If we listed Betsy West and Julie Cohen’s numerous accolades, films, documentary news programs and teaching credentials—namely all the reasons they were the perfect pair to make RBG—we’d have no room for anything else. Suffice it to say, West and Cohen had been on the path to telling Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s story for quite some time, even if it wasn’t always apparent. The two journalist-filmmakers were introduced by a mutual friend and colleague in 2011, when West was looking for a producer on Makers: Women Who Make America, a PBS series about the modern women’s movement
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“I did whatever I needed to do to fit into a group of people who hated the color of my skin… I wanted love. I wanted to feel love, so yeah, I just made friends with monsters.” — Cornelius Walker With politicians being outed for past ethnic slurs and cultural insensitivity, the topic of race is a volatile one, but that’s not exactly a news flash. There’s no shortage of drama where the clash between races is concerned, and when the volatility of adolescence gets added to the mix, well, violence is seldom in short supply. But then from the other side of the Atlantic comes Black Sheep, a short
What does it mean to die well in the 21st century, and how does it feel? End Game, from longtime collaborators Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman ( The Celluloid Closet; Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt), takes us inside the world of hospice and palliative care, following the journey of terminally ill patients, their families and caretakers in two cutting-edge San Francisco facilities. Documentary spoke with the Oscar-winning filmmakers about their vérité approach to a universal subject that most of us spend our whole lives avoiding. DOCUMENTARY: What would an Oscar win do for End Game
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Filmmaker Matt Tyrnauer captures the roiling debauchery of the Disco Era of the 1970s--the nucleus of which was Studio 54, the club whose clientele was a massive swirl of uptown and downtown culture, the gay community and A-list celebrities. Studio 54 premieres February 11 on A&E. The Oscar-nominated Hale County, This Morning This Evening premieres February 11 on Independent Lens. Director RaMell Ross creates an immersive cinematic reverie of African American life in rural
While Talal Derki was working on his first documentary feature—the Sundance-winning Return to Homs, a story that goes behind the barricades in the war-torn city of Homs, Syria, to follow 19-year-old Basset and his comrades in their quest for a successful revolution against the Assad regime—the seeds of his second documentary were sown. In Homs, he met a man who, he would later learn, was teaching his five-year-old son how to use weapons. The image lodged into Derki’s mind, but it wasn’t something he was able to use in Return to Homs, because his story focused on a more historical narrative
Following on the heels of last month’s “Doc Star of the Month,” Ashley York, the lead character and co-director of hillbilly, Documentary is pleased to present for February yet another face of flyover-country diversity. Walter Burrell is the proud owner of a drinking hole in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, that he lovingly refers to as the “hillbilly Studio 54” in Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher’s The Gospel of Eureka. (And which, though it hosts weekly drag shows, Burrell is quick to point out is not a “gay bar,” since it welcomes everyone regardless of sexuality; he’s staunchly opposed to “gay
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! Wesley Morris of The New York Times praises the work of Marlon Riggs, the subject of a weeklong perspective--Race, Sex & Cinema: The World of Marlon Riggs--at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. There’s no reason all of this work should still work, that it should still hypnotize, upset, delight and astound. But genius
I first saw Hale County This Morning, This Evening, RaMell Ross’s cinematic look at daily life in the Alabama Black Belt, at last year’s CPH:DOX. It was one of those unexpected festival finds, a film up for the DOX:AWARD, and thus required viewing for us international critics serving on the Danish film magazine Ekko’s annual Starbarometer jury. As I wrote of the doc in my final assessment, “A series of exquisitely framed snapshots alternate with kinetic camerawork, set to an ambient sound design weaved with an elegant score. The poetry of daily life in the rural South is deftly captured
Documentary filmmaker Chai Vasarhelyi and her husband, climber and filmmaker Jimmy Chin, haven’t been making movies together for all that long. But you wouldn’t know it when talking to them, as their synchronicity is acute, even over a conference call with each of them in different locations. Vasarhelyi made her first documentary—a feature about friends in Kosovo during the war at the turn of the last century—when she was still an undergraduate student at Princeton University. Though she went on to work under narrative director Mike Nichols on Closer, nonfiction was her passion. She set off to
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. On the heels of a year of popular and critical acclaim, Morgan Neville’s Won’t You Be My Neighbor? makes its television premiere on HBO this Saturday, February 9. Meet the television icon who made kindness and empathy the twin drivers of his irresistible persona. Sealab, premiering February 12 on American Experience, tells the little-known story of the Sealab project, launched 50 years ago this month as a pressurized underwater habitat, complete with science labs and living