Documentary recently spoke with Dr. Bruno Lessard, director of the Graduate Program in Documentary Media in Ryerson University’s School of Image Arts. Lessard, himself a documentary photographer and the author of an upcoming book about Chinese documentary filmmaker Wang Bing, shared valuable information about what draws students to this internationally recognized, one-of-kind institution. DOCUMENTARY: Tell me about your program at Ryerson—how is it structured and what can students expect? BRUNO LESSARD: Ryerson offers a two-year Master of Fine Arts degree (MFA) that brings together many
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Dayton, Ohio, is known as the birthplace of Orville Wright, and is also home to the National Museum of the US Airforce. Besides aviation, it is also a town steeped in manufacturing. But in 2008, gripped by the recession, the GM plant on the outskirts of the city was shuttered. Filmmakers Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert recorded this gloomy event in their Academy Award-nominated film The Last Truck: the Closing of a GM Plant. The loss of over 2,400 mostly blue-collar jobs had ripple effects throughout the community, which struggled to recover. Less than a decade later, in 2014, when Chinese
To help you get ready for Podcast Day, we’ve compiled a list of must-listen audio docs that you can dive into online. We even asked this Saturday’s panelists to recommend a few of their own personal favorites, including docs whose production and creation they’ve been involved in: from classic true crime to animated history, here are some audio docs to listen.
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 Derek Hallquist’s Denial. We caught up with Hallquist via email while he was touring the film on the summer festival circuit
“ You [Americans] did it for me. You wrote Moby Dick , The Old Man and the Sea . You inspired me with this amazing literature….It was just a question of saying the same thing, but with pictures, not with words.” —Victor Kossakovsky Master Russian filmmaker Viktor Kossakovsky does not want to tell you anything—he wants to show you everything. Aquarela is his 90-minute visual symphony to water and our planet’s precarious ecology. Filmed in 96 frames per second and projected in theaters at a stunning 46 fps (with no fewer than 118 channels of audio), the result is a triumph of European-style, non
Since I didn’t attend this year’s Sundance, I missed seeing Cold Case Hammarskjöld—the latest surreal offering from the Danish gonzo journalist/filmmaker/radio host/all-around provocateur Mads Brügger—at its debut back in January, when it won the World Cinema Documentary Directing Award. Which, like the film itself, turned out to be a bizarre blessing in disguise. Instead of braving the Park City crowds, I found myself, several months later, serenely watching the mesmerizing (and hilarious) doc—a through-the-looking-glass reexamination of the death of UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld in a
In the week since the passing of DA Pennebaker, we have been honoring the great pioneer with social media posts, repurposed content, and recommendations for viewing from the prodigious Pennebaker Hegedus canon. And we’ve been reaching out to the friends who knew and loved him best. By my lights, Pennebaker, along with his many great collaborators—from the merry band of groundbreakers at Drew Associates to his longtime co-conspirator in art and love, Chris Hegedus—produced a inspiring body of work that showed us America in action—from the odyssey of presidential campaigns to the magical mystery
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! From IndieWire, Robert Greene, a documentary filmmaker and professor at Murray Center for Documentary Journalism at the Missouri School of Journalism, maps out the career and impact of the late documentarian D.A Pennebaker. As much as his ingenuity, it was the image of Pennebaker that was so influential to several
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 Ofra Bloch’s Afterward. Bloch is a filmmaker and psychoanalyst based in New York City. She grew up in Israel, where her deep
Co-directed by Nanfu Wang and Jialing Zhang, One Child Nation examines China’s One-Child Policy, coaxing confessions and revelations of drastic, profound depth from its subjects. Taken together, these wide-ranging first-hand accounts tell the era’s story, conveying its dark, emotional legacy in an astonishing film that is sure to contribute to the historical and cinematic record. Enacted in 1979 and replaced with the “Two-Child Policy” in 2015, the One-Child Policy was a severe population-planning effort that limited the number of children parents could have. Its enforcers employed strategies