13 films to receive a total of $850,000 in production funds and 2 emerging women filmmakers of color receiving Logan Elevate Grants of $25,000 each.
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Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Now streaming on Firelight Media.tv, In The Making is a new documentary short film series, presented in collaboration with American Masters, that follows the lives and journeys of emerging BIPOC cultural artists—most of whom graduated from Firelight Media’s Documentary Lab—who bring insight and originality to their artistic craft. OVID.tv presents Democracy and its Discontents, a collection of films that address the notion and nature of democracy (and democracies) from
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! The Center for Media and Social Impact (CMSI) released a new study this past week: “Breaking the Silence: How Documentaries Can Shape the Conversation on Racial Violence in America and Create New Communities.” The study raises questions about how social issues documentaries can address the ideological divide fueled by a polarized news media—and a polarized nation
Dear Readers, With COVID-19 still raging in synch with the fires on the West Coast, the current occupant of the White House in full-on mendacity and corruption mode, and the country tearing itself apart in an ever-widening and irreparable schism, the fourth edition of Getting Real Documentary Film Conference arrives like a much-welcome blast of civility and hope. Access. Power. Possibility. These are the guiding beacons around which the Getting Real team has developed the five-day forum, and as the documentary community is undergoing the deep processes of systemic transformation, what emerges
Documentaries were out in force at the 58th New York Film Festival. No longer cloistered in a separate section, they stood shoulder-to-shoulder with narrative features throughout this mostly virtual, streamlined edition. In part, that reflects the increasing fluidity of the form itself. “It’s sometimes even hard to say if a film is documentary or fiction,” observed director of programming Dennis Lim during one of the festival’s many virtual Talks, which you can catch on YouTube. Films like Inheritance, Ouvertures and My Mexican Bretzel seriously mess with boundaries by injecting scripts and/or
In 2016, Kirsten Johnson, who was then most known for her work as a cinematographer on some of the most challenging and acclaimed documentaries of our time, ranging from Kirby Dick's This Film Is Not Yet Rated and The Invisible War, to Laura Poitras' The Oath and Citizenfour, released the feature-length film Cameraperson, which she directed. The film used footage from many of the films she shot over the last quarter-century to tell her own story. It grew out of an awareness of how she was compartmentalizing some of the vicarious traumas she experienced in her job, how it has affected her and
Premiering at Sundance, going on to open Hot Docs, and now set to air on POV October 12, Nairobi-based director Sam Soko’s Softie is both inspirational character study and unnerving cautionary tale (at least for those of us here in the West who’ve long taken our democracy for granted and may now be paying a costly price). The film follows Boniface “Softie” Mwangi, a grassroots activist-turned-politician, as he faces down his country’s entrenched corruption—paying for votes, power-brokering behind closed doors, and police blithely gunning down protestors is all just business as usual in Kenya
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Now streaming on World Channel is Raúl O. Paz-Pastrana’s Border South, which profiles Gustavo Lopez Quiroz, a Nicaraguan migrant trying to cross into America through Mexico, and Jason De León, a US anthropologist seeking traces of others who never made it. Paz-Pastrana assembles a vivid portrait of the thousands of immigrants who disappear along the trail. Border South reveals the immigrants’ resilience, ingenuity and humor as it exposes a global migration system that renders
Essential Doc Reads is a weekly feature in which the IDA staff recommends recent pieces about the documentary form and its processes. Here we feature think pieces and important news items from around the internet, and articles from the Documentary magazine archive. We hope you enjoy! Just before we plunged into Getting Real ‘20, the Ford Foundation released Creative Futures, a collection of essays (or, as the foundation puts it, “provocations”) to “reimagine the arts, documentary and journalism.” Documentary magazine will be republishing a selection of these in future issues and online, but
This year’s Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) was the strangest ever. There were no red carpets, no galas, no film stars. With Canadian border regulations requiring two-week quarantines for all foreign visitors, TIFF was only international by Zoom and the films selected, not by the people attending the festival. Approximately 20 percent of the films screened in a normal year—50 features and five short programs—were available for viewing, either online or in drive-ins and a limited number of cinemas attended by a few socially distant filmgoers. It’s easy to surmise that quite a number