The image of a nation is never fixed. Scenes of a shared land are regularly in conflict, reductive of the multiple heritages and cultures contained within the borders of a country. The international perception of Britain during the grand finale Brexit is of a country in a state of confused direction and identity, where beams of creative vibrance are dullened by the cloak of a political dark age. While fiction can project and escape this farce, what of nonfiction, a space embedded in the real, tethered to truth and the evolving shape of actuality? What is British nonfiction cinema in this
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"When you raise a child, the days are long and the years are short." So says Raphaela Neihausen, executive director of DOC NYC, who together with her husband, the festival's artistic director, Thom Powers, gave birth to their son the same year that DOC NYC was born ten years ago. "I kind of raised them both together." In that first launch year, there were a handful of people in a basement doing every task—just like making a documentary film. A decade later, it is the largest American documentary festival, held over nine days in New York City, showing over 300 films in 21 sections, with 500
Dr. Victor Rios, the lead character of Katie Galloway and co-director Dawn Valadez's The Pushouts, is the first professor to be featured as "Doc Star of the Month." An Associate Dean of Social Science and Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Rios is also the author of five books (titles include Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys; Project GRIT: Generating Resilience to Inspire Transformation; and Human Targets: Schools, Police, and the Criminalization of Latino Youth), not to mention a popular TED Talk. (1.3 million views and counting!) But
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Coming December 19 on Ovid.TV is Bill Morrison's IDA Documentary Award winner, Dawson City: Frozen Time. The film takes the 1978 discovery of a long-lost collection of nitrate film prints buried under a swimming pool in the Yukon Territory as a pretext for a deeper exploration of time, history and preservation. Also coming on December 19, The Criterion Channel presents Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One, William Greaves' meta meditation on making movies. This 1968 gem features
Essential Doc Reads is a weekly feature in which the IDA staff recommends recent pieces about the documentary form and its processes. Here we feature think pieces and important news items from around the Internet, and articles from the Documentary magazine archive. We hope you enjoy! Writing for Filmmaker, programmer/critic Abby Sun offers an insightful critique of the documentary ecology--particularly festivals and organizations and their need for structural and systemic change, despite their seeming embrace of #DecolonizeDocs ideas. We all need to work through what is merely a symptom of a
Los Angeles, CA (December 7, 2019) - The International Documentary Association (IDA) handed out the 35th Annual IDA Documentary Awards tonight at a ceremony at Paramount Studios in Los Angeles. For Sama, by Waad al-Kateab and Edward Watts, received the Best Feature Documentary Award. Al-Kateab also received IDA’s Courage Under Fire Award. The award for Best Director went to Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert for the Netflix/Higher Ground Production American Factory. Learning to Skateboard in a Warzone (if you're a girl), by Carol Dysinger, received the award for Best Short, while the Best Music
The Sublimity of Document: Cinema as Diorama by Scott MacDonald Oxford University Press 2019 In an interview with Austrian documentary filmmaker Nickolas Geyrhalter regarding his 2016 film Homo Sapiens, the intrepid film theorist, critic, educator and author Scott MacDonald stated, "You find a way to transform the decay we are seeing into something sublime." To which Geyrhalter responded, "If hypothetically there would no longer be humans, the world–nature–would not miss us and would immediately cope with the new situation. We would be missing but nobody and nothing would care. I wanted to
It is the documentary artform's responsibility to keep viewers informed and intrigued about the world at large. As such, documentaries have always been central in raising awareness around sociopolitical issues, and giving a voice to those working towards an equitable society, defending civil rights and fighting for the inalienable rights afforded to all human beings around the world. For Human Rights Day, we turn our attention to these particular stories and their cultural importance. Whether it's the ongoing struggle for peace in war-torn Syria, or the fundamental question of accountability
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Right on the heels of the IDA Documentary Awards, here's where you can catch most of the winners: Best Feature: For Sama (Director/Producer: Waad al-Kateab; Director: Edward Watts) Now Streaming on Frontline: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/for-sama/ Best Short: Learning to Skate in a Warzone (if you’re a girl) (Director: Carol Dysinger; Producer: Elena Andreicheva) Now streaming on AETV.com: Pare Lorentz Award and Best Cinematography Award: Honeyland (Director
Essential Doc Reads is a weekly feature in which the IDA staff recommends recent pieces about the documentary form and its processes. Here we feature think pieces and important news items from around the Internet, and articles from the Documentary magazine archive. We hope you enjoy! IDA Executive Director Simon Kilmurruy, in an opinion piece for the Los Angeles Times, calls into question the Trump Administration's new visa application requirements, which would force applicants to disclose their social media handles over the past five years. IDA and Doc Society have jointly filed a lawsuit