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Interview
With a flurry of announcements in the last six months, the Doris Duke Foundation’s Building Bridges program has stepped squarely into the film funding space in a concerted effort to broaden the pipeline of Muslim-American filmmakers in media and entertainment. The program is partnering with a handful of film institutions, most notably the Islamic Scholarship Fund, the Center for Asian American Media, Sundance Institute, and the Muslim Public Affairs Council’s Hollywood Bureau, on a series of public activations, funds, and fellowships. The programs have taken place in a variety of spaces, from Sundance festival to IDA’s own Getting Real. The activities caught our attention.
"Block Party": Veteran game developers Navid and Vassiliki Khonsari of iNK Stories are building an open world that reflects their own community of Brooklyn, NYC, populating it with AI-powered NPC avatars in the likeness of the duo’s real-life neighbors. Documentary spoke to the duo about this experiment and its profound implications for the documentary field.
Director Song Won-geun discusses historical documentary filmmaking and storytelling with specificity in relation to his film, “Panmunjom: The Front Lines of Ideology.” Song wanted to “explore Panmunjom as a truce site that hasn’t changed much for 70 years, without necessarily taking sides or seeing it through the lens of another powerful country.”
Rebecca Day and Malikkah Rollins speak with Documentary magazine about the ever-present need for mental health resources for documentary filmmakers: “What we are really trying to focus on here is the filmmakers’ key role, rather than the hierarchical structure that puts them in this massive power game.”
Documentary speaks with director and producer Tim Moriarity about the aims, production and marketing strategy of his film “Jesus Thirsts.” As a film about the church’s official teachings on the Eucharist, it has grossed nearly $3 million at the box office since its release in June making it one of the few doc hits since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Documentary spoke with codirectors Suh and Mones about how their film “Sorry/Not Sorry” evolved as they learned the full story of the women wrapped up in Louis C.K.'s destructive orbit.
Charlie Shackleton describes “The Afterlight” as “a film that’s designed to be lost.” It deliberately exists as a single 35mm print that will naturally degrade over time and with every showing. But recently, the film was lost in a different way than intended. Documentary spoke with Shackleton about the logistics of the accidental loss of the film and its subsequent recovery.
To learn about Josh Fox’s multimedia extravaganza,‘The Edge of Nature’, Documentary caught up with the veteran director-playwright-environmental activist the week after The Edge of Nature’s run at NYC’s LaMaMa Experimental Theatre Club, which critic Bernie Sanders succinctly deemed “great work.”
An enormous English estate and its extensive gardens near Oxford take center stage for Dutch filmmaker Suzanne Raes’ latest feature documentary, Where