The outcome of the Platform Films meeting was the formation of the Miners’ Campaign Tapes Project, with 13 groups (including Platform; Trade Films in Gateshead and Newcastle; Chapter Community Video Workshop in Cardiff; Amber Films in Newcastle; Birmingham Film and Video Workshop; Open Eye Film and Video Workshop in Liverpool; Active Image in Rothertham and Sheffield; Films at Work in London; and the London Media Research Group) committed to producing footage interviewing miners and their supporters and documenting strike and fundraising activities. The material was then sent for editing down, mainly by Chris Reeves of Platform and Chris Ruston of London Video Arts, into what was originally planned to be 10 shorts and one feature-length work. The final project would consist of six short tapes.
Collectives
In the Winter 2024/2025 cover essay of Documentary magazine, No Other Land’s collective of Palestinian and Israeli co-directors imagine a reciprocal, shared future in front of and behind the camera.
Before A-Doc (Asian American Documentary Network) formed its roots at IDA’s 2016 Getting Real conference, there was a decades-long history of Asian
That NoCut has no physical office, that it is registered in Romania and India (unofficially floating into Belgium), and that its members frequently navigate three different time zones to set up meetings, are all appropriate given its origin story. Rothe, Rinaldi, and Hanes met ten years ago as classmates in DocNomads, the Erasmus Mundus master’s program in documentary filmmaking. Run by a consortium of three universities in Portugal, Hungary, and Belgium, DocNomads is a fully funded course for students from all over the globe, with an emphasis on teamwork and coproduction, which explains why many of its graduates often end up working with each other later. Helping each other with student projects, the three women developed a working rapport even as they fell into a thick friendship.
When good intentions meet bad assumptions on the film festival circuit Editor’s Note: The writers are the co-directors and executive producers of The
Jean-Marie Teno is Africa’s preeminent documentary filmmaker. With a critical eye and a sharp wit, he questions the established truth, exposes the
Amid industry disruption, filmmakers search for marketing and data solutions in community.
Imagine the hallways of Cornell University, a quiet, comfortable campus in upstate New York, in the mid-1970s. Now imagine, in one of the Ivy League rooms, a Marxist reading group that brings together students and professors from different generations, ethnicities, and countries. They are united by an urgency to make revolutionary art and contribute to the dismantling of imperialist capitalism. This is the origin story of the Victor Jara Collective, a coalition of artists and activists named after the revolutionary Chilean musician assassinated during the Pinochet regime.
When Yolŋu filmmaker Ishmael Marika first found a 1970s recording of his grandfather speaking to his fathers as a small child, he was overwhelmed. He