Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. If you feel like starting the week on a sweet note, watch DA Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus’ 2009 documentary Kings of Pastry on Criterion Channel. Join in as the adrenaline runs high in the Meilleurs Ouvriers de France—the Olympics-like intense three-day competition where the best French pastry chefs bake it out. From France to rural southern India. In Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh’s Timbaktu, streaming on YouTube, a tiny village in Andhra Pradesh takes over acres of barren
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The 10th Annual BlackStar Film Festival, which took place in Philadelphia and online from August 3-8, could not have been timelier. After nearly 18 months of increased coverage surrounding the state-sanctioned murders of unarmed Black people and the disparities revealed in COVID-19’s impact on global communities of color, the long-held resilience of these communities has been taxed. I am no stranger to this weariness as I have personally been overwhelmed by a sense of powerlessness against the racist and white supremacist systems that continue to perpetrate and perpetuate injustice. But one
On the eve of the 500th anniversary of the fall of the Aztec capital at the hands of the Spanish Conquistadors and their allies, filmmaker Rodrigo Reyes returned to the locations of his hybrid work, 499 . Reyes screened his film throughout Mexico, with the protagonists in attendance; he also hosted a series of dialogues around the current crisis of violence in Mexico and its relationship to a history of five centuries of oppression. Here, Reyes shares some impressions from the journal entries he wrote during the tour which concluded earlier this month. Returning Eduardo arrived from Madrid
Dear IDA Community: We are excited to share that IDA will begin programming in-person public events in Los Angeles this fall. These events will complement our ongoing virtual events to ensure we serve our community wherever you are. As we re-introduce the in-person component of our public programming we will prioritize the health and safety of our members, audiences and IDA staff. With this in mind I would like to update you on the safety measures IDA is putting in place for our upcoming events. We now require that all IDA staff, volunteers and attendees be fully vaccinated against COVID-19
Youth movements have changed the world and revolutionized the way we organize against systems of oppression. From Freedom Summer to the March For Our Lives, young people have been at the forefront of some of the most radical and important activism of nearly every generation. In honor of students returning back to school and all youth who endured one of the most challenging years, this Docs to Watch features nine documentaries that celebrate young activists who look adults in the eye and say “no more.” Changing The Game (Michael Barnett, 2019) This year saw one of the most vicious attacks
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. In this 2019 documentary from Germany-based DW Documentary, Afghanistan—Land of Endless War, the narrators are all women. They talk about their hopes, their fears, and the many ways in which war has shaped their identities. The film is a revelation in the way it makes us reexamine our biases against Muslim women of Afghanistan. In BBC’s Afghanistan in the 1950s: Back to the Future, Afghan journalist Saeeda Mahmood, introduces us to the Afghanistan that existed before it
IDA is excited to launch our new MyIDA portal today for all IDA members! This improved platform will make accessing your member benefits and engagement with the IDA easier than it's ever been before.
Alex H. Rafi is a St. Louis-based documentary filmmaker and educator. Originally from Miami, FL, Alex earned his BA in Communication and Cinema Studies from the University of Pennsylvania and his MFA in Documentary Film at Stanford University. His short film, On Task (2019), screened at several film festivals including Mammoth Lakes, SF DocFest, and the New Orleans Film Festival. His most recent film a door away (2021), premiered at Brooklyn Film Festival and has since screened at the 10th annual BlackStar Film Festival. Alex is invested in foregrounding the stories of people of color
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 Rebecca Davis speaks to Afghan female filmmakers about their anxiety, despair, and the future of filmmaking under the Taliban rule. “I feel like I’m watching a [Quentin] Tarantino film. I look at what’s actually happening and think, ‘No, that’s an American movie, not real American actions,’” says Afghanistan Documentary House founder Sahra Mani, requesting
By Elizabeth Mirzaei and Gulistan Mirzaei We are writing this with sleepless eyes, shaking hands, and knots in our stomachs that grow tighter with each bit of news coming out of Afghanistan, as if an invisible but unbreakable string connects our hearts over continents and oceans. There is an Afghan proverb in Dari, “Dil ba dil rah dara"; There is a way from heart to heart. And our hearts, while broken, are not shattered. We believe Afghanistan is worth fighting for and we won't give up on the country we love. We are Gulistan and Elizabeth Mirzaei, an Afghan/American couple and documentary