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At Double Exposure Investigative Film Festival, come for the recent festival winners that share a common DNA: investigative journalism. And stay for the conversations about how to do it right. This elegantly curated (by Co-creator/Co-director Sky Sitney) and expertly organized (by Founder/Co-director and former New York Times journalist Diana Schemo) is a rare and much-needed site to discuss journalistic documentary and see its latest exemplars. The Stuff of Nightmares There were nightmare-inducing films, with actionable political revelations here in the US. Erika Cohn’s Belly of the Beast

The feature documentary shortlist includes 30 films from 21 countries. 38% of directors and 55% of producers are women, 30% of directors and 28% identify as BIPOC. Additionally, 8% of directors and 7% of producers are LGBTQ. 5% of directors and 3% of producers are disabled.

There are plenty of films made by creators in the IDA family to catch. Check out the IDA-supported titles at DOC NYC this year, including IDA Enterprise Documentary Fund and Pare Lorentz Documentary Fund grantees, fiscally sponsored projects and DocuClub alumnus.

It’s been more than nine months since the deadly movement of COVID-19 from China to North America and Europe—and nearly every other continent—utterly changed the world. Since that time, more than a million people have died. Now, most of us wear masks when we go outside and use hand sanitizers before entering shops. When we meet friends, a six-foot social distancing rule is applied by most of us. The world has, for the time being, become something else, something that some documentarians want to shoot—or, in any case, must deal with in what is, at least temporarily, a “new normal.” While a

Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. City So Real, a five-part series from Steve James, Kartemquin Films and Participant, premieres in its entirety on October 29 on National Geographic; all five episodes will be available October 30 on HULU. This complex portrait of contemporary Chicago delivers a deep, multifaceted look into the soul of a quintessentially American city, set against the backdrop of its history-making 2019 mayoral election. The series opens in 2018 as Mayor Rahm Emanuel, embroiled in accusations

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! Equal, a new docuseries about the history of the LGBTQ+ movement, premiered October 22 on HBO Max. The Los Angeles Times’ Laura Zornosa talks to some of the artists behind the making of the series. In a lot of ways, what we’ve done is a primer: a very slick, beautiful, edgy, hip primer for all this history,” showrunner Stephen Kijak told The Times, “that we hope kicks

By Julie Angell, Steven C. Beer & Neil J. Rosini

Stanley Nelson and Marcia Smith are celebrating 20 years of building Firelight Media into a company that tells eloquent stories about Black people, events and movements and is leading the charge empowering filmmakers of color to create their own work. “The very first day, the two of us were sitting there looking at each other in our spare bedroom,” Smith recalls. “It was the fall of 2000 and we were like, ‘OK, great, we did it. Now, what’s it mean?’” The initial conversations between Nelson and Smith about Firelight—who are partners in life as well as film—were about starting a nonprofit and

When Bonni Cohen and Lisa Chanoff founded Catapult Film Fund in 2010 to support documentary filmmakers with development funding, “The fundamental idea,” according to Chanoff, was to “provide funding for documentaries at a stage when there was, at that time, very little support; and when we were thinking of development, we were thinking before there was any proof of concept, sample or trailer.” Catapult has continued to grow and evolve over the past ten years, providing grantees with continued mentorship and access to follow-up Momentum Grants and Consulting Grants in addition to development

The issue of ethics has driven the documentary field in various ways and in various degrees of emphases and urgency since the beginnings of the art form, when Robert Flaherty’s 1922 documentary Nanook of the North would later be taken to task about its use of reenactments and recreations, and in more recent years, as a prototype for extractive storytelling. The 2009 study from the Center for Media and Social Impact, " Honest Truths: Documentary Filmmakers on Ethical Challenges in Their Work," spearheaded by then Center Director Pat Aufderheide and research fellows Peter Jaszi and Mridu Chandra