Martha Coolidge made her mark in Hollywood directing films like Valley Girl, Real Genius, and Rambling Rose, but before all that, she was breaking
Online Feature
Now, while there may be greater attention to filmmakers’ proximity to their subjects and a push for more diverse directors, co-directors, producers, and crew members, there’s also a rise in what some call “cover-your-ass” hires over meaningful collaborations. If the U.S. industry, then, has accepted that documentary projects benefit from having creatives from similar races, genders, sexualities, or nationalities as their subjects, they might be included—but are they actual partners?
A film forged through traumatic reckoning, Sugarcane investigates the discovery of 50 unmarked graves on the property of St. Joseph’s, a now-defunct
“I don’t think of myself as a documentary filmmaker”: Documentary spoke with Kienitz Wilkins to discuss his methodology, his thoughts on documentary’s relationship to his work, and the festival landscape at large.
At this moment in our industry, when everyone is trying to find a solution to the distribution crisis, BAVC Media continues to adapt in order to
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.
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.
"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.”