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! American Documentary’s new ED, Erika Dilday, speaks to Variety’s Addie Morfoot about representation, POV, PBS and beyond. I don’t want to just count numbers. I really don’t. I want us to dig deeper. I want us to try harder. We owe a debt to our audiences to bring them content that stretches them, that enriches them and that sometimes will make them a little
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(Note: Portions of this writing are excerpted directly from the full report (global findings) as well as the "15 Key Findings" report based on US respondents, co-authored with Bill Harder. Both reports and downloadable graphs are available at cmsimpact.org) To say the documentary industry and its marketplace are changing is an understatement. In the streaming media age, we’ve never experienced so many platforms and outlets for audiences to find and view nonfiction storytelling. It’s an exciting time, from exploring genres to experimenting with new artistic ideas. In this media frenzy moment
Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, now in its 24th year, has become a notable stop on the circuit, not least for its homey welcome to filmmakers, its ease of navigation, its events, and its wealth of carefully curated offerings. This virtual, pandemic version was a valiant effort to maximize the possible and dispense with what could not be substituted. It featured an eclectic mix of coming-soon-to-a-streamer-near-you work, slow cinema, and the downright experimental. As Artistic Director Sadie Tillery explained, this meant shrinking the fest strategically. The retrospective strands
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. For your perfect post-July 4th screening, join comedian/journalist CJ Hunt as he sets out to document the New Orleans City Council’s vote to remove four Confederate monuments. His new documentary, The Neutral Ground, produced by Darcy McKinnon, took shape after Hunt’s shoot and the Council’s decision were halted by opposition and death threats. The film, playing on PBS’ POV, sets forth a conversation on racism, America and its foundational white supremacy. If you’re feeling
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! Variety ’s Addie Morfoot interviews IDA’s Executive Director Rick Perez, who renews his call for diverse voices in the documentary space. The question of, ‘Do we take a risk?’ would come up. And I would intentionally reverse that question by saying, ‘How can we invest in this filmmaker?’ Because that’s quite a different idea — that we are nurturing and cultivating as
Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) is the directorial debut of Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson about the Harlem Cultural Festival of 1969, which came to be known as "Black Woodstock." Six weeks. Six free concerts. 300,000 people. A feast for the soul, the concert featured otherworldly performances by Sly and the Family Stone, Stevie Wonder, Gladys Knight & the Pips, the Staples Singers, Mahalia Jackson, B.B. King, and Nina Simone, among other legendary artists. The footage from the Harlem Cultural Festival had lain dormant in a basement in New York; the late filmmaker
My queerness is the foundation of my creativity, political orientation and values. Being queer means being free and centering liberation in all actions and interactions. As a producer, every film I make is queer—even if it doesn’t center queer lives on screen. In this way, queer producing means centering liberation in all aspects of filmmaking: casting participants, crew and funder contracts, hiring, financial models, production, editing, publicity, sales and impact. When I talk about Multitude Films as a queer-led team, it doesn’t only mean that our three principal producers (myself, Anya
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. If you need to transport yourself to somewhere cooler amidst this hot summer we suggest heading to the theaters (only if you feel safe to do so) and watching Óskar Páll Sveinsson’s Against the Current. Follow the awesome Veiga Grétarsdóttir’s 103-days-long adventure as she becomes the first person in the world to attempt to kayak over 2,000 kilometers around Iceland, counter-clockwise and "against the current." This is a journey that is perhaps a little less difficult than
"On the 7th of August 1941, in the city of Calcutta, a man died," begins Satyajit Ray’s 1961 documentary Rabindranath Tagore (1961). The eponymous Bengali polymath—the "man" in question—was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature and assumes a God-like spectre over the cultural conscience of Bengalis all over the world. As does Ray—the first Indian to ever win an Honorary Academy Award, in 1992. He directed 36 films, authored books, scored music, sketched, invented fonts, and wrote essays on film criticism, among other things. Lesser known among the many hats he donned, Ray
Elodie Edjang is a documentary story consultant and cinematographer from Atlanta, Georgia. She holds an MFA in Documentary Media from Northwestern University and earned a BA in Anthropology and a BAJ in Advertising from the University of Georgia. She is currently directing a short documentary about Kartemquin Films co-founder Gordon Quinn and working on an IDA fiscally-sponsored project, Queer Christians (working title), a feature-length documentary about queer Christian women of color. Elodie is a 2019 NeXt Doc Fellow and currently serves on the mentorship committee for the Alliance of