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! The Washington Post’s Sebastian Smee believes that nature documentaries are the greatest art of our time and "deserve to be rescued from overfamiliarity." He argues that these miracles of imagery and production are ahead of their time that will be watched in the future as the best artifacts of the present. These
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Overview In its 26 years, Sheffield Doc/Fest has steadily put on weight, expanding and maturing into a festival that tries to offer a little something for everyone interested in the art of nonfiction storytelling. Having attended every year but one since 1997, I have enjoyed a long relationship with the festival. I’m currently an Advisory Board Member, and I write some of the film copy; in years past I also ran the festival’s now defunct daily newspaper, helped to program, and produced a number of panels. I have easily watched more than 1,000 Doc/Fest films over the years, and I am a better
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. SIMA’s staff pick of the month for July is A River Changes Course, from director Kalyanee Mam. This film tells the story of three Cambodian families struggling to maintain their traditional ways of life as the modern world closes around them. A River Changes Course won the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize: Documentary at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, and also earned a Special Mention for the IDA Pare Lorentz Award. Premiering on HBO July 9 and 10, Erin Lee Carr's I Love You
Journalism works to hold the powerful accountable, whether it is public officials or private corporations, provoking a public reckoning with wrongdoing and forcing change. Documentary films, especially in recent years, have also been held up as drivers of social change; presenting untold or long-forgotten stories in a cinematic format can generate new levels of awareness. But documentaries and journalism do not, by themselves, create change. They present evidence and the building blocks for the levers of accountability by exposing wrongdoing or telling stories misrepresented by the larger
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! In a time where environmental documentaries are as important as ever, Davide Banis from Forbes makes the case for revisiting the 1982 experimental film Koyaanisqatsi from Godfrey Reggio. With no dialogue or plot, this film uses time-lapses and slow-motion footage of people and landscapes across the United States
Nick Broomfield’s latest documentary, Marianne and Leonard: Words of Love, explores the complicated and decades-long love story between legendary songwriter Leonard Cohen and his Norwegian muse Marianne Ihlen, who inspired much of Cohen's best-known work. Cohen met Ihlen on the Greek island of Hydra—a colorful community of expat artists, writers and musicians exemplary of 1960s bohemia. At the time, Cohen was a struggling and largely unknown Canadian writer, and Marianne was a single mother with a young son. Broomfield, who himself began an intimate friendship with Ihlen on Hydra at age 20
By Bruce D. Brown and Simon Kilmurry In August, as many as 100 officers from the Durham Constabulary in England and the Police Service of Northern Ireland raided the homes and searched one of the offices of two prominent documentary filmmakers in Northern Ireland, seizing scores of documents and newsgathering equipment as part of an investigation into the alleged “theft” of an anonymously leaked police ombudsperson’s report. International condemnation, including from our organizations, ensued, and the Belfast High Court declared that the warrants authorizing the search and arrest were unlawful
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 reached out to the filmmakers as they were either winding their way through the festival circuit, or gearing up for it. In this edition of "The Feedback," we spotlight Bridgette Auger and Itab Azzam’s We Are Not Princesses. We caught up with Auger via email while she was touring the film on
IDA’s busy-as-ever summer season isn’t possible without the help of our interns! We are proud to present three wonderful students who are helping further our mission this summer: Kenneth Brown (Awards Competition Intern), Lauren Giella (Documentary Magazine Intern), and Verena Hecht (Arts Education Intern). They come from a variety of backgrounds, and bring something unique to the table in expanding and nurturing the documentary community. Their internships have been generously supported by the Los Angeles County Arts Commission Arts Internship Program. Kenneth Brown, Awards Competition Intern
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. DA Films is now featuring a collection of four films from legendary Dutch documentarian Joris Ivens. A Valparaíso (1962) profiles, through images both starkly real and lyrically poetic, the Chilean port city at the center of sea transportation via Latin America before the completion of the Panama Canal, with vast differences between poverty and wealth apparent at first glance. The short Le Petit Chapiteau (1963) was also made during the director’s stay in Chile, capturing the