Dear Documentary Community, Everything has changed over the last several weeks. In just filmmaking terms, hundreds of you have had film premieres canceled, missed vital shoot days, had gigs called off, been laid off, or been brought to a standstill in your work and lives by the urgent reality of COVID-19. Personally, the virus has already touched members of our organization and our community. The broader global implications of the crisis are far greater and are still months away from being known. We have paused in this moment to ask ourselves the original questions that prompted the first
Latest Posts
Film festivals are so crucial to launching your film, giving it that initial exposure to key thought leaders in the press, test-driving it in front of audiences, making valuable contacts and finding distribution. Where you premiere your film is just as important as the apparatus you build to fortify your launch. It takes a team beyond your filmmaking team—of publicists, sales agents, advisors and participants in your film. And it takes money: travel and accommodations, marketing and promotional materials, etc. This winter, the coronavirus pandemic has been devastating in so many ways, and for
It's a crying shame that Cynthia Cooper is not a LeBron-level household name. Having won championships in college, at the Olympics and in the WNBA—where as a Houston Comet she was named MVP in the finals for four straight seasons (still a record) and anointed by fans as one of the Top 15 players in the league's history—does anyone doubt things would have been different had she been born into a non-patriarchal world? Hard to imagine any NBA athlete with that type of track record being exiled to 10 years of overseas play just to earn a talent-commensurate wage. And now with the COVID19 crisis
The arrest of Ugandan filmmaker and journalist Bwayo Moses on charges of “unlawful assembly” and “singing [a] song subverting or promoting subversion of the government of Uganda” represents an unwarranted and unjustifiable attack on artistic expression, and charges against him should immediately be dropped, PEN America, the International Documentary Association (IDA), and the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) said today.
In this time of social distancing and sequestration, Screen Time is here with a curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. PUSHOUT: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools, written and directed by Jacoba Atlas, exposes a new and troubling trend: African American girls are the fastest-growing population in the juvenile justice system and the only group of girls disproportionately experiencing harsh discipline at every educational level. PUSHOUT features heart-wrenching stories from girls ages 7 to 19 across the country as they
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! In the rapidly evolving world of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have witnessed a cavalcade of cancellations and closures this past week—festivals, markets, screenings, workshops, theaters, etc. A number of outlets out there have been busy monitoring and compiling some useful information. IndieWire has been keeping a regular tally of what's happening in the media arts world
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. To commemorate International Women's Day and Women's History Month, Women Make Movies is hosting a virtual film festival that highlights the new releases in the organization's Transnational Feminist Film collection. Throughout March, festival attendees will receive free access to select films about women from around the globe. Now streaming on American Masters, UNLADYLIKE2020 showcases 26 short films and one feature-length films profiling diverse and little-known American
This year's True/False Film Festival fought off COVID-19 with gallon jugs of hand sanitizer, outrageous costumes, and endless cocktails of creativity. Tucked into improbable venues throughout the college town of Columbia, Missouri, the festival showcases a wide range of documentary styles. It also attracts visual and musical artists throughout the Midwest, who showcase their art at the fest’s many venues. Now in its second year of post-founder operations, the festival’s theme was "Foresight," a capacious umbrella for a host of issues and approaches. Launched in 2003, True/False has a well
The swan song for John Cooper, following his stellar, three-decades-long tenure at the Sundance Film Festival, including 11 years at the helm, was overshadowed in the doc space by two bookended happenings: The wedding, apparently officiated by filmmaker Sam Green, of Sundance Documentary Film Program Director Tabitha Jackson and filmmaker Kirsten Johnson, to kick off the festival (the couple was introduced at the DFP party by DFP associate head Kirsten Feeley, to tumultuous applause), and, at festival’s end, the anointment of Jackson as Cooper’s successor. And in between those mighty paroxysms
Through a collection of 20 essays written over two decades, Patricia Zimmermann, Professor of Screen Studies at Ithaca College and co-director of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival, expands, questions and reflects upon our notion of documentary. In Documentary Across Platforms, she considers and analyzes the myriad approaches to documentary work that go far beyond the limited models of feature-length and television projects. To be clear, Zimmermann’s mission is not to present some alternative ways to make a documentary so that it is cutting-edge, or a how-to book for people who could