Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Frontline’s Afghanistan Undercover, which exposes the reality of women living under Taliban rule, airs August 9. Correspondent Ramita Navai shares stories of not only women facing punishments from Taliban officials, but the women activists fighting to rescue them. Watch the documentary on PBS. Camilla Nielsson’s President follows the complexities behind the test for political power in Zimbabwe in the 2018 general election. As Nelson Chamisma challenges current president
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BY Tom White & Bedatri D. Choudhury
Storytelling, and its advancements, has mostly been in the pursuit of making things seem more and more real, to immerse the listener in an experience that seems lived, to have them believe what they see on a screen is actually happening, or can happen. Artworks using Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality often succeed in breaking the fabled fourth wall and helping audiences embody the experience of going through what is on display. Naturally enough, the documentary form—which often seeks to create empathy in viewers—finds a home within these mediums, moving away from traditional 2D formats
Dear Documentary Community, Just over a year ago, I began my tenure as IDA’s first Latinx executive director. I accepted the position hoping to address the systemic inequities and biases that undermine the documentary industry. But this endeavor was interrupted by numerous staff resignations, causing turmoil and confusion in the larger community. I humbly admit that during this period, the board and I struggled to effectively communicate to the community what was happening. This was due to the legal constraints involving confidential personnel matters. I also regret that I did not effectively
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Eefje Blankevoort and Els van Driel’s feature documentary Shadow Game shares the reality facing immigrants, who flee from war-torn homes. The documentary follows teenagers leaving European countries, as they “travel through a shadow world of minefields, bears, fast-flowing rivers, smugglers and border guards, desperately trying to win what they call ‘The Game.’” Watch the film on True Story and see the lengths that these teenagers will go to in pursuit of a better life. A
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! Now Then’s community correspondent and editor Philippa Willitts evaluates how accessible the recently concluded Sheffield DocFest was. In the article, Willits concludes that “all of the barriers [they] faced were avoidable.” I explained that saying somewhere “has disabled toilets” is not adequate accessibility information, that last-minute venue changes have a
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Mark Moormann’s documentary The Day the Music Died: The Story of Don McLean's “American Pie” marks the story of the eponymous song that is considered “one of the great musical touchstones of the 20th century,” 50 years after its release. As Don McLean explains the story and history behind the iconic song, we see a recounting of his life and career, and many of those whose lives were touched by the song. Watch the film on Paramount+ Speaking of music documentaries, make sure
Directors/producers Lisa Riordan Seville and Zara Katz came to their first documentary project, A Woman on the Outside, through separate, but converging, career paths. Seville, an award-winning investigative journalist in both broadcast and print platforms, and Katz, a photo editor, producer and curator for NBCnews.com, The New York Times, The Guardian and other outlets, collaborated in 2014 on the Instagram project Everyday Incarceration, which examined 40 years of mass incarceration in the US prison industrial complex. The project garnered attention online, as well as from such museums as
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home.
There is something called the Paris Syndrome, under which, tourists—mostly Japanese and eastern Asian tourists—experience a deep sense of dismay and disappointment when they visit the city of Paris, because what they see doesn’t quite live up to the expectations they had had of the city. Watching Alice Diop’s documentaries does the opposite for me. They reveal something I have never known about Paris and its suburbs. And it leaves me in awe. Diop, who made her first film, La Tour du Monde, in 2005, was born to Senegalese immigrants and grew up in the banlieues—the suburbs of Paris. The world