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! The New York Review’s Caroline Fraser writes an essay on the genre of true crime and people’s love for it. Fraser refers to several podcasts and documentaries in this engrossing read. Theories have attempted to explain the appeal. There’s the desire to see justice done, the satisfaction of solving mysteries, the need to allay fear by studying crimes, lest they happen
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IDA is proud to officially announce an open call for In-kind IDA Documentary Screening Series Grants. During the 20-21 events season, we hosted screenings and provided advertising support to five independent BIPOC filmmakers. This year, we are expanding our support to historically excluded communities. Our goal is to minimize the financial burdens associated with pursuing a film awards campaign. Learn more about how we are changing our Screening Series to better reflect our mission of building a more equitable documentary culture. Grant Amount IDA will provide ten filmmakers with an in-kind
On September 13, 2013, the Constitutional Court of the Dominican Republic ruled that children born to non-citizens in the country since 1929 are not, and have never been, citizens of the Dominican Republic. Imagine waking up one morning in your birthplace, and your citizenship and connection to the only country you know as yours is revoked. You’d have no access to your passport, birth certificate or any other form of identification. In the moment, this decision caused significant regional and international uproar. Human-rights defenders exposed the ruling as state-sanctioned racist apartheid
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Chris Smith’s cult-favorite documentary American Movie is now streaming on the Criterion Channel. Described as "bizarre, comical, and quintessentially American," this film is a tale of "ambition, obsession, excess, and one man’s pursuit of the American dream." James Blagden and Roni Moore’s Midnight in Paris is now available on Youtube after screening at MoMA, Metrograph, True/False and more. The documentary follows a few teenagers in Flint, Michigan, during the lead-up to
By ANSELM BEACH and Patricia Aufderheide AFI Docs, held in Washington, DC, but organized out of AFI’s Los Angeles office, strives to create a menu that would appeal to politically obsessed Washingtonians and area filmmakers. Largely unconcerned with premieres, AFI Docs leans toward handsomely produced work, big issues, and synergies with its partners. This year, public TV was back as usual, and so were a wide collection of media companies (Apple+, as lead sponsor, plus HBO, Netflix, NatGeo, as well as journalistic outlets). The Audience Award went to the captivating Storm Lake, by Jerry Risius
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! Close on the heels of the renewed media interest in Chicago’s (and the world’s, by extension) climate change crisis, Chicago Tribune’s Nina Metz draws out a game plan that involves paying heed to documentaries. Documentaries can help us better understand what’s happening around us and Fire in Paradise, also from 2019, is also worth a look. The film, which is on
"You never forget your first time seeing a whale," director Joshua Zeman says in The Loneliest Whale: The Search for 52. His was as a kid working on a sailing ship. But the impetus behind this documentary came years later, after he read about a solitary whale that couldn’t communicate because his call was at a different frequency from every other whale: 52 hertz. Dubbed 52, he’d been roaming the ocean for decades, his song unanswered. Though heard on hydrophones, 52 had never been visually spotted by scientists. Zeman decided to try. Through Kickstarter, he raised enough money for a seven-day
When the IDA Documentary Screening Series launched eight years ago in place of its annual DocuWeeks™ theatrical showcase, the goal was to present the most critically acclaimed documentaries of the year to awards voters and IDA members in both Los Angeles and New York City. While the purpose and goal of the Screening Series has not changed since its inception, the program has grown dramatically over the years. We went from screening 15 films in 2014 to nearly 50 films over four months in 2019. This enormous industry growth has led to an increasingly expensive and complex awards campaign model
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Carole Roussopoulos was the first woman in France to purchase a lightweight Sony Portapak camera. As a result, she and her feminist comrades were able to film the feminist agitation that took over the country post-May 1968. Along with colleagues like the French actor Delphine Seyrig, Roussopoulos made films that criticized the mainstream and called out the general patriarchal society. Catch a curation of some of these films on MUBI, as a part of their new special program
Editor’s Note: The following is a translation of Kristal Sotomayor’s article from the Summer 2020 issue, about the Puerto Rican documentary community. Thanks very much to Amaya Garcia for the translation. Read in English Parte 1: La Isla antes de María "Puerto Rico es una isla pequeña en un limbo político." Así describe la situación política de la isla caribeña la documentalista y directora del filme Ser grande, Karen Rossi. Tras décadas de trabajo como cineasta independiente, Rossi ha sido testigo de los cambios que ha experimentado la industria cinematográfica en la Isla. "Cuando invitamos a