IDA announced the four emerging writers who will participate in the Documentary Magazine Editorial Fellowship Program. These fellows will participate in IDA’s editorial planning process, receive a quarterly stipend to write articles for the publication, partake in mentorship sessions, and attend the Getting Real Documentary Film Conference in September 2022.
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Everyone wants an Academy Award. But for the last several years, nonfiction filmmakers working in the nonprofit sector have faced daunting competition in the race for the major film awards. Six years ago, I wrote an article called “Oscar Doc Campaigns Have Become Fast, Costly, and Out of Control”—and the situation has only gotten worse. After winning the Best Documentary Oscar for Icarus in 2018, Netflix has aggressively sought further nonfiction accolades, most notably two years ago when four of its films made the shortlist, two were nominated, and one of its acquisitions, American Factory
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! For the Sundance blog, filmmaker Amanda Spain reflects on her journey as a Sundance Producing Fellow, and how the experience proved to be a life-changing one. If you start to feel yourself wavering, you just have to trust your partner is there to catch you and keep moving the pitch forward. From my memory, Dava and I always caught each other and that trust has carried
DOC NYC 2021 was back in theaters this year, with the in-person festival running from November 10-18, and then virtually through November 28. In a year when IATSE workers continue to demand more humane conditions on narrative film and television sets, documentary workers are organizing to protect themselves in less regulated, real-time production environments. The Cinematography and Producer Panels at this year’s DOC NYC Pro revealed how some members of the documentary community are responding to these growing concerns, while the programming of the festival’s International Competition
Recent years have seen a surge in documentary productions and a growing popularity of documentary film among audiences worldwide. Despite this encouraging development, however, disempowering colonialist legacies linger on within the documentary craft and narrative, resulting in a number of films that are largely exploitative and reductionist. In the hopes of scrapping the historical framework of exploitation, activists and filmmakers have been calling for the reimagining of the nonfiction ethos, built on the values of responsible authorship and accountability. The 64th edition of the
At the end of August 2021, the images of frantic Afghanis crowding Kabul airport were a stark reminder of the despair with which people flee their homeland in search of a safer future. The news unfortunately continues to provide us with a daily litany of tragic images: Haitian refugees rebuffed with whips at the border, North Africans shipwrecked off the tiny island of Lampedusa, or Kurdish women and children drowning in the frigid waters of the English Channel in the hopes of reaching more hospitable shores. For many refugees, each stage of their fraught journey threatens to be their last
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Like everyone else, the Documentary team has been deeply mourning the passing of Broadway titan Stephen Sondheim, but we’ve also been celebrating his life by playing and replaying soundtracks from his musicals, and watching documentaries that honor his amazing legacy. No surprises here, but DA Pennebaker's 1970 documentary, Original Cast Album: “Company" tops our list. The film, as legendary as the eponymous musical, was long unavailable, but you can now watch it on Criterion
Nearly six years ago, in 2016, a story out of Rutherford County, Tennessee became something of a national outrage, although many of us missed the news. Four Black girls — one in sixth grade, two in fourth grade, and one in third grade —were arrested at school for a crime that a recent ProPublica article suggests was illegitimate. Apparently, the children watched and were accused of doing little to stop a “fight” in which a five- and a six-year-old boy threw feeble punches at an older child. And as a result, the children were accused of the trumped-up charge of “criminal responsibility”—for a
Dear Readers, What the past 20 months have unleashed upon the world underscores the urgency to center trauma and mental health in our ongoing conversations, and in this issue of Documentary. This past winter, we published a first-person account from cinematographer Jenni Morello about her experiences filming in troubled regions—and her struggles to address the traumas that ensued. Morello’s account inspired us to inquire about other trigger-laden phases of documentary filmmaking, such as post-production. We reached out to seasoned editor Miranda Yousef, who discusses her own experiences
Dear Documentary Community, As the documentary financing business model continues to evolve, so have the strategies that filmmakers must pursue in order to secure meaningful funding for their important work. While the first hurdle we all have in common is in being able to actually secure a meeting or gain access to financiers in the nonfiction space, a key part of this process, once you are face-to-face, involves establishing relationships with these funders beyond the transaction. It was already extraordinarily challenging for documentary filmmakers to find the money they needed to make their