The current pandemic has accelerated educators into the virtual world. For better or worse, a good number of us have turned to technology to solve the problems inherent with conducting classes and exchanging information without personal proximity or physical contact with our students (not that THAT was encouraged in the first place). We have been forced inward, and in the process of retreating from our students, friends, neighbors and colleagues, the pause button has been pressed as we reexamine how we conduct ourselves, our business, and our involvement with our students and the world around
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Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Now streaming on PBS' Reel South, Mossville: When Great Trees Fall, from Alexander Glustrom, captures life in Mossville, Louisiana, one of the oldest African-American communities in the nation, which has been devastated by environmental racism at the hands of the petrochemical industry. Glustrom tracks the history of this tragedy and follows the efforts of the few survivors in Mossville to fight the power. COVID: Our Lockdown in Shanghai, premiering May 26 on Smithsonian
On December 3, 2019, it was announced that directors Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering had collaborated with Oprah Winfrey on a documentary called On The Record, about sexual harassment in the music industry and, specifically, rape allegations against hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons. A little over a month later, Winfrey, who was one of the film's executive producers, dropped out of the project, effectively putting an end to the film's distribution deal with Apple TV+. The media juggernaut withdrew her name from On The Record 15 days before the doc's world premiere at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival
During the month of May, we celebrate the culture and history of the United States' diverse and expansive Asian-American and Pacific Islander-American communities. The documentary landscape in particular has an incredibly rich offering of stories, many of which can be viewed online. Celebrate Asian and Pacific Islander American Heritage Month by checking out these documentaries from current IDA members and past IDA Documentary Awards winners and nominees! Asian Americans PBS' documentary series Asian Americans is a five-episode saga of the fastest-growing racial/ethnic group in American
By March, COVID-19 had been declared a pandemic and it effectively changed the world. But the virus didn't change WarnerMedia's launch date for their new video streaming service, HBO Max. The novel streamer will appear May 27, making it the latest player in the ever-growing subscription VOD landscape. For $14.99 a month HBO Max subscribers will have access to hit TV show franchises like Friends and South Park, and content from within the WarnerMedia portfolio including HBO and CNN. HBO Max programming will also include original series and movies as well as plenty of new nonfiction content
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! Writing for Sight and Sound, the ever-wise and witty Robert Greene offers some new insights into what a post-COVID world might look like for doc makers. This new age of hyper self-awareness is also the reason we documentary filmmakers may no longer be necessary. Video documentation and distribution is possible for anyone with a smartphone and an app. As a virus forces
One of the stranger stranger-than-fiction sagas to premiere at Sundance (where it picked up a Special Jury Award for Creative Storytelling) in January—yes, back when film festivals still happened in real life—Norwegian director Benjamin Ree's The Painter and the Thief follows the unconventional relationship as it unfolds between Barbora Kysilkova and Karl-Bertil Nordland, one a Czech naturalist painter, the other a petty criminal who steals two of the former's paintings from an Oslo gallery. Quickly arrested after the theft, Nordland refuses to give up his accomplices, or to even lift a finger
One of the most jarring aspects of the global pandemic is the rapidity with which every part of life as we know it has been upended, forcing us to nimbly pivot at the drop of a hat. And the film world, of course, has not been spared the disease’s speedy domino effect, nor its subsequent demands. This seemed to be the consensus among the array of international panelists streamed in live from lockdown in their various home countries to participate in a DOCU/CLASS titled "International market after the quarantine: how to distribute documentary films tomorrow?" at this year’' 17th Docudays UA
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Premiering Monday at 9:00 on MTV, the Academy Award-nominated short St. Louis Superman, from Smriti Mundhra and Sami Khan, profiles Representative Bruce Franks Jr., a Ferguson, MO activist and battle rapper who was elected to the overwhelmingly white and Republican Missouri House of Representatives. Forced to deal with the trauma he's been carrying for nearly 30 years after witnessing the shooting death of his nine-year-old brother, the film chronicles his work toward
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’ Brandon Yu interviews actor Daniel Dae Kim, one of the narrators of the PBS series Asian Americans, about how the program resonates during the pandemic. We don't want to be speaking just to ourselves. What's really important is to have this history brought out to the general population so that people who have no idea of what our contributions might