On Christmas Eve of 1989, a pregnant mother of nine named Imelda Bbaale was inexplicably shot and killed in her home. It was a shocking tragedy that forced Imelda’s husband to flee with his young children to a different continent with the murder remaining unsolved. Nearly a quarter century on, Imelda’s daughter Patricia Bbaale Bandak gave birth to her own baby girl (also Imelda) on that very same horrible yet holy date. The coincidence catalyzed Bandak, now an acclaimed Ugandan-Danish filmmaker, to return to her native land to seek answers—less about the circumstances surrounding her mother's
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If Alex Garland's fictional film about a hypothetical new American Civil War feels insufficiently political, Charlie Sadoff's Against All Enemies, warning of the ways a real one could come about, may be more suitable. Now on VOD, and burning up the iTunes charts, Against All Enemies is produced by the liberal PAC Meidas Touch, Restrepo (2010) director Sebastian Junger, Ken Harbaugh, and Sadoff.
SECTION 1: Julian When I began the lengthy process of reporting and directing my feature documentary, The Holly (2022), there were plenty of indications of potential pitfalls. The story involved a gang shooting case, possible police corruption, and a historic community on edge from a rash of shootings, an ongoing effort to gentrify it, and decades of mistreatment by powerful forces in Denver. Still, I didn’t imagine that just as we were preparing to launch the film’s festival run that my entire team would be served legal papers at their homes in a defamation lawsuit that threatened to derail
The question of how to build a more open and equitable film festival is an old and still pressing concern. Ideally, there will be a plurality of answers and the Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival may be one of them. Its 2024 edition, which ran 7–10 March, felt like a festival whose program was not only deeply engaged with larger political struggles, but also open and malleable in a way that many festivals claim but rarely enact in the relations underpinning the screenings.
What would life be like in America? By the time we fled Uganda, there had been two attempted kidnappings of my wife, Nulu. I had been shot in the face at close range while filming, arrested, thrown in a crammed police cell, and denied access to a lawyer.
American Documentary, the nonprofit organization behind POV, POV Shorts , and America ReFramed , announces the 12 selected Wyncote Fellows who will attend the PBS Annual Meeting in a curated program. A unique opportunity that introduces filmmakers to the labyrinthian world of the PBS Annual Meeting, the seventh annual Wyncote Fellowship is coordinated by AmDoc in collaboration between PBS Indies partners POV , Firelight Media, ITVS, Reel South, America ReFramed , WORLD, and the five organizational members of the National Multicultural Alliance: Black Public Media, Center for Asian American
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.
During the closing remarks at the Getting Real '24 conference on April 18, IDA's Executive Director Dominic Asmall Wilssdon announced the new collaboration between Sheffield DocFest and the International Documentary Association (IDA) for the Alternate Realities Exhibition and Summit during the 31st edition of Sheffield DocFest taking place 12 - 17 June 2024. An international collaboration supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.
There’s a scrappiness behind Memory’s sleek exterior and dedicated cult following. The L.A.-based production company has only two full-time employees: its founders Sebastian Pardo and Riel Roch-Decter. The duo sought to create both a low-budget dream factory for passion projects and a sustainable network of filmmakers working in the DIY ethos of the 2000s, but with the stylistic inclinations of tidier, higher-budget productions.
In these first couple of months as IDA’s executive director, a few lines by the cultural thinker Paul Gilroy have been on my mind. They indicate, for me, something of the purpose of documentary filmmaking.