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!
At Film School Rejects, Christopher Campbell considers the way that certain films, mostly docs, get a second chance for awards recognition.
The allowance for overlap between the Oscars and the Emmys, which tend to be associated respectively as an honor for film and an honor for television, has been a place to find the blurring between the mediums for decades, and I've always found it strange. I don't like questioning anything that wants to shed more light on documentaries, especially deserving films such as Cutie and the Boxer and Life Itself, which took an editing award last night, but I can't help wonder why it's done for docs but not other kinds of movies.
At Indiewire, Anne Thompson and Matt Brennan report on the ways that the collision of film and televsion has shaken up the doc awards race.
In part, this is a function of rules changes by both the TV Academy and AMPAS, which likes to define documentary Oscar contenders as "films" that play in theaters. But the reality is that most contenders play on multiple platforms and simply qualify for Oscar consideration with short New York/Los Angeles theatrical runs with attendant reviews in the New York and Los Angeles Times. Documentaries with nontheatrical distribution, including day-and-date releases, are now eligible for the Oscars as long as their TV, VOD, or SVOD presentation does not occur before the first day of their qualifying theatrical release.
At Filmmaker, Esther B. Robinson discusses the non-monetary aspects of filmmaking sustainability.
We've adopted the idea of sustainability from the environmental movement, where it describes the quest to make an ecosystem stable and long-lasting. Sustainability's myriad definitions range from the utopian ("all systems in dynamic balance") to the terse, harsh pragmatism of its Latin root, sustere: "to endure." As artists, we can probably all agree that an "endurable" life might not be our best goal. "Dynamic balance" has potential, but it does raise the question: What needs to be in balance to make our film lives sustainable?
Nieman Storyboard shares highlights of editor Joe Bini's class on "The Poetics of Documentary" at the Camden International Film Festival.
He says he watches a lot of films with the sound turned off. As an example, he showed a few minutes of one of his earlier collaborations with Herzog, filmed in German, without subtitles. You were forced to focus on the story that the images told you, not the words. You saw pain, and gratitude, and the shy joy of a girl being filmed, probably for the first time.
At Mediashift, Elia Powers shares lessons on empathy and narrative from the Story Movements Conference.
Empathy was also an overarching theme during the day-two exercise in which participants were placed in groups, assigned a social justice topic and issue brief, and given several hours to build a narrative and determine the appropriate storytelling platform. Groups pitched ideas such as a virtual reality experience that puts the user in the day of the life of a transgender person, a game modeled off The Sims in which users control a city budget and learn about the high costs of mass incarceration, and a game in which people assume the role of both police and civilians facing tense, racially-charged scenarios.
"A filmmaker needs to make a decision early on as to what the vision is for this film. Maybe they play a big festival and they get a lot of great press or they win an award. You have to make a decision at that point and put your team in place, whether it's a publicist, a sales rep, and so forth. You can't be calling up publicists in October and saying, "Can you help me?" Because anyone who's good is going to be committed."
National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Announces Winners At the 37th Annual News & Documentary Emmy Awards
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The Grierson Awards Announces 2016 Nominees
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Poitras Leaves The Intercept to Expand Field of Vision
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