Ira Glass to Host 2009 IDA Documentary Awards
The International Documentary Association is proud to announce that Ira Glass will host the 2009 IDA Documentary Awards, Fri. Dec. 4 at 8 p.m. at the Directors Guild of America, 7920 Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles, CA.
IDA welcomes back Ira Glass, himself an IDA Award recipient, as host of the 2009 Awards. Glass is host and producer of This American Life, heard on more than 500 public radio stations each week by over 1.8 million listeners. This American Life has won the highest honors for broadcasting and journalistic excellence, including several Peabody and DuPont-Columbia awards. In March 2007, the television adaptation of This American Life premiered on Showtime to great acclaim winning IDA's Distinguished Continuing Series Award in 2008 as well as several Emmy awards in 2008 and 2009.
Join Ira and IDA as we honor the best documentaries of the year!
More honorees and nominees will be announced soon.Check here for more info, news, and updates.
Four months after leaving this planet, Michael Jackson returned to the screen, and This Is It, directed by Kenny Ortega, earned $34,492,926 in its first five days of release, surpassing Earth, the big hit from DisneyNature, to take over the number one spot in among docs at the box office. Whether the King of Pop can take out the all-time reigning champ, Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 911 , in This Is It's second and final week in the theaters remains to be seen.
But one of the real unsung success stories of 2009 is Aviva Kempner's Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg, the profile of pioneering television and radio star Gertrude Berg. Since its July 10th release through International Film Circuit, the film has been touring the country, with the indefatigable Kempner ensuring that those who grew up watching and listening to Berg would come out to see her again on the big screen. As the filmmaker was quoted in indieWIRE in a statement, "After four months of traveling around with the film all over America, I am thrilled that Berg is no longer ‘the most famous woman in America that you've never heard of,' thanks to InFC's fine handling of the film. It also proves that docs that appeal to older audiences like The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg can be commercial successes. Never underestimate the interests of senior citizens, even though they pay less for a movie!!!"
Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg has earned $1,029,982 to date. Kempner's previous film, The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg, took in $1,712,385. For a Documentary Online article about Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg, click here.
Here are the top 11 highest grossing docs of 2009. I count Waltz with Bashir among the 11, even though it was released in the last week of 2008.
1) Michael Jackson's This Is It $34,442,926
2) Earth $32,011,576
3) Capitalism: A Love Story $13,664,911
4) Food, Inc. $ 4,410,116
5) The September Issue $ 3,590,087
6) Good Hair $ 3,453,044
7) Waltz with Bashir $ 2,283,849
8) Valentino: The Last Emperor $ 1,755,134
9) Every Little Step $ 1,725,141
10) It Might Get Loud $ 1,523,776
11) Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg $ 1,029,982
AFI DigiFest offers attendees a window onto the most compelling examples of new media storytelling and associated cross-platform engagement opportunities. The audience will be made up of some of the most interesting minds in our industry.
And the best part? It's free! All you need to do is pre-register right here.
Day one focuses on projects incubated in the AFI Digital Content Lab such as Interview Project Presented by davidlynch.com, a proposed online strategy for engaging youth in a series of relevant environmental action challenges for the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation and more.
Day two offers a curated look at the most innovative digital media productions released during the past year, including a 3D animation pieced together from contributions by thousands of animators from around the world, storytelling application for the iPhone and more.
It's the dream of every social-issue documentarian: to inspire a happy, ongoing epilogue to one's work, whether through dialogue or action, or improved conditions or relations, or funding for the cause. Mai Iskander's Garbage Dreams, which follows three teenage boys involved with the Spirit of Youth Association, the Cairo-based organization of Zaballeen (Arabic for "Garbage People") as they embark on a journey to turn their century-old recycling trade into a 21st century job, has been the toast of the festival circuit, landing, among other kudos, the 2009 Al Gore REEL Current Award at the Nashville Film Festival, and screening to great acclaim at IDA's DocuWeeks. But this past week at the International Sustainability Conference in Cairo, Islander and her film hit the jackpot: Following a screening of Garbage Dreams, Melanie Walker of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced a $1 million grant in support of the Spirit of Youth Association.
"This year, since we heard about this film, we invited Mai to come screen the film [Garbage Dreams] for us at our foundation," Walker explained to the audience. "It [Garbage Dreams] is very eye-opening. Because you can hear about it, but then you see it and it becomes very much more real and you can start to think about ways to try to help and be involved. We are privileged to have had that opportunity. . . Our goal is to try empower groups such as these and others around the world."
Ezzat Naem Guindy, executive director of the Spirit of Youth Association, responded, "We are honored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for honoring us as Zaballeen. . . We will use these funds to build the capacity of our team, the capacity of our people, and to spread income generating projects and awareness such as the source segregation campaign . . . So that Garbage Dreams becomes a reality."
The Spirit of Youth Association runs the community-based Recycling School for Zaballeen youth; spreads the concept of waste segregation, recycling and renewable energies; and advocates for the garbage collectors community, in particular their integration into the formal sector of Cairo's solid waste management.
For an interview with Mai Iskander in conjunction with DocuWeeks, click here.
Wildlife fan? Nat Geo's got a project that's right up your alley! As reported in RealScreen, National Geographic Society and National Geographic Channels have announced the undertaking of the largest global television event and cross-platform initiative in the institution's history. Entitled Greatest Migrations, the project includes a seven-hour television mini-series, a 300+ page book, a children's book, iPhone apps, a lecture series and screenings, exhbits, and a series of National Geographic Expedition trips, among other elements. From RealScreen:
"The scope of this project draws upon all of the Society's passion for the natural world," said Michael Rosenfeld, president of National Geographic Television, in a statement. "We are using every resource at our disposal to produce and distribute this spectacular content in a coordinated effort across all media platforms. Many of the planet's great migrations are at risk, so the series is going to illuminate the fragile existence of these great animal movements and inspire a worldwide movement to protect them."
The editors of Newsweek, Maziar, and his bride Paola Gourley would like to thank the thousands of friends, colleagues and well-wishers around the world whose support over the last few months has helped to make this moment possible. Your efforts have been invaluable, and the family is deeply grateful. They ask only that they be allowed some time alone together now after their long and trying separation.
Claims of posing, false captioning, and faking regularly appear in much the same way as they appeared in the 1930s. Clearly, Photoshop is not the cause of these controversies. They predate Photoshop and other modern means of altering photographs by more than a half century. But they allow us to ask an important question. What can we of the Great Recession learn from the photographs of the Great Depression?
ESPN is rolling out the beginning of its ambitious "30 for 30" series--in which the network enlisted 30 filmmakers to make 30 docs about sports to celebrate, yep, 30 years of covering sports.
The series started this month with Kings Ransom (by Peter Berg) about Wayne Gretzky's career with the Los Angeles Kings and featured a film by Academy Award-winning filmmaker Barry Levinson about the Baltimore Colts' shocking move in 1984. A doc about Muhammad Ali by Albert and David Maysles premiered tonight. And there's still 26 to go! (If you missed some premieres, don't sweat it, they're repeating on ESPN's various nets for some time.)
The concept came from popular ESPN columnist Bill Simmons, who explains the beginning in one of his usually-entertaining way. "It started out as a one-paragraph e-mail in 2007. And only because I love documentaries.," he writes. "The goal of a well-written piece and a well-done documentary is fundamentally the same: you pick a story that hasn’t been fully explored yet, you throw yourself into it and you make it sing."
Real Screen checked in with ESPN Films exec director Connor Schell to see how it's going. Schell couldn't have been happier about the sucess so far. Seems even couch potatoes can get into the sports thing with these films. From the interview:
They were made for both [sport and documentary fans]. I think we program for sports fans and we try to tell sports stories in all sorts of ways and the documentary form is just another great way to reach them and tell compelling stories. If some of these films reach a different audience and bring them to our network, that's fantastic, but first and foremost we want to just tell great sport stories and let an audience enjoy them.
We couldn't agree more. And with docs about sport analyist Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder, to horse racing, to O.J. Simpson's infamous white Bronco car chase and more on tap, we'll be watching.
The International Documentary Association is proud to annouce the following information about the IDA Documentary Awards 2009.
The event will take place on Friday, December 4, 2009 at the Directors Guild of America, 7920 Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles, CA. Purchase your tickets now!
On that evening, the IDA will award its prestigious 2009 Career Achievement Award to legendary and innovative filmmaker Errol Morris. Given to a filmmaker who has made a major impact on the documentary genre through a long and distinguished body of work, the IDA Career Achievement Award has previously been awarded to Sheila Nevins, Michael Apted, Ken Burns, Albert Maysles, Haskell Wexler, Michael Moore, and last year’s recipient, Werner Herzog. Part detective, part philosopher, part poet, part iconoclast, Errol Morris is one of the most important and influential non-fiction filmmakers of his generation. His movies have achieved great critical success, and he has received a Guggenheim fellowship and a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant. His artistic journey has resulted in such landmark works as The Thin Blue Line, Standard Operating Procedure and Academy Award Winner The Fog of War.
Host, More Honorees, and Nominees will be announced soon.
Listen up, the IDA is proud to host a screening of Neil Young Trunk Show, the next great concert film that dares to capture rocker Neil Young on and off stage. The Wed. Nov 4, 10:30 pm screening takes place at the Grauman's Chinese Theater in Hollywood as part of the AFI FEST 2009. The screening (as are all AFI FEST 2009 screenings) is free.
After months of battling, Dole Food Company, Inc. has announced that it is dismissing its defamation lawsuit against filmmakers Fredrik Gertten, Margarete Jangard and WG Film AB in the Los Angeles Superior Court, relating to the film "Bananas!*." Read about some of the drama here. Dole stated that it made its decision “in light of the free speech concerns being expressed in Sweden, although it continues to believe in the merits of its case.” (from indieWIRE)
Hot on the heels of the release of their most recent movie, The Yes Men Fix the World (and a much-publicized stunt involving the U.S. Chamber of Commerce), the activists-pranksters Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno, (known collectively as The Yes Men) are receiving their own channel on Babelgum. The channel will feature behind-the-scenes planning of The Yes Men's pranks and media post-mortems for past stunts not seen in their films, The Yes Men and The Yes Men Save the World. Check it out here: www.babelgum.com/yesmen.B-Side Entertainment announced that it has acquired Alex Vlack and Damani Baker's portrait of soul legend Bill Withers Still Bill, which will be released via the distributor's Theatrical-on-Demand program where individuals and organizations can host a screening of any size, in any location, at any time. Still Bill's website will allow audiences to sign up to host their own screening of the film. (via indieWIRE)
Can we pick 'em or what? A Walk To Beautiful, which won the 2007 IDA Award for Feature Documentary also walked away with an Emmy last month for Outstanding Informational Programming -- Long Form thanks to an airing on NOVA. The filmmakers said thanks with the following release: "Thanks to many of you for watching the film at its initial small screenings, and then at the film festivals - first one then two then 30 and growing - then in theaters during our feature release, additional requested screenings across the country and internationally, and then on television when it was broadcast (in shorter form) on NOVA, and to those of you who supported our efforts in other important ways behind the scenes. Winning the Emmy Award is a huge achievement particularly considering this was produced without major broadcaster support until late in the process and took four years to produce." Missed the movie? Pick up a DVD at http://www.walktobeautiful.com.
Well, if you are Marina Zenovich, director of Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, and a panelist on The Digital Documentarian at the Digital Hollywood Fall conference (presented by the IDA), you hit film festival pay dirt and get the distribution deal of a lifetime at Sundance Film Festival. Marina has international distribution with The Weinstein Company, a limited domestic theatrical release by THINKfilms and cable distribution on HBO. Other documentary filmmakers also screening at Sundance that year, including fellow panelist Rebecca Yeldham, producer of Anvil! The Story of Anvil were green with envy at the time as they waited for their own lucrative distribution deals that never materialized. But what I learned sitting and listening to the panel, which also included Matt Tyrnauer (director, Valentino: The Last Emperor), Courtney Sexton (Participant Media) and Scott Hamilton Kennedy (director, The Garden) and moderated by IDA President Eddie Schmidt, is that what seems like pay dirt at the time can actually come with a huge down side: Marina no longer owns the rights to her film. She has no “say so” how the film is marketed or distributed nor can she profit from its future sales.
All of the panelists agreed, including Marina, a filmmaker should never, when at all possible, give up that much control of their film. Rebecca Yeldham, Anvil’s producer, finally did get calls about distributing her film but she felt that the offers were too low and decided go with her gut instinct not to sell the film. She instead decided to self distribute, using social media networks and some very famous fans of the film to promote Anvil which led to screenings with live performances from the band around the country and a band appearance on The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien. Eventually, she sold the DVD and television rights to VH1. Scott Hamilton Kennedy got a distribution deal through Oscilloscope Pictures, which is partly owned by Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys. Scott was able to maintain some of the rights to his film to The Garden and can sell DVDs of his film from his website and at screenings and yes…pocketing those profits!
Besides talk of money, rights and ups and downs of the business, we attendees got to watch clips of their completed films and works in progress in addition to hearing some great stories about how these films got made. The best stories came from Matt Tyrnauer, director of Valentino, who was advised early on that his crew must all look like male models because the fashion designer, Valentino, must always be surrounded by beautiful things! Furthermore, the crew had a strict dress code, I believe he the mentioned both blazers and slacks. Can you imagine?
More importantly, Matt discussed the equipment and format he shot on and how digital media has revolutionized the art of documentary filmmaking something which all of the panelists agreed on. Can you imagine trying to shoot intimate discussions between a designer and his lover with a 35mm camera? How many cameras would you need for coverage? What could you miss while changing the mag? I could go on but the idea is that digital technology and the web is revolutionizing how we are conceptualizing, executing, promoting and distributing our films and making the once overwhelming task of documentary filmmaking and distribution accessible to all.
Federal Judge Dale Fischer on Monday denied a request for an injunction to block the release of the documentary, which is going wide this week, The Wrap reported. Plaintiff Regina Kimbell is seeking to block the film's release as part of a $5 million lawsuit she filed on Oct. 5.
Kimbell claims there are similarities between Good Hair and her film, My Nappy Roots: A Journey Through Black Hair-itage, which she also claims Chris Rock screened on the set of his TV show Everyboody Hates Chris in 2007. Rock co-produced, co-wrote, narrates and appears in Good Hair, which focuses on African-American hair culture.
“We always knew that it would be tough getting the judge to grant a request for a preliminary injunction," said Kimbell's attorney, Reginald K. Brown. "We are looking forward to going to trial."