The Academy recently announced its Oscar nominations. At IDA, Oscar season means that we are in high gear planning for DocuDay LA, our annual day-long marathon screening of nominated films. If you have not been, DocuDay LA is IDA’s longest-running signature event, since 1983! Our loyal fans take the annual pilgrimage from all over North America to see the year’s most powerful films, hear from the key creatives who made them, and gain insight into the anatomy of an Oscar-nominated documentary. Whether you are a doc-maker yourself, or simply love documentaries, the event is a truly inspiring day
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Three Films by Raymond Depardon Released by Icarus Films 2018 3-Disc Boxed Set Featuring 12 Days / 87 minutes, 2017 /French w/English subtitles, Journal de France /100 minutes, 2012, France ( Les Habitants)/ 84 minutes, 2015 If you are unfamiliar with the work of French photographer, photojournalist and filmmaker Raymond Depardon, this newly released three-disc boxed set from Icarus Films provides a basis for understanding who he is and what subject matter occupies his field of vision. Born in Villefranche-sur-Saône in 1942, the 76-year-old Depardon shows no signs of slowing down. The
Editor’s Note: Orwa Nyrabia is the artistic director of International Documentary Filmmaker Amsterdam (IDFA). He was born in Syria, where, in 2002, with his partner, Diana el Jeiroudi, he launched the first independent documentary production company in the country. They later founded DOX BOX, the leading documentary festival in the Arab region. As a producer, his films have earned numerous honors, including a Sundance Grand Jury Prize and a Grierson Award. What follows is the edited version the keynote address that he delivered at Getting Real ’18, via Skype. Where I come from, there is no
Editor’s Note: Chi-hui Yang is program officer at Ford Foundation’s JustFilms initiative. What follows is an edited version of his keynote address at the 2018 Getting Real conference. What I’d like to talk about today are in many ways some age-old questions that get to the heart of the documentary as a social and political form—and what it means to me to be a funder of social justice documentary filmmaking at Ford Foundation. These are some thoughts about the stakes of documentary today and what I’ve been calling “Documentary Power”—not the “power of documentary,” which is a very different
Editor’s Note: Molly Thompson is Senior Vice President of Feature Films at A&E Networks. In 2005 she launched the network’s feature documentary arm, A&E IndieFilms. What follows is an edited version of Thompson’s keynote address at the 2018 Getting Real conference. I wanted to begin this morning by posing what seems like a simple question: What is a documentary filmmaker? It’s one of those questions, it should be a piece of cake. But then I cleared my head and thought about it for a while—and to be honest I am still thinking about it. When I let the definition float to the surface in my mind
Transcription of Michele Stephenson's Keynote address from Getting Real '18.
Raising money for a film often feels like a Sysyphean task, constantly pushing a boulder up a hill. But as documentaries have become more popular among audiences (both at the cinema and on streaming platforms), nonfiction now appears more commercially viable than in the past. Equity finance, also referred to as hard money (as opposed to grants, which are soft money), has become increasingly a component in many documentaries. But at times, there are hidden perils of finding generous investors, as filmmakers sometimes enter unsuspectingly into Faustian pacts out of sheer desperation. As long as
Nestled at the foot of the Great Smokies and the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina, Winston-Salem is home to Wake Forest University. The school’s motto, Pro Humanitate, is often translated as “we do what we do for the sake of humanity.” Launched in early 2010 by Sandy Dickson and Mary Dalton, Wake Forest’s Documentary Film Program takes this motto to heart, with many of its instructors’ and students’ nonfiction films tending to focus on issues of social justice throughout the world. Teleconferencing from a converted cotton mill at the school’s Brookstown Campus—the Documentary Film
In a highly engaging new text, Open Space New Media Documentary: A Toolkit for Theory and Practice, authors Patricia R. Zimmerman and Helen De Michiel investigate emerging spaces in the new media documentary landscape. In simple terms, open space new media documentary describes a range of multi-disciplinary creative and political work that unites people, places and technologies. Projects emerging from this space use a range of techniques—including analog, digital and embodied forms—that are grounded in principles of co-creation, collaboration and community. It is perhaps easiest to understand
Dear Readers, Being the producer on a documentary necessitates a myriad of roles—as an artistic co-conspirator, yes, but in the right brain/left brain fluxus, the producer is the left brain, the one who takes the lead in building and maintaining the administrative/managerial infrastructure to keep the production process running; the one who watches the budget, raises the money, negotiates the deals, maps out the festival, distribution, marketing, impact, marketing and awards-season strategies; navigates the legal shoals…and so much more. In this issue, we salute the producer, with a series of