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Yoruba Richen is an award-winning documentary filmmaker whose work has been featured on PBS, New York Times Op-Docs, FRONTLINE Digital, New York Magazine’s website - The Cut, The Atlantic, and Field of Vision. Her latest film, How It Feels To Be Free, premiered on PBS’ American Masters in January 2021. Her other recent work includes The New York Times Presents: The Killing of Breonna Taylor, which premiered on FX and Hulu, and The Sit In: Harry Belafonte Hosts the Tonight Show, one of the first documentaries to premiere on Peacock; both films were recently nominated for NAACP Image Awards. Her

Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Premiering February 22 on Independent Lens is Melissa Haizlip’s Mr. SOUL!, which won the 2018 IDA Documentary Award for Best Music Documentary. The film celebrates the public television variety show SOUL!, which ran from 1968 to 1973, as one of the premier showcases for the greatest figures in Black literature, poetry, music and politics. Under the visionary guidance of producer/host Ellis Haizlip (the filmmaker’s uncle), SOUL! was the first national show to provide expanded

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! Writing for Immerse, Ngozi Nwadiogbu reports on the "Brown Girls and the New Frontier" panel at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. For us, there were a couple of things that were specifically important to acknowledge, as those who have suffered from the racial caste system. One is not just the violence that occurs or has occurred over the last 400 years across the

In 2015, the Sundance Institute launched a new initiative to support “inventive artistic practice” in documentary called Art of Nonfiction. After fostering such groundbreaking filmmakers over the years as Khalik Allah, Garrett Bradley, Robert Greene, Sky Hopinka and Kirsten Johnson, among others, the program wound down last year after COVID-19 struck and the program’s founder, Tabitha Jackson, was tapped to run the Sundance Film Festival. As an indication of the program’s success, this year’s Sundance Film Festival showcased five ambitious and formally exciting new works from Art of Nonfiction

Now is the time to act with intentionality; we need to stop meandering in search of the right way forward. Deep introspection and consideration of historically marginalized perspectives are essential for a purposeful collective pursuit of equity in our documentary field. And so, we are pleased to announce the open call for this year’s IDA Enterprise Documentary Fund's Production Grant with an addition to our application guidelines—that of authorship. The updated grant application will include questions about why the creative team is uniquely positioned to make the film, and their personal

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! Discussing the new documentary Framing Britney Spears, IndieWire’s Kristen Lopez addresses the conservatorship issue surrounding the pop icon, and how the documentary fails to mention how conservatorship is a key element of disability rights. Let’s be real, did I expect Framing Britney Spears to bring up disability issues? Sadly, no. But it’s something that, I think

I tell myself often, “You can’t cry. You are working.”

There Is No "I" in Threesome is certainly a doc I would not have predicted to have world-premiered at the WarnerMedia Lodge at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Set for a pre-Valentine’s Day streaming debut on February 11 (as an HBO Max Original), the project is directed by and stars New Zealand-based filmmaker Jan Oliver “Ollie” Lucks. Lucks is the son of an Iranian-Indian mother and a German father, and only moved to New Zealand a decade and a half ago to pursue his craft. Once there, however, he met an actress named Zoe. Boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love and plan a wedding. And

Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Streaming through February 16 on American Masters, How It Feels To Be Free, from Yoruba Richen, profiles six iconic African American female artists—Lena Horne, Abbey Lincoln, Nina Simone, Diahann Carroll, Cicely Tyson and Pam Grier—digging in to how they channeled their creativity into front-and-center civil rights activism within an industry bent on stereotyping and marginalizing them. Premiering February 15 on American Experience, Voice of Freedom, from Rob Rapley, tells

Dear Documentary Community, This past fall, I announced that I would be stepping down from IDA in 2021. Over the past few months we’ve all been living through an unprecedented pandemic, inspiring movements for racial justice, and uncertain political situations. That has caused many of us to reflect on our lives and our choices. I made my decision full of hope for IDA, the world of documentary, and whatever my role in that world may be moving forward. As I look back to how IDA has grown since 2015 and the work it is doing today, I see that IDA has become an essential institution within our