Essential Doc Reads is a weekly feature in which the IDA staff recommends recent pieces about the documentary form and its processes. Here we feature think pieces and important news items from around the Internet, and articles from the Documentary magazine archive. We hope you enjoy!
In the continuing wake of the devastating massacre in Orlando, Casey de la Rosa of Sundance.org offers a selection of docs for required viewing.
Despite this tragedy, there’s a lot for us to be proud of this LGBT Pride month — including the fact that this is a community of fighters. We’ve had to fight for every right we’ve gotten in the last 50 years, and the progress we’ve made — and the progress we have yet to make — is well-documented in these and other films. Above all else, these films chronicle the difference each of us can make, and show us how to turn pain and anger into a force for good.
Nick Allen of RogerEbert.com interviews filmmaker/journalist David Farrier about his much-talked-about film Tickled.
That’s the way I’ve always treated my TV stories, to be a bit irreverent and to be serious but not too serious, to be funny but not too funny. And so I think that translated into the film. But also, we’re all aware that this whole thing started as a bit of a joke. It was in the newsroom when I saw the video. I was laughing, like “What is this? This is the funniest thing I’ve seen.” And then it got darker and darker as time went on, and then when I was in Muskegon, I wasn’t finding things very funny and I think that translates in what happens as well.
Filmmaker’s Evan Louison talks to Martin Bell about his follow-up to his and late wife/partner Mary Ellen Mark’s Streetwise, TINY The Life of Erin Blackwell.
It’s a difficult thing, when you see something happen and can’t actually do anything, but my job is to record it. When you see it happen, you feel something — you can’t not. But it’s also part of the story that you’re capturing. If you switch the camera off and try to do something, you’re not going to have a film. You’re no longer doing your job. I’m there showing you that there’s something seriously wrong here. Of course I was angry and concerned when someone we knew was at risk, and some of them did die. Roberta Hayes died at the hands of Gary Ridgeway [the Green River Killer]. At the end of Tiny, you see Mary Ellen getting a ticket from a cop for jaywalking. Directly behind her, kids are getting into cars with johns. They’re underage. Where is the concern there? It seems to be accepted.
Natalie Jarvey of The Hollywood Reporter speculates on the future of Vimeo as a subscription model.
[CEO Kerry] Trainor's Vimeo exit, which comes amid general executive turnover at [Barry] Diller's IAC, opens the door to bring fresh blood into a business built mostly to serve filmmakers that now wants to lean toward a consumer subscription service. It's a moment of inflection for 12-year-old Vimeo, considered the No. 2 user-driven streaming service behind YouTube, that observers say is indicative of a larger question about how to compete in the age of Netflix. "IAC is looking at, ultimately, what's the bigger opportunity," says Oppenheimer internet analyst Jason Helfstein.
Technology and media strategy expert Shelly Palmer explores the ramifications of the federal appeals court ruling last week about net neutrality.
A federal appeals court upheld the rights of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to regulate broadband (wired and wireless) under Title II of the 1934 Communications Act (Title II). Or, to put it another way, regulate the Internet in 2016 like it was the phone system in 1934. This is a big win for the FCC. But what does it mean for you?
From Medium.com, Brenda Laurel, PhD, deploys her decades-long scholarship in computer games to clarify just what really is VR and what are its antecedents.
In Conclusion, this article is not to disparage any of the vibrant exploration of immersive media going on today. Great technical improvements are making great progress; e.g., frame rate, visual convergence, 3D modeling, and fine-tuned body tracking through video or other means. My intent is to describe in specific terms the formal and structural aspects of a particular form that was and is called Virtual Reality. I also want to warn younger folks of the consequences of stretching a name too thin. Back in the 1990s, that’s exactly what happened — and the form, along with the discoveries of those who created it — largely disappeared. Let’s be mindful of that this time around.
From the archives, Winter 2012, "2011 Jacqueline Donnet Emerging Documentary Filmmaker Award: David France"
What Eyes on the Prize did for me, as a young viewer, was teach me that the Civil Rights movement-brave and triumphal—was American history, my history, the legacy I inherited as an American. Though I grew up in a largely white suburb in the Midwest, it showed me how the country I lived in had been shaped and improved by this history. I was indebted to those activists. That's what I wanted to do with How to Survive a Plague. I wanted to induct it into the American canon of transformative historical events, to show that what these folks accomplished isn't just a gay story—and it is that, in heels-but is also now part of the DNA of our nation alongside the Revolutionary War, the abolitionist and suffragist movements, Civil Rights, the women's health movement and so many others. I hope it will help show a new generation of Americans what they owe to AIDS activists.
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