"From Pre-Pandemic Flashback to Post-Pandemic Visions of Documentary Distribution" was the long and winding title of a thankfully succinct, nuts-and-bolts discussion held during this year’s edition of CPH:DOX’s all-digital CPH:CONFERENCE. Occurring on the day designated REDISTRIBUTE:ECONOMY (the other four themes were REBUILD:DEMOCRACY, REPRESENTATION:POWER, REBELLION:CLIMATE and RESILIENCE:CULTURE), this insightful, all-white and primarily Scandinavian panel nevertheless included an array of diverse perspectives. And leading the talk was moderator Karolina Lidin of Norway’s Nordisk Film & TV
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The overwhelming interest in the first Flaherty book and the comments received by MacDonald and Zimmermann from those who had actually "been there" painted a much fuller picture of the impact The Flaherty Seminar had made on them.
This is a tale of taking our old films and meeting the brave new world of distribution. A lot of ingenuity is called for to keep our films before the public. We want to share with fellow filmmakers what we did and what we learned about taking back your work and repurposing or repositioning it vis-a-vis the new market realities. I made the documentaries Berkeley in the Sixties (1990), an Academy Award nominee and a well-loved classic; A Fierce Green Fire (2012), a big-picture exploration of the environmental movement; and Evolution of Organic (2017), the story of organic agriculture told by
In 2018, a junior soccer team and their assistant coach went into a nearby cave in Thailand’s Chiang Rai province. It was a week before the cave was to close for monsoon season, but that year the rains came early, trapping them inside. The world spent the next 18 days watching a life-and-death rescue mission that involved 10,000 people and more than 100 divers. The Rescue tells this story in full detail. Directors Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin partnered with National Geographic, for whom they’d made the Oscar-winning Free Solo, which documents Alex Honnold’s attempt to climb El Capitan
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. To continue our celebration of documentaries around Hispanic heritage, we wanted to make sure you’ve watched María José Cuevas’s Bellas de Noche. An exploration of Mexico’s burlesque culture of the 1970s and 1980s, the documentary, playing on Netflix, introduces us to fascinating protagonists who were former showgirls living up the disco lifestyle. In Lali Houghton’s Dead Woman’s Pass, join Maxi Manuttupa, a single mother from Cusco, Peru, and an Indigenous woman, who helps
Iliana Sosa is a documentary and narrative fiction filmmaker based in Austin, Texas. Her documentary short An Uncertain Future premiered at the 2018 SXSW Film Festival, where it won a Jury Award for Best Texas Short. She was a Berlinale Talents participant and the recipient of a Firelight Media Impact Producer Fellowship, and was named a 2018-2019 Sundance Institute Development Fellow with her first feature documentary, What We Leave Behind (Lo que dejamos atrás). Iliana has participated in the 2019 True/False Catapult Retreat, the 2020 IFP Documentary Lab, and the Jacob Burns Residency with
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 speaks to former TIFF Director Piers Handling, who recalls having to decide whether he’d cancel the rest of the festival after the news of 9/11 reached him and his team. The reality didn’t really set in until right after the towers fell. I was watching TV with a group of staffers in the press office at the Four Seasons Hotel. Of course we were
In a time of uncertainty, there is one thing that COVID-19 made clear: hybrid film festivals are the wave of the future. On August 3, Sundance Festival Director Tabitha Jackson announced that Utah will no longer be the sole home to the Sundance Film Festival. Instead, the next incarnation of Sundance will take place from January 20–30, 2022—not only in Park City, Salt Lake City and the Sundance Mountain Resort, but also digitally via 10 satellite partners stationed across the United States. And while in-person screenings in Utah will happen next year, doors will only be open to those who have
Letting Amazon buy MGM studios would be bad for independent filmmakers, and the people who love their films. It could make today’s bad situation worse. The proposed merger is before the Federal Trade Commission, now headed by Lina Khan, a fierce supporter of revitalizing antitrust enforcement. Now, the Strategic Organizing Center, a major labor coalition, has submitted a letter to the FTC explaining why it is a bad idea. The International Documentary Association contributed knowledge to the letter, as did I, as well as other scholars, distributors, filmmakers and producers. Here’s why every
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Maya Cade, who works as an Audience Strategist at The Criterion Collection, has painstakingly pulled together a collection of Black films made between 1915 and 1979, that are currently streaming. It's called the Black Film Archive and as it says on the website, “Every word on Black Film Archive is thoroughly researched and lovingly written by her.” It is a treasure trove and also a testament to how limited our viewing habits are. Thanks to Cade, changing that is easier than