We are thrilled for the return of Documentary Magazine. For the past 42 years, it has served as a space for dialogue, provocation, and an archive of the documentary form’s power, persistence, and evolution. We want to give thanks to Tom White—who gave shape to the magazine for 22 years—alongside a devoted community of readers and contributors for getting us to this milestone. The magazine was paused for nearly a year following his departure, and issue #2 is presented with Abby Sun as its editor. Abby’s curiosity and intellect are boundless, and we join all of you in anticipation of what future issues will bring.
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Dear Readers, This issue returns Documentary Magazine to print after a 10-month pause. At first, the time off from printing allowed us to begin to
Dear Readers, This month, we’ve been hard at work putting together the next print issue of Documentary Magazine , which will be in the mailboxes of
Directed and produced by Toronto-based filmmaker Nisha Pahuja along with producers David Oppenheim, Anita Lee, Cornelia Principe, Andy Cohen, and
Kokomo City opens with a bang. Liyah is lying on her bed, a giant stuffed teddy bear in the background, as she recounts a past meeting with a man
The films of New Orleans-based filmmaker Nailah Jefferson share similar grievances despite a variety of subject matter. Some of them try to remain in
Dear Readers, We are galvanized by the gains for writers (and the precious few documentarians) who are members of WGA made from the new tentative
Narcissa Wright is best known for breaking the world record for speedrunning 'The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time' in 2014. Speedrunning, the practice of using glitches in a game to bypass huge segment sections and play through the entire game as quickly as possible, has a huge online fan base and viewership on Twitch, a popular live-streaming platform.
Many media depictions of Chicago don’t resonate with me. As someone raised in its northern suburbs, I’m happy to watch works such as "The Dark Knight" (2008), "Widows" (2018), or one of the Kartemquin documentaries shot in the city. However, most of them focus on the city’s corrupt politics or have a strong crime element in the story. In a saturated media market where (true) crime sells, a story’s criminal and political attention-grabbing subject can overshadow the aspirations of real-life residents.
In films like 'Hoop Dreams' (1994), 'Stevie' (2002), and 'The Interrupters' (2011) and television series like 'America to Me' (2018) and 'City So Real' (2020), Steve James has established himself as one of the preeminent observational documentarians in the US. Over nearly 30 years, he’s chronicled social change in Chicago via various ordinary citizens, from aspiring basketball players to antiviolence activists. In a departure for James, his latest film, 'A Compassionate Spy,' is a real-life espionage thriller about Theodore Hall, a young physicist on the Manhattan Project.