If news media is to be believed, America is currently besieged by a state of nearly intractable divisiveness that some believe may be signaling the brink of the country’s self-destruction. But even this state of divisiveness is divisive; many will claim the country is no more divisive than it’s ever been. But regardless of where your beliefs lie, one of the personalities at the center of this divisiveness is political operative—and former documentary producer/director/distributor—Stephen K. Bannon. And, like a divisiveness lightening rod, Bannon is currently the subject of two documentaries
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In October 2011, the documentary series Women, War & Peace premiered on PBS. It consisted of five hour-long docs, including Pray the Devil Back to Hell, about Nobel Peace Prize winner Leymah Gbowee, and I Came to Testify, about Bosnian women who broke history’s great silence and testified about their rape and sexual enslavement. Women from Afghanistan, Bosnia, Colombia and Liberia were featured in the series, which challenged the conventional wisdom that war and peace are men's domain, while simultaneously examining how war and conflict can look different from a female perspective. The series
Years before the #MeToo movement galvanized women around the world, the sexual assault in 2012 of an incapacitated teenager by members of the Steubenville High School football team set the international media ablaze. Sparking the firestorm was Alexandria Goddard, a crime blogger originally from the Ohio town. Fully aware of the centrality of Big Red football to the city’s identity, Goddard nevertheless methodically collected and pieced together social media evidence of the rape. Then she used her blog Prinniefied.com to blow the whistle on the assailants (who’d seemed determined to live up to
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Premiering March 30 on Discovery Channel, Tigerland, from Born into Brothels director Ross Kauffman and The Cove producer Fisher Stevens, takes viewers to Far East Russia, where the guardians of the last Siberian tigers risk everything to save the species. Directors/producers Marc Levin and Daphne Pickerson follow renowned neurosurgeon and Emmy-winning CNN chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta on a journey across the US to understand why Americans rank near the bottom
Note the date: February 6, 1982, when, at the instigation of filmmaker and psychotherapist Linda Buzzell, 75 docmakers gathered in Los Angeles for a charter meeting of the International Documentary Association. Its mission coming out of that meeting: “To promote nonfiction film and video, to encourage and celebrate the documentary arts and sciences, and to support the efforts of nonfiction film and video makers all over the world.” Thirty-seven years later, its mission modified and refined, its programmatic scope greatly expanded, IDA heeds closely to the essence of its original aspirations
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! Vox’s Alissa Wilkerson talks to Khalik Allah about his new documentary Black Mother. My inspirations never actually look like what I make, but I definitely draw inspiration from all over. The main thing was, I think, just walking and asking myself what’s important to me. I wasn’t necessarily thinking of my
SXSW, the annual mega-event in Austin, TX, has become not just a festival, not just a destination, but a spectacle in four dimensions. As cosplay characters, bizarrely groomed dogs, illuminated scooters and rickshaws wove through my 2019 journey, I could visit a battery of corporate “houses” programmed to attract attention, attend “parties” promoting the latest app or device, or visit massive installations celebrating digital artistry that brings echoes of 1970s lightshows. It takes focus to pay attention at SXSW, where your time is the most relevant currency. I was focused on documentary
In Life Underground, an ambitious interactive web documentary that received an IDA Documentary Award nomination for Best Short Form Series, filmmaker Hervé Cohen takes viewers on a global tour of urban public transportation—or rather, lets them choose their own adventure. Journeying through the subway systems of Taipei, Warsaw, Santiago and Los Angeles, among many others, Cohen explores the ties that bind human experience through his random conversations with commuters. What is most impressive is the range of topics he covers with people who are essentially strangers to him: love, migration
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Premiering March 18 on POV, 306 Hollywood, from Jonathan and Elan Bogarin, is a magical realist documentary of two siblings who undertake an archaeological excavation of their late grandmother's house. They embark on a journey from her home in New Jersey to ancient Rome, from fashion to physics, in search of what life remains in the objects we leave behind. Barbara Hammer, renowned as an indefatigable trailblazer in both LGBTQ and experimental cinema, passed away this past
While making his 1999 documentary Home Page, which documents the emerging culture of the Internet through one of its wunderkinds, 21-year-old blogger Justin Hall, Doug Block followed Hall’s lead and started a personal blog himself. That blog, which Block named The D-Word, would transform over the next two decades into a vital global online community of 17,000 members in 130 countries, where filmmakers offer each other advice, feedback, support, contacts, ideas and refuge. The history of The D-Word is woven with stories of filmmakers helping their peers. That is entirely intentional. “The