Garrett Bradley in Conversation with Dawn Porter

The 36th Annual IDA Documentary Awards is honoring Garrett Bradley with the Emerging Documentary Filmmaker Award for her feature debut, Time. In conversation with Bradley is award-winning filmmaker, Dawn Porter.

Garrett Bradley works across narrative, documentary and experimental modes of filmmaking to address themes such as race, class, familial relationships, social justice, Southern culture and the history of film in the United States. Her collaborative and research-based approach to filmmaking is often inspired by the real-life stories of her subjects. For Bradley, this research takes multiple forms—deep dives into historical archives, in-depth dialogues prompted by Craigslist want-ads or an extended engagement with the communities and individuals she seeks to represent—and results in works that combine both scripted and improvisatory scenes. Bradley’s films explore the space between fact and fiction, embracing modes of working and of representing history that blur the boundaries between traditional notions of narrative and documentary cinema. Her rigorous explorations of the social, economic and racial politics of everyday life—its joys, pleasures and pains—are lyrically and intimately rendered on screen.

The video includes ASL interpretation and open captions.