Two luminary filmmakers whose short films were highlighted at this year’s Cinemalibero, Sarah Maldoror and Nicolás Guillén Landrián, both emerged in the 1960s and were products of the anticolonial revolutionary movements that swept the Global South in the postwar period. Although Landrián’s work has received little exposure outside of Cuba up to this point, Maldoror has been well-known in certain circles for years, especially following the restoration and re-release of her landmark feature Sambizanga (1972) in 2020.
Online Feature
"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.
On a warm May evening, the opening ceremony of the 14th edition of the Taiwan International Documentary Festival (TIDF) was teeming with euphoria
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.”
Jemma Desai’s keynote address at Getting Real 2024 delves deeply into the ethical and existential challenges faced by cultural workers, particularly in the realm of documentary filmmaking, against the backdrop of global conflicts, notably the ongoing crisis in Palestine: “I have chosen to speak about integrity and so I cannot speak about anything but Palestine.” Her reflections resonate beyond the specific context of film, challenging all cultural workers to consider their role in shaping narratives that affirm human dignity and confront systemic injustices.