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! Impact strategist Sonya Childress, writing in Medium, reflects on a moment of reckoning in the nonfiction media field—one for accountability and rebuilding. Filmmakers of color have advocated for a seat at the table for more than five decades. They have launched production houses, distribution collectives, affinity groups and pipeline development programs to improve
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Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Sam Feder's Disclosure, premiering June 19 on Netflix, takes an unprecedented look at transgender depictions in film and television, revealing how Hollywood simultaneously reflects and manufactures our deepest anxieties about gender. Leading trans thinkers and creatives, including Laverne Cox, Lilly Wachowski, Yance Ford, Jen Richards, Mj Rodriguez, Jamie Clayton and Chaz Bono, share their reactions and resistance to some of Hollywood's most beloved moments. What emerges is a
How important is streaming media to documentarians in Europe? Really important. At the International Documentary Festival at Amsterdam (IDFA) last November, Guy Bisson from Ampere Analysis, a leading consultancy on video, explained why. In March, we followed up on the implications of Covid-19 for the marketplace. Streaming media is still only 10 percent of the European market, but over the last five years, pay TV—still the leader—has basically had flat growth. Meanwhile, streaming media has grown more than 400 % and shows no sign of stopping. In fact, streaming consumption is way up, with so
Belly of the Beast, Erika Cohn's follow-up to her multi-award-winning The Judge, tracks down a previously little-known story about enforced—and illegal—sterilization of female inmates in California's correctional facilities. For nearly 40 years after a 1979 law was passed in California banning enforced sterilization, this practice continued with impunity in prisons. Justice Now, a 20-year-old nonprofit based in Oakland, has been in the business of working with people in women's prisons and local communities to, as their mission states, "end violence against women, trans, and gender non-binary
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. Writing for Filmmaker, Denae Peters interviews Brown Girls Doc Mafia Founder Iyabo Boyd about the imperative to hire BIPOC filmmakers within the documentary community. One of the many roots of the problem is the lack of professional and personal friendships that White people have with people of color. In film, people work with their friends, so if you don't have any friends who are
Documentaries aren’t solely about issues. “One problem filmmakers come across is, ‘Here’s an issue I care about. I’m going to talk to a bunch of people about this issue and put it all together,’” says Lauren Mucciolo, a documentarian who is professor of practice and executive producer of the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School Journalism and Mass Communication. “I think that’s a problem. Great films are made in the storytelling.” Gang violence in Honduras, or the opioid epidemic in New England, or the fact that in America your family
By Sheila Curran Bernard and Kenn Rabin Editor’s Note: This article is adapted from the second edition of Bernard and Rabin’s Archival Storytelling: A Filmmaker’s Guide to Finding, Using, and Licensing Third-Party Visuals and Music , published by Focal Press in May 2020. Wonderful news: On January 1, 2020, after a period of 20 years—during which copyright expirations were frozen—a treasure trove of materials copyrighted in the United States in 1924 finally entered the public domain. The delay was due to the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act, which took effect on January 1, 1999. In it, US
When was the last time you picked up a book—a historical survey on documentary film, to be more exact—and discovered a page-turner? My guess is, you never have—and neither had I until I read Screening Reality: How Documentary Filmmakers Reimagined America. Just released by Bloomsbury, a publishing house known as much for its best sellers as for its respectable catalogue of academic books in the humanities, social sciences and visual arts, Screening Reality is being touted as the first, comprehensive history of American documentary film. If this is indeed the case, there is no one better
Vetting—the process of reviewing scripts and footage to address legal concerns prior to a documentary film’s release—generally occurs at (or toward) the end of a project. And while vetting is a necessary and important step, many legal issues can be identified and addressed much earlier in the filmmaking process. Indeed, for many independent documentarians, working with an attorney during the development and production of a film is invaluable. For example, an attorney can help a documentarian obtain access to key documents, footage and court filings. An attorney can also provide advice about
As we continue to process and reflect and figure out the way forward, we offer, in this Screen Time, a collection of both documentary work and discussions that serve to contextualize and underscore what we’ve been experiencing. The second edition of Firelight Media's new Beyond Resilience series, happening June 12 at 7:00 pm, will address "Production During Crisis: Ethics, Care, and Imagination," exploring how docmakers fulfill their role in the midst of a pandemic and an uprising—taking into consideration new creative approaches and ethical considerations. Carrie Lozano, IDA's Enterprise Fund