The SFFILM Festival played at several San Francisco Bay Area venues from April 10-23. At 62 years, it’s the longest-running film festival in the Americas, and this year's edition screened almost as many documentary features (40) as narratives (46), showing the gradual creep of the nonfiction form toward filmfest dominance. Doing post-festival reports on them can be a little anticlimactic, since many of them have been released into theaters or on Netflix and are not shiny new phenomena. But they also have a chance to live in my memory for a few weeks, and some bubble up more insistently than
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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! Whitney Friedlander of Paste explores the power of political documentary, spotlighting Rachel Lears’ Knock Down the House and David Modigliani’s Running with Beto. “But, it was really the type of campaign [for U.S. Senate] that he was going to run: that he was going to go to every county in Texas, that he was only
Everybody loves an anniversary. Hot Docs had its celebrations last year when Canada’s biggest documentary festival turned silver to massive industry and popular acclaim. Soldiering on after the accolades, Toronto’s major doc organization resumed its lofty trajectory this year, including the nearly inevitable breaking of the seasonal audience count, which went up to 228,000. Hot Docs’ public performance figures are impressive: there were 451 public screenings of 234 films on 14 screens across Toronto; over 300 filmmakers and subjects participated in public presentations; and—pity the
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Premiering May 20 on Independent Lens, Wrestle, from Suzannah Herbert and Lauren Belfer, follows four members of the wrestling team at Huntsville, Alabama’s J.O. Johnson High School—long listed as one of Alabama’s failing schools. The four teammates face everyday challenges that transcend the wrestling mat—and their journey to the state championship. As their tough-love coach grapples with his own past while wading into the complexities of race, class and privilege, 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! Judith Heumann, Senior Fellow at the Ford Foundation and internationally renowned disability rights advocate, talks to the Foundation about changing the face of disability in the media. "With films like Unrest, by Jen Brea, which is about people who have hidden disabilities, more people are beginning to identify
Filmmaker Pare Lorentz believed movies held enormous potential for social justice and education. In his 1936 film The Plow That Broke the Plains, Lorentz juxtaposes a tractor toiling across the Great Plains of the US with tanks rolling into World War I. A military reveille sounds as a cavalcade of plows disrupt the earth and economy. A stoic voice speaks alongside images of downtrodden families leaving a bone dry land, “Blown out, baked out, and broke. Nothing to stay for. Nothing to hope for. Homeless, penniless and bewildered they joined the great army of the highway.” Rewatching the film
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. What’s My Name: Muhammed Ali, from Antoine Fuqua and executive producers Lebron James and Maverick Carter explores the boxing icon’s challenges, confrontations, comebacks and triumphs through archival recordings of Ali himself. The film celebrates a man who transcended his sport to become a global beacon of hope and a symbol of humanity and understanding. The two-part series premieres May 14 on HBO Sports, then streams on HBO Go and HBO Now through May. Manuel Correa’s The
Bernardo Ruiz has always been interested in stories about borderlands—“In particular, the love/hate relationship between the US and Mexico,” he says. When he’s not busy as a director and producer-for-hire on films for ESPN’s 30 for 30 series or Alex Gibney’s Jigsaw Productions (on the recently released Facebook Watch miniseries, USA v. Chapo), the movies he’s produced independently have each dealt with this theme in different ways. His first documentary feature, Reportero ( POV), was about a group of journalists in Tijuana who cover organized crime and political corruption. His second feature
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! IndieWire’s Anthony Kaufman critiques the economic disparity in the documentary industry. With more commercial entities intent on making and releasing nonfiction, it’s an exciting time. But similar to Hollywood’s cooption of indie film in the 2000s, much of that energy is going towards predictable places—celebrity
Filmed over seven years, The Silence of Others reveals the epic struggle of victims of Spain’s 40-year dictatorship under General Francisco Franco as they organize a groundbreaking international lawsuit and fight a so-called “pact of forgetting” around the crimes they suffered. It is a compelling and moving cautionary tale about fascism and the dangers of forgetting the past. The Silence of Others is the winner of a 2019 Goya—Spain’s Academy Award— the Berlinale Panorama Audience Award, Berlinale Peace Film Prize, Sheffield Doc/Fest Grand Jury Award, the IDA Pare Lorentz Award, an IDA