It is no secret that the Fourth Estate has been under attack in recent years. Journalism, once perceived as a noble profession, has been dragged through the muck by right-wing pundits and politicians, its integrity and efficacy called into question by those with little or no integrity of their own. Enter the summer of 2018, when an unlikely and unexpected ally emerged: Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist bequeathed $20 million to the Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. Newmark was quoted as saying: “In this time, when trustworthy news is under attack
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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! Variety’s Addie Morfoot interviews TIFF’s documentary programmer, Thom Powers, and other filmmakers with films in this year’s lineup. While many docs submitted for consideration this year were pandemic-related, Powers decided to keep the lineup COVID-free. “I felt like we had a great film about COVID last year in 76 Days” says Powers. “The challenge for films about
For over four weeks, a small team of colleagues from the D-Word online community has been frantically working to help our list of 75 Afghan nationals; some are documentary professionals, some are extremely high-risk young people, some are single women who have worked in TV journalism and women’s rights, and some are folks who collaborated closely with the US and are in deep danger. Over these four weeks, many of us have worked 18-hour days without a break to build pathways of aid. We have become deeply versed in the challenges, the evacuation options, the legal processes. We count as new
Each year, the Outfest Los Angeles LGBTQ film festival hosts some of the best queer and transgender cinema in the world. It’s a chance to catch films that were misunderstood by straight programmers or rejected by festivals because they were “niche.” But more than any of that, festivals like Outfest provide a much-needed space for community, both for filmmakers and enthusiasts. This year, more than ever, we needed this space to celebrate the stories that don’t fit neatly in a box and reject straight sensibilities. Erased Histories and Reframing Narratives Each year a new powerful slate of
By Marissa Woods and Patricia Aufderheide The need for journalism about documentary filmmaking has never been greater. But this work is underfunded, undervalued, too little and too white, says a new report from American University’s Center for Media & Social Impact. A big part of the problem is that documentary filmmakers have never established any shared standards for journalists to hold them to. Raising the Alarm In an interview about his most recent film Roadrunner (2021), director Morgan Neville cheerfully revealed that he used artificial intelligence to recreate the voice of Anthony
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. The New York Times critic James Poniewozik recently wrote in this piece, “Is 9/11 a Day, or Is It an Era?”: “For 20 years, the refrain has been: Remember, remember, remember. Memory is so ingrained in the language of Sept. 11 — “Never forget” — as to imply that it is obligatory, and sufficient, for future generations merely to remember by revisiting the narrative and imagery of one terrible day, rather than to connect it to the years of history that followed.” As important as
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! Variety’s Manori Ravindran reports on the unfortunate turn of events at the Sheffield Doc Fest. We stand in solidarity with the programming team. “The exchange established between artists and curators over the last two years to develop an artistic approach to various aspects of the festival is now in vain,” reads the statement. “What is the future of the artistic
“Memories, that is all you travel with,” Ibrahim Mohammed, a young man from Harar, Ethiopia, tells a much younger Mohammed Arif in Jessica Beshir’s debut feature documentary, Faya Dayi. Beshir, like the men in her film, grew up in Harar. “It was the Cold War and Harar was a military strategic point. My father is a surgeon, and I grew up in the hospital watching droves of soldiers coming in from the front,” Beshir tells Documentary, shortly before the theatrical release of her film, following a festival run at Sundance, Hot Docs, Full Frame and others. She moved to Mexico during Ethiopia’s
Since last summer, I’ve been reflecting on what the poet/essayist Cathy Park Hong describes as “minor feelings.” She identifies these as a range of negative emotions, built from racial experiences of having one’s perception of reality constantly questioned or dismissed. It reminded me of the countless times I’ve been asked, “Where are you from?” as a way for white strangers to signify my foreignness even after I disclose I’m a second-generation Korean-American. Whenever these microaggressions occur, I find myself contemplating whether or not I should feel upset or brush it off as unintentional
Richard Ray (“Rick”) Pérez took the helm as executive director of IDA this past May, following a six-year period of expansion, growth, impact and innovation under the leadership of Simon Kilmurry. Pérez brings to the table a 20-year career in documentary, and a tangential association with IDA throughout those two decades. As a filmmaker, he made Unprecedented: The 2020 Presidential Election with then-IDA Board Member Joan Sekler; his second feature, Cesar’s Last Fast, was a project in IDA’s Fiscal Sponsorship Program; he has moderated various panels and convenings at IDA’s biennial Getting