In celebration of the work and life of the late documentary master DA Pennebaker, IDA will be both digging into our archives and reaching out to his and Chris Hegedus’ many collaborators, friends and mentees for their reflections. In the meantime, here’s where you can catch some of his greatest films—in a trailblazing career that spanned over six decades. Daybreak Express is a five-minute short of the soon-to-be-demolished Third Avenue elevated subway station in New York City, set to the classic Duke Ellington recording of the same name. Pennebaker’s 1953 debut film is a tribute to his love of
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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! Ken Burns’ documentaries have captured some of the most critical times in US history. In an interview with The Guardian's Mark Lawson, Burns discusses his new film Country Music, his distinct filmmaking style, and how his films have led many to reflect on what it means to be American. "While the stories I have
Science fiction scholars believe that Murray Leinster’s 1945 short story, “First Contact,” was the original use of “First Contact” to represent the initial meeting of two very different cultural groups. In the Leinster story the meeting of space travelers is a collaboration of equals. Both groups are explorers from advanced civilizations and share equal amounts of excitement and fear at discovering that they are not alone in the universe and that these Others may have much to offer them. In the end, they switch space vehicles so that each group can begin to explore the Others’ “new”
When the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, many of us were alarmed to learn the extent to which we’d transformed from consumer to product in the digital age. Few of us, however, were inclined to take on those greedy behemoths mining our online data in the ravenous mode of the copper barons of old. Fortunately, there was David Carroll, an associate professor of media design, and director of the MFA Design and Technology graduate program at the School of Art, Media and Technology at Parsons The New School for Design. In other words, the perfect foil for Big Tech Goliath. And in The Great Hack
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 decade comes to a close, IndieWire compiled a list of their 100 best movies from the last ten years. Several acclaimed documentaries made the list, including All These Sleepless Nights, Fire at Sea, Cameraperson and O.J.: Made in America. Fire at Sea is told largely from the point of view of Samuele, a 10
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Inventing Tomorrow, from director Laura Nix, follows a group of passionate teenage innovators from around the globe who are creating cutting-edge solutions to confront the world’s environmental threats - found right in their own backyards - while navigating the doubts and insecurities that mark adolescence. These inspiring teens prepare their projects from the largest convening of high school scientists in the world: the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. The Changing Same tells the story of Lamar Wilson, a young man who learns his hometown of Marianna, Florida was the site of the brutal slaying in 1936 of Claude Neal, a young African-American man accused of murdering a 20-year-old white woman, at the hands of a mob of white men. Wilson takes it upon himself to confront his town’s dark history by running the 13-mile route that Neal took that fateful night. On the 70th anniversary of the lynching, directors Joe Brewster and
Fifteen years into its mission of promoting human rights through film, the Copenhagen-headquartered Why Foundation is coming up against a distribution dilemma. The nonprofit organization—best known for pioneering commissioning strands such as the Peabody Award-winning Why Poverty? series—is being courted by an array of streaming services that are hungry for the high editorial standards that have become a hallmark of The Why’s projects. No stranger to the specific set of challenges posed by cash-flush digital players, CEO and executive producer Mette Hoffmann Meyer—former head of documentaries
By Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi Documentary filmmakers in the US routinely employ fair use—the right to limited use of unpermissioned copyrighted material—in their films. Since the Documentary Filmmakers Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use was created in 2005, errors and omissions insurers have routinely accepted their claims. Fair use makes possible archival work like Gordon Quinn’s’63 Boycott, critical films like Barbara Kopple’s Gun Crazy, films that include accidentally captured footage like Bing Liu’s Minding the Gap, and much, much more. But how does fair use work in a global
In the US and Europe, there is a tendency to think of Latin American documentary filmmaking in terms of coups, government repression and revolution, but the new reality in many Latin American nations is a different kind of revolution. Case in point: Tea Time (La once) by Maite Alberdi of Chile, in which a group of upper-middle-class women, friends since high school, have been meeting once a month for “tea time” for 60 years. Alberdi’s documentary, which aired on POV in 2015, is one of too few Latin American documentaries to reach audiences in the US and Europe, despite being part of a rapidly