Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Streaming this month on POV, starting August 10, is About Love, from Archana Atul Phadke, who trains her camera on her Mumbai-based family, three generations of which live together in the same home. The personal becomes political as power structures within the family become visible, and eventually unravel. Cruel and comic in equal measure, the film shows the vagaries of affection across generations. Premiering August 12 on HBO, Muta’Ali Muhammad's Yusuf Hawkins: Storm Over
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If every documentary tells a story, then one of the most critical issues in our community today is who gets to tell that story, and to whom. IDA has engaged in debates surrounding self-representation and power dynamics in storytelling for a long time–from discussing the pressing need to decolonize docs to “ the inequity of unchallenged filmmaker bias and motives, of the chasm between the subject and audience (and) of film as a tool of racialized colonial power and empire.” August 9 is recognized as International Day of the World's Indigenous Peoples. While documentaries have attempted to
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! IndieWire's Steve Green talks to filmmaker Greg Whiteley about how he approached the final season of his IDA Documentary Award-winning series, Last Chance U. "I actually think we are a lot more nervous than the players are. I've entered every single season doing this show, even if we're at a school where we filmed the year previously, and all the players are pretty
Dear Readers, In this most convulsive of years, summer hasn’t felt like summer. In the months between when we published the Spring 2020 issue online, COVID-19 has continued to carve out its invisible path of devastation. Here in Southern California, the virus persists, with devastatingly high numbers of daily cases and fatalities, especially among communities of color toiling in the essential jobs to keep the world running. Over the course of the pandemic, we have monitored the dramatic pivots the documentary community have taken—particularly, festivals transitioning to online, virtual
Dear IDA Community, It has been a dizzying and discombobulating six months since the coronavirus upended our lives, forcing us to stay at home and completely re-evaluate how we approach our work. It has been a few short months since the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and countless others, ignited a reckoning around systemic racism and injustice — also calling on us to re-evaluate how we approach our work. Despite the pain and suffering that these situations have caused, they are forcing innovation, reflections and, hopefully, change. We are an industry that values
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Opening August 7 in virtual cinemas via PBS Distribution, Frontline|PBS and Concordia Studio, Ramona S. Diaz's A Thousand Cuts takes viewers to the Philippines, where the worldwide erosion of democracy, fueled by social media disinformation campaigns, is starkly evident in the authoritarian regime of President Rodrigo Duterte. Journalist Maria Ressa places the tools of the free press—and her freedom—on the line in defense of truth and democracy. A Thousand Cuts is an IDA
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! Hammer to Nail's Christopher Reed talks to The Fight directors Eli Despres, Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg about how they secured access to the ACLU to make their film. Yeah, so we went to the ACLU and presented our vision for the film, and that we’re vérité doc filmmakers, and so the thing we always want and what we really need to make the films in the way that we
I am a white female filmmaker, a director of documentary films. Women, especially white women, have traditionally done better in documentaries than in the rest of Hollywood. There is less money and prestige than in the fiction world, but the barriers to entry are lower. It’s easier to "green light" yourself. Things have changed. In the past few years, documentaries have become "hot" and Hollywood has taken notice. Hollywood wants in. Brand-name companies and brand-name celebrities are opening documentary divisions. Agencies have created premium documentary departments. More and more
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Now streaming on Netflix, Father Soldier Son, produced by The New York Times and produced and directed by reporters-turned-filmmakers Catrin Einhorn and Leslye Davis, follows a former platoon sergeant and his two young sons over almost a decade, chronicling his return home after a serious combat injury in Afghanistan. Originating as part of a 2010 project on a battalion's year-long deployment, Einhorn and Davis stuck with the story to trace the long-term effects of military
After completing the second of what would be four Q&As at the True/False film festival in March, David Osit, who directed the documentary Mayo r, found out that the 2020 South by Southwest Film Festival had been canceled. "At the time [other filmmakers and I] were joking with each other that we were at the last [in-person] film festival in the world," Osit says. "Then True/False literally ended up being the last film festival that proceeded as scheduled in North America. It was remarkable." Osit's Mayor, which follows Musa Hadid, the Christian mayor of Palestinian city Ramallah, is looking for