Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Today is International Working Women’s Day and while many companies will have us believe that it’s a day about spa coupons, roses and cute bracelets, it’s actually a day that demands that we look at women’s—all women’s—labor: how we acknowledge it, how we appreciate it, and—most importantly—how we compensate it. Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar’s 9to5: The Story of a Movement, available for viewing on PBS’ Independent Lens, is a documentation of the efforts of a group of
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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! Fork Films’ Abigail Disney pens a full-throated and sincere apology, in the wake of the criticism received by Jihad Rehab, a film on which Disney served as an executive producer. The responses have been painful, significant, bewildering, and deeply stressful for each of us in different ways. Adding to the weight of two years of pandemic trauma, a nation that seems to
FLEE wins Best Feature, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson wins Best Director for Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised), and A Broken House wins Best Short.
Dear Readers, As IDA commemorates 40 years in the documentary space, we’ve witnessed a tsunami of change around us, from the art to the business, to the transformation of the community to a front-and-center manifestation of what democracy truly looks like. And we’ve done our best to morph accordingly—and hopefully by riding the tsunami, rather than by chasing it. This is my third go-round in creating a commemorative issue, and I'm never one to replicate the territory I’ve trodded before. In fact, after saluting our 20th and 25th birthdays, I skipped the 30th and 35th toasts. But 40 sounds like
It has been deeply troubling to watch our peers in the Ukrainian film community have their lives and work unraveled by the horrors of war. The International Documentary Association (IDA) has joined over 500 film professionals and institutions from around the world in signing a letter in support of Ukrainian filmmakers’ effort to fight the toxic disinformation war waged by Russia and keep our hearts open to all Russians and Belarusians who resist Putin’s war. Please join IDA and support our colleagues in Ukraine by: Signing the letter, if you are a filmmaker, industry leader or on behalf of a
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. As the tragedy and the resistance both unfold in Ukraine this week, we offer a selection of documentaries, in solidarity with the struggle and the beauty of the Ukrainian people. The International Coalition For Filmmakers at Risk is putting together an emergency fund. Please consider making a donation here. Iryna Tsilyk’s The Earth Is Blue as an Orange, for which Viacheslav Tsvietkov won a 2020 IDA Documentary Award for Best Cinematography, follows single mother Hanna and her
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! In celebration of Black History Month, Farout Magazine’s Calum Russell writes about Marlon Riggs’ revolutionary documentary Tongues Untied. Whilst experimental, personal filmic essays are often reserved for the artistic expression of private exhibition, there are some that become simply too pertinent that they break free from their own secrecy. Such was the case for
Editor’s note: Black history in the US is marked by unimaginable pain and violence, but also by resilience, triumph, beauty, and a rich cultural history. The Black community’s struggle for equity continues today. As we honor and uplift Black voices, stories, and art for Black History Month this year, we’re excited to share a list of Docs to Watch in collaboration with the Black Association of Documentary Filmmakers West (BADWest). Joyce Guy, Officer and Treasurer of BAD West, shared a list of their members' picks for the top five Black docs of 2021—along with a few honorable mentions. The list
Since 2003, IDA has presented the Emerging Documentary Filmmaker Award to a filmmaker whose early work exhibits extraordinary promise and expands the possibilities of nonfiction storytelling. This year, IDA recognizes Cecilia Aldarondo, a director/producer from the Puerto Rican diaspora, whose innovative films emerge from the intersection of poetics and politics. She holds an MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths College and a PhD in Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society from the University of Minnesota. She is also an Assistant Professor of Art at Williams College. Through
What is the responsibility of programmers when it comes to discerning whether a film deserves the platform and profile of a major festival? In a recent opinion piece in The New York Times, Roxane Gay inadvertently spoke to this issue: “There’s a difference between censorship and curation,” she wrote. “When we are not free to express ourselves, when we can be thrown in jail or even lose our lives for speaking freely, that is censorship. When we say, as a society, that bigotry and misinformation are unacceptable, and that people who espouse those ideas don’t deserve access to significant