Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Forty years ago, Vincent Chin—a young Chinese American man—was murdered by a white American autoworker who went on to confess but never served any time. Christine Choy and Renee Tajima-Peña’s Oscar-nominated and IDA Documentary Award-winning Who Killed Vincent Chin? was released in 1987 and continues to raise questions about race, the American legal system, and justice in ways that remain ever-pertinent and relevant. Catch the film as it plays on POV, as a part of a special
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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! Over at IndieWire, Eric Kohn questions the ways film festivals have been treating their programmers. “While the industry relies on programmers, they have never been treated as more disposable. What would it take to change that?” he asks. Meanwhile, so many programmers stitch together their profession in piecemeal that festivals build their budgets around the notion
By Bedatri D.Choudhury AND Tom White Tom White: The Hot Docs Canadian Documentary Film Festival reclaimed its in-person status after a three-year, pandemic-fueled hiatus. We had the fortune to attend the Toronto-based confab, and we reacquainted ourselves with that high-octane festival vibe: the thrill of engaging with art on the big screen, the stimulating energy of Q&As and sessions, and the invigorating jolt of impromptu conversations with old and new friends. A month into spring, Toronto still felt like winter, and the brisk walks from the hotel to the Varsity Cineplex, and the TIFF Bell
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. It’s Pride Month here in the US, and while we celebrate the work and art of our queer colleagues all year, we wanted to use this week’s Screen Time to showcase some of our favorite documentaries on queer participants, down the ages. We hope these films bring out the intersectionality and the many joys and struggles of living as queer people in this country. Back in 2012, David France, who reported extensively on the AIDS crisis as a journalist, made How to Survive a Plague to
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! Marking the 50th anniversary of Okinawa Prefecture officially reverting from American to Japanese control, Japan Society in New York programmed the recently-concluded “Okinawa in Focus” series. Hyperallergic’s Dan Schindel delves deeper. The NDU’s two documentaries in the program, 1971’s Motoshinkakarannu and 1973’s Asia is One, bookend the Okinawan reversion, with
The International Documentary Association (IDA) announced the appointment of three new members to its Board of Directors.
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Two years since George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis by police officers, the documentary Police on Trial—produced by FRONTLINE in partnership with Star Tribune and CAAM—explores this “pivotal event in the history of race and policing in America.” Directed by Mike Shum and produced by Shum and Marcia Robiou, the documentary follows George Floyd’s murder and Derek Chauvin’s subsequent conviction, and continues to highlight the ongoing demand for police accountability and
It has been a devastating month for us reeling from gun violence in the US. The most recent wave of horrifying shootings targeting Black Americans and young children has many asking, “When will this end?” Yet, the topic of gun control in the US still remains taboo for many. As with many issues, we look to documentaries to give us a deeper understanding of how we got here and what's next. This blog explores eight documentaries that discuss the topic of guns and America, taking a specific look at the activists on the frontlines fighting back against gun violence and pushing for comprehensive gun
For over four decades, 20,000 feet of 16mm-shot film sat untouched in the San Francisco home of lifetime Chinatown resident Reverend Harry Chuck. The footage was supposed to serve as the basis for Chuck’s sweeping graduate thesis, “Chinatown San Francisco: A Community in Transition.” But then life invariably got in the way, and the epic cinematic history of one marginalized community’s generational struggles—‘60s-radicalized youth vs. their “keep your head down” elders raised under the threat of the Chinese Exclusion Act—was never completed. Until now. With the help of son/co-director and
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. We at IDA are heartbroken at the passing of Heddy Honigmann, documentarian extraordinaire and a true master of the form. As big fans and admirers, we are dedicating this week’s Screen Time to celebrate her and her art. Honigmann’s Buddy takes an unsentimental look at six canine and human pairs to “reveal what’s really given and received.” Many critics have noted the ease with which the filmmaker would open people up to trust her and the camera. "I don't do interviews. I make