Essential Doc Reads is our curated selection of recent features and important news items about the documentary form and its processes, from around the internet, as well as from the Documentary magazine archive. We hope you enjoy! Over at Screen Daily, London International Smartphone Film Festival’s co-director Adam Gee writes a manifesto of sorts for smartphone filmmaking and makes a case for the efficiency and diversity the medium offers. Smartphones chime in perfectly with the issues of diversity that have come to the fore in the industry globally in the last year. They offer an immediate
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The documentary community is filled with tough pros, but surely all of us can spare a thought for a festival that had to deal with the first outburst of COVID-19 last spring and was forced to work around the pandemic again this year. In Toronto, the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival became renowned over 20 years ago not only for showcasing the best new documentaries but also for its uncanny luck in always having their event during the first genuinely warm week of spring. While the chilly weather continued unabated during this year’s virtual festival (April 29-May 9), the
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. The Tulsa Massacre is one the most horrific episodes of racial violence in American history, and it continues to be overlooked by most textbooks and history syllabi in the country. This year marks a century since 35 blocks of thriving Black businesses in Tulsa, Oklahoma’s Greenwood District were burned to the ground by white supremacists, resulting in a massive loss of lives and Black-owned businesses. To commemorate the tragedy, and to honor the longstanding history of Black
Essential Doc Reads is our curated selection of recent features and important news items about the documentary form and its processes, from around the internet, as well as from the Documentary magazine archive. We hope you enjoy! The New York Times’ Osayi Endolyn writes about the new Netflix limited series High on the Hog (Dir.: Roger Ross Williams), which she calls a “long overdue nuanced celebration of African Americans and their food.” Black joy has always been politicized in the United States, because Blackness was codified to justify social oppression and extreme, race-based wealth. Our
By Coley Gray and Patricia Aufderheide The 2021 True/False Film Festival split into two, one in-person and another virtual. Both featured the high-touch approach that this unique festival offers and neither was much like what True/Falsers remember from earlier fests. True/False has evolved into a festival that doesn’t just feature documentaries, but puts the question of what makes a documentary center-stage. It’s not just a film festival, but a performative celebration of creativity. The college town of Columbia, Missouri sprouts pop-up art galleries everywhere, buskers open the film
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. The Korean-American artist Nam June Paik once said, “What matters today is what I would call the Archaeology of the present, and video is its privileged instrument.” Erik Nelson’s Apocalypse ‘45 combines filmmaker John Ford’s graphic World War II footage, archival material, and narratives of 12 men who witnessed the Pacific War. Premiering May 27 on discovery+, the film, as Paik would say, “digs ruin after ruin to try to understand the past as if one understood the present.”
Essential Doc Reads is our curated selection of recent features and important news items about the documentary form and its processes, from around the internet, as well as from the Documentary magazine archive. We hope you enjoy! Over at Variety, Elsa Keslassy speaks to Thierry Fremaux, the artistic director of the Cannes Film Festival, two weeks before the festival is slated to announce its lineup. It will be magnificent. We already have the music of the opening credits to Cannes, the one composed by Camille Saint-Saëns, in our heads. The desire to be at the center of ovations, perhaps boos
Sue Ding is a documentary filmmaker and artist based in Los Angeles. She directs and produces nonfiction projects for platforms including The New York Times and PBS. Her most recent film, The Claudia Kishi Club, was an official selection at SXSW and premiered on Netflix. Her work explores identity, storytelling, and visual culture. Sue also leads the XR media program at the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, and consults on interactive, immersive, and multiplatform projects. She writes and lectures on documentary, participatory, and emerging media storytelling. Sue is an alumni of MIT’s
We’re excited to announce a partnership with Argo, a new streaming platform and global curator of short films, starting this month exclusive to IDA members. With the goal of elevating shorts above the oceans of social media content, Argo provides a discovery home for filmmakers and film fans alike. Argo is building a community with all genres of short film curated into themed playlists by film festivals, filmmakers, and influencers. IDA will be joining a host of partners including Sundance Film Festival, The Guardian and Kickstarter. Yes, filmmakers do get paid! The platform works on a revenue
Aldo López-Gavilán and Ilmar Gavilán, the sibling protagonists at the heart of Marcia Jarmel and Ken Schneider’s Los Hermanos (The Brothers), are two Cuban-born virtuoso musicians, now in their 40s, whose lives have forever been at the mercy of ideological politics. While still in his early teens, elder brother Ilmar was sent to the former Soviet Union to perfect his string instrument talent—eventually ending up as a chamber violinist in the US, never to live in Cuba again. Meanwhile, kid brother Aldo stayed home to train with some of the most respected classical and jazz pianists on the