Latest Posts

It’s been more than nine months since the deadly movement of COVID-19 from China to North America and Europe—and nearly every other continent—utterly changed the world. Since that time, more than a million people have died. Now, most of us wear masks when we go outside and use hand sanitizers before entering shops. When we meet friends, a six-foot social distancing rule is applied by most of us. The world has, for the time being, become something else, something that some documentarians want to shoot—or, in any case, must deal with in what is, at least temporarily, a “new normal.” While a

Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. City So Real, a five-part series from Steve James, Kartemquin Films and Participant, premieres in its entirety on October 29 on National Geographic; all five episodes will be available October 30 on HULU. This complex portrait of contemporary Chicago delivers a deep, multifaceted look into the soul of a quintessentially American city, set against the backdrop of its history-making 2019 mayoral election. The series opens in 2018 as Mayor Rahm Emanuel, embroiled in accusations

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! Equal, a new docuseries about the history of the LGBTQ+ movement, premiered October 22 on HBO Max. The Los Angeles Times’ Laura Zornosa talks to some of the artists behind the making of the series. In a lot of ways, what we’ve done is a primer: a very slick, beautiful, edgy, hip primer for all this history,” showrunner Stephen Kijak told The Times, “that we hope kicks

By Julie Angell, Steven C. Beer & Neil J. Rosini

Stanley Nelson and Marcia Smith are celebrating 20 years of building Firelight Media into a company that tells eloquent stories about Black people, events and movements and is leading the charge empowering filmmakers of color to create their own work. “The very first day, the two of us were sitting there looking at each other in our spare bedroom,” Smith recalls. “It was the fall of 2000 and we were like, ‘OK, great, we did it. Now, what’s it mean?’” The initial conversations between Nelson and Smith about Firelight—who are partners in life as well as film—were about starting a nonprofit and

When Bonni Cohen and Lisa Chanoff founded Catapult Film Fund in 2010 to support documentary filmmakers with development funding, “The fundamental idea,” according to Chanoff, was to “provide funding for documentaries at a stage when there was, at that time, very little support; and when we were thinking of development, we were thinking before there was any proof of concept, sample or trailer.” Catapult has continued to grow and evolve over the past ten years, providing grantees with continued mentorship and access to follow-up Momentum Grants and Consulting Grants in addition to development

The issue of ethics has driven the documentary field in various ways and in various degrees of emphases and urgency since the beginnings of the art form, when Robert Flaherty’s 1922 documentary Nanook of the North would later be taken to task about its use of reenactments and recreations, and in more recent years, as a prototype for extractive storytelling. The 2009 study from the Center for Media and Social Impact, " Honest Truths: Documentary Filmmakers on Ethical Challenges in Their Work," spearheaded by then Center Director Pat Aufderheide and research fellows Peter Jaszi and Mridu Chandra

In October 2016, when my first son Gray was born in San Francisco, I became intensely aware of the relationship between children and screens. Would I let my baby play with my smart phone? Would I show him baby videos? Would I send him to a screen-free daycare? When would I bend the rules? On a plane trip? With the grandparents? Such banal questions reflect a very complex relationship that we have to technology and to screens in particular. I’ve also thought a lot about the screen as a filmmaker. In the 20 years since I’ve been making films, I've experienced a drastic change in how we watch

Dear IDA Community, We are in an extraordinary time. I have been asked many times how one can process what is happening in America at this moment in history. I have shared my belief that the combination of this strange confluence of events that has caused so much economic hardship, racial disparities that long existed being brought to the surface in the most spectacular way through the coronavirus, along with general feelings of restlessness and hopelessness, has led to this moment. It seems that in every season we deal with a new tragedy. But because these prior incidents appeared to happen

I never intended to become a documentary filmmaker in 1986 when I accepted the receptionist position at a science-focused production company. A year later, by chance, I began watching Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954–1965 (Exec. Prod.: Henry Hampton/Blackside) when it premiered on PBS. It is difficult to describe the intense emotions that coursed through me as I watched the series, but the experience changed me, an African American woman who grew up in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. Unlike students today, most people my age didn’t learn about “The Civil