Chinlund and Deborah Hoffmann Music: Mary Watkins Distributor: Women Make Movies With profound insight and a healthy dose of visual and verbal levity, the personal documentary Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter chronicles the progressive stages of a mother's Alzheimer's disease and the evolving response of the daughter—who is also the filmmaker—to the illness. The desire to cure the incurable—to set right her mother's confusion and forgetfulness, to temper her mother's
Documentaries at this year's Berlin International Film Festival, which was held February 9-20, were most in evidence at the International Forum of Young Cinema, headed by Ulrich Gregor, who is also co-director (with Moritz de Hadeln) of the entire festival. Another section, Panorama, headed by Wieland Speck, is always generous with time for documentaries, with special attention to low-budget iconoclastic swingers, god bless 'em. Berlin's video sidebar also included documentaries, notably those of activist Jon Alpert, who heads New York's Downtown Community Television. Perhaps 200 international
A little-known chapter in documentary history is that of Japan's pre-World War II proletarian film movement. The organization at the core of this movement was the Proletarian Film League of Japan, known as Prokino for short. The founding meeting for the group was in 1929, and it was active for about five years after that. But these facts were little known after the war, let alone before it, and rarely appeared even in the histories written by scholars of Japanese film. In the 1960s there were some, particularly young activists and filmmakers, who wanted to take up Prokino's work, and people
Like many of you who make documentaries for television, I thought that the advent of multiple channels would lead to a golden age of nonfiction filmmaking. (Someone has to fill up all that time). In one sense there is more work, but in most cases, the minimal budgets that are offered make it quite a struggle to create quality work. One of the reasons for these sparse budgets was made clear by Stan Moger, an IDA trustee and the president of SFM Entertainment, a division of the nation's largest independent media-buying organization, as he shared audience data with me. As always, budgets reflect
A little-known chapter in documentary history is that of Japan's pre-World War II proletarian film movement. The organization at the core of this movement was the Proletarian Film League of Japan, known as Prokino for short. The founding meeting for the group was in 1929, and it was active for about five years after that. But these facts were little known after the war, let alone before it, and rarely appeared even in the histories written by scholars of Japanese film. In the 1960s there were some, particularly young activists and filmmakers, who wanted to take up Prokino's work, and people
"When Strangers Meet" was the motto of the 14th Hawaii International Film Festival, held November 4-17, 1994, in Oahu, Maui, Hawaii, and neighboring islands. At least it must have appeared that way when, following an evening of screenings and a morning dive trip, I lumbered out of the sea with clumsy flippers and a dangling snorkel to congratulate Native American filmmaker Victor Masayesva Jr. while simultaneously dripping salt water on the blanket of Museum of Modern Art film curator Sally Berger. Such is the casual nature of this unique event. As a producer, along with my partner Matthew
New technologies such as digital imaging, interactive movies and television, TV on demand, interactive kiosks, virtual reality, CD-ROM, and CD-I are opening up a new relationship between Hollywood and Silicon Valley. The Hollywood-based Women in Film's New Technologies Council organized a three part series of interactive seminars to showcase some of the opportunities for creative professionals that are being created as a result of this entertainment and computer industry marriage. The first seminar, "Creating an Interactive Project," held last May, began with a case study of an interactive
It's nice to see that Hoop Dreams (one of the 1994 IDA Distinguished Documentary Achievement Award winners) has made almost every "best ten" list of movies this year. Not only that, but quite a few critics, like Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times, think it's the best picture of the year. According to Turan, " Hoop Dreams is as out and out entertaining as any film of the year, and it offers more substance than almost any that could be named....There is yet another reason to anoint Hoop Dreams, and that is to call attention to the critical mass of exceptional documentaries that visited Los