Even before Working Films had a name, its founders, Robert West and Judith Helfand, knew what the organization would stand for and do. “Filmworks [as it was temporarily called] will transition social-issue documentaries beyond traditional distribution, broadcast and initial releases to further push their impact and potential. This initiative will extend the relevance and long-term usefulness of documentaries, capitalize on the momentum and recognition from festivals and broadcasts, and develop coordinated, integrated and timely grassroots outreach and classroom projects,” the duo wrote
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The David L. Wolper Student Documentary Award, introduced to the IDA Documentary Awards in 1987, recognizes exceptional achievement in nonfiction film and video production at the university level. Bringing greater industry and public awareness to the work of students in the documentary field is an integral part of the IDA Documentary Awards, and we are thrilled to engage with these emerging storytellers in the field. Each of the 2020 IDA Documentary Awards nominees for the Student Documentary Award are transitioning between their educational institutions into the "real world" of documentary
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! Mark Binelli of The New York Times Magazine talks to the great American documentarian Frederick Wiseman, who’s been hunkering down in Paris since the beginning of the pandemic, on the eve of the December 22nd PBS broadcast of his latest opus, City Hall. They also represent the work of an artist of extraordinary vision. The films are long, strange and uncompromising
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Premiering December 22 on PBS is City Hall, the 45th film from the remarkable Frederick Wiseman, immerses audiences in the municipality of his hometown of Boston to illustrate a government taking care of its diverse citizens. Through his filmmaking, audiences come to realize how city government touches upon almost every aspect of their lives, acknowledging how necessary services like sanitation, veterans affairs, elder support, parks, licensing bureaus, recordkeeping, as well
Can there be upsides in a global pandemic? COVID-19 has decimated huge swaths of the entertainment industry and led to massive unemployment, food insecurity and debt, but some documentary filmmakers have, surprisingly, seen opportunities. With studio moviemaking lurching forward in fits and starts, and indie fiction films struggling to cope with the extra challenges of pandemic-related costs and cast scheduling, a number of nonfiction projects and producers have remained surprisingly busy, or even benefited over the last several months. “It’s been very active,” says Julie Goldman, the Oscar
Three days after the 2020 US presidential election, the tide began to turn in Georgia. The potential for a historic blue flip from a solidly red Deep South stalwart revealed itself as vote tallies stacked up, steadily narrowing the gap. Pundits and pollsters failed to predict the possibility for Georgia’s starring role in the most anxiously anticipated election in a generation, but filmmakers Grace Lee and Marjan Safinia were not surprised. Along with their crew—all women of color—they spent 2018 and 2019 in Georgia and around the country, documenting the painstaking, hopeful grassroots
This year’s virtual gathering of Getting Real ‘20 called for the redistribution of power within documentary practice and the removal of barriers inhibiting the expansion of possibility within the field and access to it. However, the process of actualizing such changes requires a series of transitions that move us away from the status quo to the future. Although many conversations held before, during and after the convening are grounded in that work, one in particular, “The Liberatory Canon,” illustrates a pattern of change taking place in the ecosystem that reflects current values within the
This decade has given us some of the boldest, most informative and timeliest documentaries in film history, and with it coming to an end, many of us here in the IDA staff are looking back on the films that had a special or significant impact on us, not just as documentary professionals, but as documentary lovers. Check out these IDA staff picks and find links to watch some of the best nonfiction storytelling on major streaming platforms, all the way from 2011 to the current moment. And make sure you use a legitimate streaming service to directly support the filmmakers and filmmaking team
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Premiering December 16 on HBO and HBO Max, The Art of Political Murder tells the story of the 1998 murder of Guatemalan human rights activist Bishop Juan Gerardi and how it stunned a country ravaged by decades of political violence. Just two days after presenting a damning report blaming the atrocities of the civil war on the Guatemalan military, Bishop Gerardi was found dead in his home. The documentary highlights the team of young investigators who take on the case and
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! IndieWire’s Eric Kohn brought together filmmakers Brett Morgen and Alex Winter for a conversation about their respective films, Montage of Heck and Zappa, two archive-heavy docs about musical icons Kurt Cobain and Frank Zappa. There’s this misconception that doing an archival film is easy. If you do an interview-based documentary, you have dailies. If you have an