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
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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
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! Christopher Campbell of Nonfics.com discusses Apollo 11 and They Shall Not Grow Old as recent examples of a growing surge of archive-intensive documentaries that are transforming how we engage history. Docs that are going for the full-on archival style aren’t really looking to any precursor or precedent or to one
The elephant in the room is Netflix. Just ask Marc Mauceri, vice president of indie film distributor First Run Features. This sentiment is reflected by his collaborators Jonathan Miller, president of Icarus Films, and John Hoskyns-Abrahall, founder of Bullfrog Films and owner, along with Icarus, of Docuseek, an SVOD (subscription video on demand) streaming platform for colleges and universities. They, along with Distrib Films US, an independent distributor of international feature films; KimStim, a Brooklyn-based company run by Mika Kimoto and Ian Stimler; and the newest of the bunch
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Premiering March 15 on Paramount Network, I Am Richard Pryor, from Jesse James Miller, explores and celebrates the life and career of the iconic comedian who lifted himself out of poverty to achieve worldwide success as a shrewd and penetrating observer of the Black experience in America. The six-episode Finding Justice, airing Sundays on BET through April 14t, travels the country to join heroes, leaders and activists as they battle to bring change to their home cities. Each
Editor’s Note: Documentary filmmaker and cinematographer Andrew Berends passed away—just a week after Free Solo , on which he was one of the cinematographers, won the Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary. Berends had to have been drawn to the brand of fearlessness that Alex Honnold exuded in scaling El Capitan. Berends himself personified that kind of moxie throughout his career, venturing alone to some of the more unnerving places on the planet in pursuit of stories of compelling humans who challenged the stigma that often tainted these places, who proclaimed a kind of fierce hope. For
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! Filmmaker’s Vadim Rizov talks to Brett Story about her latest film, The Hottest August. ...I’m really interested in expanding what we call “political cinema.” I also dislike message-y films, or whatever you want to call the films that see their role as delivering a particular policy line and/or demanding that