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
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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
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! Frederick Blichert from Realscreen reports on the backlash Discovery is facing from members of the production community over a new funding model for new, unscripted programming. Discovery implemented a system in which production companies pay producers for their content after it has been delivered to the network
I’ve been thinking a lot about what a unique, strange and unpredictable thing the web series space is, and how working in it after a decade of working in feature docs has been both illuminating and humbling. So I called up a friend I knew could relate: renowned DP and now full-time director Nadia Hallgren. We both recently made short-form documentary series for the web. Nadia’s series for Topic is She’s the Ticket. It’s about women running for office after the election of Donald Trump. My series The F Word is being released by SoulPancake, a division of Participant Media, and is available on
The International Documentary Association (IDA) has awarded directors Nina Alvarez and Violet Feng the 2019 Logan Elevate Grants. The Elevate Grants are an initiative of IDA’s Enterprise Documentary Fund supported by a grant from the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation. The $25,000 grants are awarded to emerging women filmmakers of color whose feature-length projects integrate journalistic practice into the filmmaking process. The Jonathan Logan Family Foundation supports organizations that advance social justice by promoting world-changing work in investigative journalism, the arts, the
As we commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising this month, a slew of films reflecting on that seminal event in LGBTQ history are, unsurprisingly, hitting screens from coast to liberal coast. What sets Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s State of Pride apart from this pack, though, is the doc’s firm focus forward, as the Oscar-winning duo turn their lens on the many young queer communities celebrating Pride today. And not just the usual suspects—i.e., white cisgender gays and lesbians of means living in New York City and the Bay Area—that have historically been visible onscreen
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. On June 26, HBO premieres True Justice: Bryan Stevenson’s Fight for Equality, from Emmy-winning filmmakers Peter Kunhardt, Teddy Kunhardt and Geroge Kunhardt. The documentary follows Bryan Stevenson, an Alabama attorney and founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, as he shares his experience advocating for the poor and condemned within the criminal justice system and his struggle to create a more fair system in the face of deeply entrenched racial