This year marks the fifth edition of Getting Real, IDA’s biennial conference, where documentary filmmakers and industry professionals will meet and dialogue in a hybrid gathering curated and programmed by Abby Sun, Conference Director and IDA’s Director of Artist Programs, as well as programmers Chris Boeckmann and Jonathan Ali. Through a digital platform, Getting Real ‘22 will enable a global audience to connect to the in-person Los Angeles gathering. The theme of this year’s conference, Flipping the Frame, reconsiders the traditional power dynamics in the documentary space. According to the

I am here to provide a China perspective and a feminist point of view, raising some questions about the face of working women, and rather than addressing what we are concerned about as filmmakers, distributors and human beings in a COVID 19 pandemic and politically chaotic era.

What I’m going to talk about today are three of those unseen practices in documentary filmmaking—compensating protagonists, empowering our crews, and questioning who is in leadership.

When we are fighting a pandemic and on the brink of environmental cataclysm and we can’t breathe and our children are locked in cages, what is our responsibility as artists?

This year’s virtual gathering of Getting Real ‘20 called for the redistribution of power within documentary practice and the removal of barriers inhibiting the expansion of possibility within the field and access to it. However, the process of actualizing such changes requires a series of transitions that move us away from the status quo to the future. Although many conversations held before, during and after the convening are grounded in that work, one in particular, “The Liberatory Canon,” illustrates a pattern of change taking place in the ecosystem that reflects current values within the

“When you are a member of a marginalized community, most film and television is not made with you in mind. And so, if you are a person of color, an LGBTQ person, a person who is an immigrant, a person with a disability, you develop a critical awareness because you understand that the images that you’re seeing are not your life.” —Actress/activist Laverne Cox in Sam Feder’s Disclosure When the history of cinema has failed to accurately portray our communities, how can we find a new path forward to right the decades of wrong? Disclosure, directed by Sam Feder, tackles the issues of Trans

I attended my first conference in yoga pants and a t-shirt with snacks and a coffee mug on my desk, a cat and dog, and stretch breaks whenever I wanted.

It’s been more than nine months since the deadly movement of COVID-19 from China to North America and Europe—and nearly every other continent—utterly changed the world. Since that time, more than a million people have died. Now, most of us wear masks when we go outside and use hand sanitizers before entering shops. When we meet friends, a six-foot social distancing rule is applied by most of us. The world has, for the time being, become something else, something that some documentarians want to shoot—or, in any case, must deal with in what is, at least temporarily, a “new normal.” While a

The issue of ethics has driven the documentary field in various ways and in various degrees of emphases and urgency since the beginnings of the art form, when Robert Flaherty’s 1922 documentary Nanook of the North would later be taken to task about its use of reenactments and recreations, and in more recent years, as a prototype for extractive storytelling. The 2009 study from the Center for Media and Social Impact, " Honest Truths: Documentary Filmmakers on Ethical Challenges in Their Work," spearheaded by then Center Director Pat Aufderheide and research fellows Peter Jaszi and Mridu Chandra

Although the documentary form can take shape in reenactment, animation or other mediums, storytelling through participant interviews continues to command the craft.