The IDA Membership is composed of directors, producers, composers, editors, writers, cinematographers, students and non-fiction enthusiasts, among others. Members News is the place to find out about their accomplishments and activities.

If you are an IDA Member and would like your news to be featured in the Members News column, please send your blurb (150 words max) to Documentary associate editor/content producer Tamara Krinsky at krinskydoc@ca.rr.com. You MUST include your name and the words “Member News” in the subject line.  

David DeHilster reports he has raised the necessary funds to get to a final cut of his film Einstein Wrong. His team is currently logging the recently digitized footage shot between 2005-2009. www.einsteinwrong.com

Documentary Educational Resources, in conjunction with The Human Studies Film Archives, Smithsonian Institution is pleased to announce that the John Marshall Ju/'hoan Bushman Film and Video Collection, 1950-2000 has been recognized for its exceptional value as part of world documentary heritage and has been added to UNESCO's Memory of the World Register. The Collection, held at the Smithsonian Institution's Human Studies Film Archives, is one of the seminal visual anthropology projects of the 20th century, providing a unique example of sustained audiovisual documentation of one cultural group, the Ju/'hoansi, of the Kalahari Desert in northeastern Namibia, over half a century. The collection is only the fourth documentary property held in a United States archive or library to be added to the Memory of the World Register.

Sandi DuBowski spent time this past summer in Berlin, where The Heinrich Boll Foundation sponsored screenings of A Jihad for Love, Trembling Before G-d, and a panel on the Queer Middle East with representatives from Lebanon, Turkey and Israel, moderated by Chairman of the German Green Party, Cem Özdemir, star Turkish-German politician.

Sky Fitzgerald of Spin Film passes along a tale of equipment intrigue..."We are happy to report that one of our NGO partners (Search for Common Ground) recently received a call from an unknown party in Eastern DRC, hoping to exchange our "lost" film equipment for cash. Though we vigorously pursued the lead in the hope that we might be able to recover our stolen gear, the contact soon fell silent--prey to unknown forces. We are keeping our fingers crossed that a viable exchange may still emerge in the future. Meanwhile work on the Congo project continues with translation and rough editing. We are still scheduled to wrap post-production on the project at the end of the year. Stay tuned..."
Finding Face, directed and produced by Fitzgerald and Patti Duncan, premiered at The International Film Festival and Forum on Human Rights in Geneva, followed by its Portland premiere in August at the Portland Art Museum's Whitsell Auditorium. The film documents the controversial case of Tat Marina, a young woman who was attacked with acid in 1999.

Cheryl Furjanic's Sync or Swim has been gathering up awards. The film received The Chris Award – Honorable Mention from the 56th Columbus International Film + Video Festival; the Kansas City Film Fest Jury Award for Best U.S./International Feature, for which they beat out all other features at the fest, including fiction movies; and the Billie Award for Journalism (Broadcast/Cable/Film) from the Women’s Sports Foundation. This award (named in honor of the great Billie Jean King) honors excellence in media coverage and depictions of women and girls in sport.

On September 30, as part of President Obama's United We Serve initiative, the USO, Operation Homefront and HandsOn Network presented the documentary The Way We Get By at a special Capitol Hill screening, followed by a Q&A with filmmakers Aron Gaudet and Gita Pullapilly. Dr. Jill Biden introduced the film, which looks at the personal stories and struggles of a group of senior citizens who have made history by greeting more than 900,000 American troops at a tiny airport in Bangor, Maine. Bill Knight, Jerry Mundy and Joan Gaudet (filmmaker Aron Gaudet’s mother) find the strength to overcome their personal battles and transform their lives through service. The Way We Get By is a co-production of Dungby Productions, the Independent Television Service (ITVS) and American Documentary, Inc./POV, WGBH, Maine Public Broadcasting Network (MPBN) with funding provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). It will have its national broadcast premiere on Veterans Day, Wednesday, November 11 as part of the POV documentary series on PBS stations nationwide.

Scanpix, Scandinavia’s biggest picture agency, is now representing ITN Source in the Nordic region. This will add over one million hours of motion to the Scanpix archive. Lars Borg, head of business development for Scanpix, says: ”We really look forward to making one of the world’s greatest motion archives known to the Nordic region, and especially to the high number of very good Nordic documentary film projects.”

R. J. Johnson's documentary The Joke's On Thee airs on KOCE in Los Angeles on Sunday, October 18 at 8:00 pm.The show asks if God has a sense of humor, and takes off from there, featuring comedy and insights from a truly diverse group of preachers, comedians, writers, performers, celebrities and theologians including Mary Pat Donovan, Oral Roberts, Jonathan Winters, Jesse Duplantis, Pat Boone, Robert G. Lee, Dr. Tony Campolo, Kathleen Madigan, Jim Brogan, Smokey Robinson, Tom Dreesen, George Wallace, Mark Russell, Paul Rodriguez, Rev. Jess Moody and Steve Allen. The film won Best Comedy at the Berkeley Video & Film Festival.

Kartemquin Films' In the Family was nominated for an Emmy Award in the category of Outstanding Informational Long Form Program. Joanna Rudnick produced and directed In the Family —her personal story of testing positive for the hereditary "breast cancer" gene—at the age of 27. The documentary is an exploration into the psychological, social, legal and ethical challenges surrounding predictive genetic testing.  It's been a good six months for Kartemquin--they won a Peabody Award for Terra Incognita and a Silver Hugo Television Award for At the Death House Door. http://kartemquin.com

KPI has two series on History. Clash of the Gods, which explores the truth behind myths, premiered in August, and MysteryQuest is currently running new episodes.  

MacGillivray Freeman Films is proud to announce that 11 years after it was released to outstanding critical acclaim and record-breaking attendance records in giant-screen theatres, their giant-screen epic Everest was inducted into the IMAX Hall of Fame during the Giant Screen Cinema Association’s annual GSCA Achievement Awards in Indianapolis. The epic story of three climbers’ triumphant ascent of the world’s tallest mountain during the fateful 1996 climbing season, Everest was first released in 1998 to universal acclaim and quickly shattered all industry attendance records. It was the first and only giant-screen film to reach Variety’s top 10 box office chart, and the first to play in nearly 100 theaters simultaneously, establishing new benchmarks for the giant-screen industry. The film has been exhibited in more than 250 giant-screen theatres around the world.
The company has also announced a partnership with Oceana, the largest international organization focused solely on ocean conservation, to develop a global marketing and educational outreach campaign for the release of the film To The Arctic. The film is a new 3D documentary and the first for IMAX Theatres to document the unprecedented changes occurring near the North Pole as temperatures in the Arctic heat up due to climate change. The film is produced and directed by two-time Academy Award-nominee Greg MacGillivray, with Oceana scientists serving as advisors. Principal photography is expected to be complete by summer 2010, with a worldwide release planned for spring 2011.

Brooklyn Girl Productions presents the DVD release of the award-winning documentary From Silence to Sound, directed by Chase Matthews and produced by Jenine Mayring. Witness a deaf man gain his hearing at the age of 27 thanks to the miracles of modern medical technology. www.fromsilencetosound.com.

Ravit Markus and Dan Katzir are releasing several of their films on DVD, including Yiddish Theater: A Love Story, Out for Love... Be Back Shortly, Company Jasmine, Shivah for my Mother and The Choices of Rama Lindheim. Films will be available both on their website: www.newlovefilms.com, and on Amazon.com. Their films continue to play on the big screen. Yiddish Theater: A Love Story recently screened in Nassau, New York, and in Skokie, Illinois. The filmmakers showed Praying in Her Own Voice at the West Coast Hillel Conference in Brandeis Bardin and will continue their Hillel run of the film this fall.

The Art of Failure: Chuck Connelly Not for Sale, produced and directed by Jeff Stimmel, won the 2009 Emmy for Outstanding Arts & Culture Programming. The film explores the creative passion of a painter who is his own worst enemy. The film aired on HBO last year, as well as, the BBC, and Zdf/ARTE in continental Europe. www.theartoffailure.com

Izumi Tanaka has exciting news on several fronts! First, Pushin' Forward was nominated for Best Feature Documentary for  the Imagen Awards, which honors Latino TV, Film and Theater. Second, Tanaka and his eight fellow producers who worked on a feature documentary Nanking were nominated for Emmy Awards in the category of Outstanding Individual Achievement In A Craft: Research. Finally, the photography project Tanaka worked on last year with bereaving families of fallen soldiers from the Iraq War was published in a book, Portraits of Silence. Says Tanaka, "It is currently available on Amazon Japan, but we're working to make it available in the US market as well. I'm still working with the same photographer on the next project with GLBT families raising young children."

The United Nations has just announced that they have invited Mark Terry's The Antarctica Challenge: A Global Warning to be screened to 190 world leaders attending the Conference for Climate Change in Copenhagen this December. This represents the first time a film has been invited by the UN to participate in a conference designed to create a new environmental policy for the world. The film made its world premiere at the Blue Planet Film Festival in Los Angeles in September.

John Trinh's film Agent Orange: 30 Years Later will be screened at the 18th Annual Hot Springs Documentary Film festival. http://agentorangefilmjohntrinh.ash.com

Women Make Movies' Hold Me Tight, Let Me Go had its national broadcast premiere on POV on July 28. In the film, director Kim Longinotto documents the students and staff at England's Mulberry Bush School, a facility for children with severe behavioral problems that advocates consolation and gentle restraint.

Writer/director/editor Richard Wormser has a new documentary just in time for October’s National Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Rethinking Cancer is a provocative film that presents a compelling look into the therapeutic and psychological journeys of five men and women who chose to use non-toxic, biological therapies to overcome serious illness. Four of the patients featured in this educational film had been diagnosed with cancer; two of these were designated terminal. The fifth used these methods to overcome a severe case of Lyme Disease, which was resistant to powerful antibiotics prescribed by both his family doctor and a specialist. All of the patients profiled have been disease-free from 15 to 37 years. They are representative of a large pool of well-documented, long-term survivors who sought guidance from the Foundation for Advancement in Cancer Therapy (FACT) and its then president, the late Ruth Sackman. Himself a cancer-survivor, Wormser has produced, directed and/or written over 100 documentary programs and films, including the Peabody Award-winning four-part PBS series, The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow, and the Emmy-nominated PBS documentary Delta Dreams. Other production credits on Rethinking Cancer include Consuelo Reyes, executive producer; Linda Goldberg, producer; James Oakar, producer/composer ;and Tom Hurwitz, director of photography. www.rethinkingcancer.org.