Access is one of the cornerstones of documentary production that allows a filmmaker to tell urgent stories. Access may imply risk for the filmmakers or for the protagonists, or it might mean complicity with power to be able to make one’s film.
Getting Real
Jean-Marie Teno is Africa’s preeminent documentary filmmaker. For almost four decades, he has been producing and directing films about the inheritance of a colonial system in Cameroon and the wider African continent.
There has been an alarming increase in threats to filmmaker freedom of speech in the past year, from the loss of funding and distribution of work to the loss of residencies and teaching positions and the reality of being publicly targeted for actions as small as signing petitions and liking social media posts.
In her keynote address, Jemma Desai will question the role of integrity in the documentary field. James Baldwin understood the integrity of artists as an analogue for the integrity of being human.
Never in human history has the global circulation of images happened at the speed and scale it is now. When cameras were invented over 200 years ago, they required people to operate them. Besides machine-operated surveillance cameras and drones, we now see images that are generated by AI in the absence of both human bodies and minds.
Thanks for getting real with us at our sixth biennial Getting Real conference! 1500+ documentary practitioners attended in person in Los Angeles and virtually from 40+ countries.
Whether we are unemployed creatives, overwhelmed freelancers, or underpaid employees, it can often seem like everyone else has figured it out. Social media is a constant stream of people announcing new jobs, festival screenings, and prestigious grants and awards. Yet more often than not, the filmmaker who had the big premiere, received all the accolades, and even successfully sold their film is still struggling to get by, just like the rest of us. So how are filmmakers actually making a living?
In this Fireside Chat, IDA’s Executive Director Dominic Asmall Willsdon will draw Burnett into a wide-ranging conversation about his work, which includes a new documentary in production.
Kirsten Johnson has been a cinematographer and director since the 1980s. Her acclaimed films as a director include The Above (short, 2015)
Over the years, Jemma Desai’s writing, programming, research, and practice have intersected with institutional critique. Through investigating film