Jacqueline Olive’s debut feature, Always in Season—its title a nod to the year-round racial terror that African-Americans, especially in the Deep South, historically have experienced—picked up the Special Jury Prize for Moral Urgency at this past Sundance Film Festival. Though the film explores the domestic terrorist act of lynching and its legacy through multiple angles—from sober, talking-head interviews to Monroe, Georgia’s harrowing, annual lynching reenactment— the beating heart of the film lies within one specific woman: Claudia Lacy. Five years ago, Lacy—a native of Bladenboro, North
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Who Will Write Our History, a documentary about a group of heroic spiritual resisters in the Warsaw Ghetto who wrote and buried eye-witness accounts in a secret archive so the truth would survive, even if they did not, was seven years in the making. During that time, I was fixated on premiering at the Berlin International Film Festival. That didn’t happen. At least not in the way I’d expected. What did happen is that I learned (again) that there are more ways than one to have a successful roll-out. The film premiered in July 2018 at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, where it received the
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Filmed over more than 25 years, The Pushouts follows Victor Rios’ inspiring trajectory from high school dropout, three-time felon and Oakland gang member to award-winning professor, author and expert on the school-to-prison pipeline. Filmmakers Katie Galloway and Dawn Valadez weave in the stories from YO!Watts, a youth center serving 16-24 year-olds who are out of school and out of work. The Psuhouts premieres September 20 on PBS/ Voces. Inside Bill’s Brain: Decoding Bill
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! Robert Frank, one of the greatest American photographers, passed away Monday at age 94. He also gained acclaim as a filmmaker, and his documentary work included Conversations in Vermont (1969), Life-Raft Earth (1969) and About Me: The Musical (1971). But the doc he is best known for is the one that is hardest to
The podcast space, even with hundreds of thousands of titles proliferating the market, is still emerging and evolving. Like documentary filmmaking, the podcast promises compelling stories and examines important issues. The overlap is organic. But the two also underlap, if you will, as podcasting’s audio-only limitations invite inventive, cinematic use of sound, engulfing the ear to incite the imagination. Ultimately, the audience is coaxed into seeing sound. For the podcast-curious, leading podcast producer Wondery and IDA offered a day-long program on August 24 of topic-specific panel
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Premiering September 9 on POV, Grit, directed by Cynthia Wade and Sasha Friedlander, tells the story of a natural and manmade catastrophe in East Java, Indonesia: a massive mudflow triggered by a mismanaged series of fracking incidents at the suspected hands of Lapindo, a natural gas multinational company. In the aftermath, nearly 60,000 residents have lost their homes and dozens of structures—mosques, schools and factories—are now submerged in a massive wasteland of cracked
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! As the Toronto International Film Festival gets underway, opening with Daniel Rohrer’s Once Were Brothers, about The Band’s Robbie Robertson’s reflection on the iconic troupe he helped found, CBC News’ Deana Sumanac-Johnson delves into a developing trend: the music industry getting behind documentaries. But record
Since IDA's DocuClub was relaunched in 2016 as a forum for sharing and soliciting feedback about works-in-progress, many DocuClub alums have since premiered their works on the festival circuit and beyond. In an effort to both monitor and celebrate the evolution of these films to premiere-ready status, we reach out to the filmmakers as they are either winding their way through the festival circuit, or gearing up for it. In this edition of "The Feedback," we spotlight Alex Lora & Adan Aliaga’s El Cuarto Reino (The Fourth Kingdom), an IDA Pare Lorentz Documentary Fund grantee. We caught up with
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Premiering September 3 on WORLD Channel, America Reframed presents Margo Guernsey’s Councilwoman, which follows Dominican immigrant Carmen Castillo as she transitions from hotel housekeeper to city councilwoman in Providence, Rhode Island and advocates for working families in her community. Nightshift, premiering September 3 on KCET and kcet.org, and September 8 on LinkTV, follows five Los Angeles residents in their routines as night shift workers. The filmmakers take viewers
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! On the eve of the premiere of Alanis Obonsawin’s Jordan River Anderson, The Messenger at the Toronto International Film Festival, POV Magazine’s Pat Mullen looks at the Abenaki-Canadian filmmaker’s recent cycle of work that addresses the rights of Indigenous children. The Abenaki director’s 53rd film completes her