Los Angeles, CA (August 29, 2019) - The International Documentary Association (IDA) announced today the lineup of their annual Screening Series to begin September 9 with a screening of Todd Douglas Miller’s Sundance Award-winning, awe-inspiring epic Apollo 11 at the Century City 15 IMAX Theater. Additional IDA Documentary Screening Series highlights in Los Angeles include Honeyland (September 24), The Cave (October 2), Sea of Shadows (October 23), American Factory (November 1) and For Sama (November 5). In addition to the always popular Los Angeles screenings, the Series has expanded to New
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Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Jawline, the debut film from Liza Mandelup, follows 16-year-old Austyn Tester, as he transforms his life in dead-end rural Tennessee into teenage stardom in the live-broadcast ecosystem, connecting with a global audience of young girls through an ongoing stream of positivity. Jawline, for which Mandelup won a Special Jury Award for Emerging Filmmaker at the Sundance Film Festival, streams on Hulu. Ghana Controversial: Music from the Ground Up, streaming on Al Jazeera English
Editor’s Note: The documentary career is as demanding and taxing as it is rewarding. On the one hand, there are the occasional honors, accolades, fellowships and grants, along with the impetus that your work can make a transformative difference in both moving the art form forward and making substantive social change. But the documentary profession is a long-odds game, one often fraught with disappointment and struggle. Since its launch in 2014, IDA’s biennial Getting Real conference has sparked dialogue and calls for action about such issues as sustainability—the elusive act of making a living
One of the many highlights of the always impressive CPH:DOX is its annual CPH:CONFERENCE, five days of jam-packed industry events with each full day centered around a specific theme (film, art, science, technology and social change). While I wasn’t in town to attend them all, I did at least have the good fortune to catch the Science & Film program, which opened the conference and was curated by Greg Boustead, the founding executive producer of Sandbox Films, a new mission-based documentary studio (underwritten by the Simons Foundation and headquartered in New York City) devoted to excellence
Recognizing that the world is in a perilous state—and that they are in a position to do something about it—three major environmental film festivals have ratcheted up their industry activities. Closely mirroring the documentary industry as a whole, for these festivals it’s all about engagement, immersion and making connections. Jackson Wild, formerly Jackson Hole (Wyoming) Wildlife Film Festival, has not only rebranded and become an annual event, but has fundamentally shifted its ethos to focus on engagement. “It's a real pivotal shift in philosophy and programming,” Jackson Wild’s executive
Stories, exposure, education, networks, funding: Around the world, these things are not a given, nor are they easy to access. In Turkey, the cultural and political context has made it difficult for documentary filmmakers to survive as working artists, despite their energy and interest. In a country with such a strong history, culture and language, there are many stories to be told. A national preoccupation with politics, however, means that even art is never completely free from responsibility. Shifting Goals of Filmmaking Before the 1990s, documentaries in Turkey tended towards nature
ReFocus: The American Directors Series, from Edinburgh University Press, has an admirable mission statement: “The series ignores no director who created a historical space—either in or out of the studio system—beginning from the origins of American cinema and up to the present.” This may seem like a tall order, but not ignoring does not necessarily guarantee that a lesser-known director will be given representation on the printed (or digital) page; thus far, seven directors have been included this series: Budd Boetticher, William Castle, Delmer Daves, Amy Heckerling, Barbara Kopple, Kelly
I spent my youth on the streets of St. Louis, obsessed with making photographs. I had no interest in movies in those years, but my mother had been introduced to a filmmaker named Arthur Barron, who was in town making a CBS doc about the neighborhood where she worked. On a visit to our house, he was told that I was a photographer, and he asked to see my pictures. I remember that he looked at them closely and called me a storyteller, that being the highest praise I’d ever gotten. Two years later, as a college freshman in New York, I saw Arthur’s name in the course catalogue offering a
By Steven Beer, Jake Levy and Neil Rosini This edition of Legal FAQ answers an assortment of questions relating to treatment of celebrities in remote locations, obtaining government-created stills and footage from private archives, and whether copyright applies to works generated by non-humans. My documentary has a celebrity host and we’ll be filming in a remote location. What now? Filming in remote locations can be trying for those working on and appearing in documentaries. A number of issues must be considered when production takes place in the wilderness or otherwise away from optimal
Dear Readers, As the world gets hotter and science takes a beating from the far right, the need for the nature/wildlife/science/environment docs is taking on a greater urgency. And filmmakers have stepped up, utilizing the most innovative tools and platforms at their disposal to create some of the most stunning testaments to the beauty and peril of our planet—and the universe in which it spins. We feature Victor Kossakovsky’s Aquarela, a breathtaking epic poem about water, a vital force that is increasingly destructive with each incremental degree of the planet’s temperature. Check out Peter