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!
Amy Kaufman of the Los Angeles Times talks to filmmaker Ed Perkins and Marcus and Alex Lewis, protagonists in Perkins' Tell Me Who I Am, about coming to terms on camera with the brothers' dark, hidden history as victims of childhood sex abuse.
"In everything they do, they steadfastly refuse to be victims," Perkins said. "I think it's amazing that this has not destroyed their lives. They live full, well-rounded and successful lives despite what they've gone through. And so even though the film inevitably goes to dark and complex places, we really hope that audiences are left with a feeling of hope."
Washington Post columnists Alyssa Rosenberg and Megan McCardle examine a discussion they had eight years ago about cord-cutting and streaming and assess the prescience of their observations.
The American consumer probably can't pay all that much more for content-plus-Internet than they did for their old cable bundle—and in an added twist, cable companies are probably going to have to start charging more for Internet, as cord-cutters snip away at the cross-subsidies from content sales that used to help defray the fixed expenses of the cable infrastructure. So household budgets for premium content may actually fall, at the same time as content providers are raising prices—or else we’re likely to actually end up paying more to replicate roughly what we had five years ago.
From the Archive, July 2003 issue: "A Family Affair: Andrew Jarecki Discusses How He Captured The Friedmans"
I also felt that while not everyone in the film tells the truth, I don't find most of them to be consciously lying about anything. They are adjusting their memory at the same time they are adjusting their story. So when the police detective in this story tells me something, and we see a photograph a moment later disproving what she says, I don't think it means she was deliberately trying to mislead me. Or at least that's not how she would see it.
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