Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Right on the heels of Mother's Day, the new New Yorker documentary, artist Titus Kaphar’s I Hold Your Love, is a “quiet vignette” that reminds us just how frightening it is for women of color to give birth in the US. Kaphar’s most recognizable series shows Black mothers holding a blank space meant to symbolize their babies. Featuring Kaphar’s friend Serena Williams and others in his family, the documentary is a celebration of Black motherhood as much as it is a reminder of

Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. At IDA, we believe in championing stories that are about protecting people’s freedoms—be it someone’s sexuality, their decision to give birth (or not), or their decision to marry their partner of choice. The last 24 hours have been harrowing for us, as they should’ve been for anyone who believes in human rights. With the leaked draft of a Supreme Court majority opinion calling for the overturning of Roe v. Wade, this week’s Screen Time is dedicated to the organizations and

Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Black Maternal Health Week, which takes place between April 11–17, was officially recognized by the White House on April 13, 2021. Within a world where every social system is plagued by racism and misogyny, the USA alone reports a maternal mortality rate in Black women that is two to three times higher than that of white women. The BMHW 2022 theme this year is “Building for Liberation: Centering Black Mamas, Black Families and Black Systems of Care.” Our Screen Time this week

Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. We have been spending this awards season celebrating the talent and genius of all the filmmakers whose works got nominated for awards. Our work here at Documentary magazine gives us a rare sneak peek into the intense labor and multiple heartbreaks that go into the making of these films. This week, we celebrate them, and every other filmmaker who still finds it in themselves to continue telling stories. This week’s Screen Time, in honor of the Oscars, goes down the dusty lanes

Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. It’s been a heartbreaking week for the documentary world, as we suffered the loss of two of our most esteemed colleagues. Brent Renaud—the Peabody-winning journalist, documentary filmmaker, and photojournalist—was in Ukraine’s Irpin city, documenting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, when he was killed by Russian forces. Along with his brother, Craig Renaud, Brent made several documentaries that documented racism, war, America’s addiction crisis, creative processes of artists

Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Today is International Working Women’s Day and while many companies will have us believe that it’s a day about spa coupons, roses and cute bracelets, it’s actually a day that demands that we look at women’s—all women’s—labor: how we acknowledge it, how we appreciate it, and—most importantly—how we compensate it. Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar’s 9to5: The Story of a Movement, available for viewing on PBS’ Independent Lens, is a documentation of the efforts of a group of

Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. As the tragedy and the resistance both unfold in Ukraine this week, we offer a selection of documentaries, in solidarity with the struggle and the beauty of the Ukrainian people. The International Coalition For Filmmakers at Risk is putting together an emergency fund. Please consider making a donation here. Iryna Tsilyk’s The Earth Is Blue as an Orange, for which Viacheslav Tsvietkov won a 2020 IDA Documentary Award for Best Cinematography, follows single mother Hanna and her

Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. With just a little less than a month in, 2022 has already been a difficult year, and we’ve lost far too many cultural icons. The larger-than-life former editor-at-large at Vogue, André Leon Talley, passed away last week. You can celebrate his life and career by watching Kate Novack’s The Gospel According to Andre, which is streaming on Hulu. Featuring the likes of Anna Wintour, Marc Jacobs and Whoopi Goldberg, the film gives us a deep insight into Talley’s fascinating legacy

The 36th season of PBS’ American Masters premieres today, January 11, with Jamila Wignot’s Ailey, the definitive documentary about the life and works of dancer Alvin Ailey, who founded the influential studio Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in 1958, at age 27. The film is a celebration of the beauty and radicality of the Black body that Ailey centered and wove magic with. As we begin to navigate a world without the legendary Betty White, we are grateful for Steven J. Boettcher’s PBS documentary, Betty White: First Lady of Television, which documents and celebrates the legacy of White, who

Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Start your year with the magical Aretha Franklin performing songs from her best-selling gospel album. Alan Elliott and Sydney Pollack’s Amazing Grace unearths Franklin’s 1972 performance at Los Angeles’ New Temple Missionary Baptist Church, and resurrects it into this breathtaking documentary that leaves us glowing in the aftermagic of the vision that is Aretha Franklin. Watch the film on YouTube. Over at the Criterion Channel, you can now watch a fantastic curation of the