Lewis Erskine, ACE, was one of the finest documentary editors around but, per the tributes that we’ve gathered from friends and colleagues, that was just one of the many things he was. In fact, he didn’t even want to be an editor at first. In a speech he delivered at the 2017 Sundance Institute and Karen Schmeer Fellowship Art of Editing Lunch, he admitted, “I didn’t set out to edit; I quit college to mix sound. I was going to work in the recording studio, I was going to make records.” While he could’ve opted to stay in the studio, we are fortunate that he chose to grace our world in a myriad
Latest Posts
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Frederick Bernas and Ana González’s The New Yorker documentary Flamenco Queer introduces us to Manuel Liñán, a flamenco dancer and choreographer who disrupts the gendered binaries that codify the dance form. As we witness Liñán break convention, we realize the immense debt we owe to queer artists for making our worlds both beautiful and equitable. A perfect homage for Pride month. In PBS’ Ballerina Boys (Directed and Produced by Chana Gazit and Martie Barylick), the all-male
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! Over at Screen Daily, London International Smartphone Film Festival’s co-director Adam Gee writes a manifesto of sorts for smartphone filmmaking and makes a case for the efficiency and diversity the medium offers. Smartphones chime in perfectly with the issues of diversity that have come to the fore in the industry globally in the last year. They offer an immediate
The documentary community is filled with tough pros, but surely all of us can spare a thought for a festival that had to deal with the first outburst of COVID-19 last spring and was forced to work around the pandemic again this year. In Toronto, the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival became renowned over 20 years ago not only for showcasing the best new documentaries but also for its uncanny luck in always having their event during the first genuinely warm week of spring. While the chilly weather continued unabated during this year’s virtual festival (April 29-May 9), the
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. The Tulsa Massacre is one the most horrific episodes of racial violence in American history, and it continues to be overlooked by most textbooks and history syllabi in the country. This year marks a century since 35 blocks of thriving Black businesses in Tulsa, Oklahoma’s Greenwood District were burned to the ground by white supremacists, resulting in a massive loss of lives and Black-owned businesses. To commemorate the tragedy, and to honor the longstanding history of Black
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 New York Times’ Osayi Endolyn writes about the new Netflix limited series High on the Hog (Dir.: Roger Ross Williams), which she calls a “long overdue nuanced celebration of African Americans and their food.” Black joy has always been politicized in the United States, because Blackness was codified to justify social oppression and extreme, race-based wealth. Our
By Coley Gray and Patricia Aufderheide The 2021 True/False Film Festival split into two, one in-person and another virtual. Both featured the high-touch approach that this unique festival offers and neither was much like what True/Falsers remember from earlier fests. True/False has evolved into a festival that doesn’t just feature documentaries, but puts the question of what makes a documentary center-stage. It’s not just a film festival, but a performative celebration of creativity. The college town of Columbia, Missouri sprouts pop-up art galleries everywhere, buskers open the film
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. The Korean-American artist Nam June Paik once said, “What matters today is what I would call the Archaeology of the present, and video is its privileged instrument.” Erik Nelson’s Apocalypse ‘45 combines filmmaker John Ford’s graphic World War II footage, archival material, and narratives of 12 men who witnessed the Pacific War. Premiering May 27 on discovery+, the film, as Paik would say, “digs ruin after ruin to try to understand the past as if one understood the present.”
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! Over at Variety, Elsa Keslassy speaks to Thierry Fremaux, the artistic director of the Cannes Film Festival, two weeks before the festival is slated to announce its lineup. It will be magnificent. We already have the music of the opening credits to Cannes, the one composed by Camille Saint-Saëns, in our heads. The desire to be at the center of ovations, perhaps boos
Sue Ding is a documentary filmmaker and artist based in Los Angeles. She directs and produces nonfiction projects for platforms including The New York Times and PBS. Her most recent film, The Claudia Kishi Club, was an official selection at SXSW and premiered on Netflix. Her work explores identity, storytelling, and visual culture. Sue also leads the XR media program at the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, and consults on interactive, immersive, and multiplatform projects. She writes and lectures on documentary, participatory, and emerging media storytelling. Sue is an alumni of MIT’s