Dear Readers, At some point, following the tentative steps we take out of college, with our degrees and diplomas at hand and a daunting mountain of debt to deal with, we find ourselves on a career path—beginning with our first jobs and the first time we fill in the "Occupation" box on our tax returns. If we're lucky, our career/occupation/line of work morphs into something deeper—a livelihood, a calling, a passion, a purpose. The documentary career—well, purpose—is a daunting one that can take you to thrilling and dangerous places, that can open your mind to a trove of ideas, that can expand
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Filmmaker Steve James earned the first Best Documentary Oscar nomination of his distinguished career earlier this year for Abacus: Small Enough to Jail, a film that took him far from his home turf of Chicago to New York's Chinatown. But he's back on more familiar ground with his latest project, the Starz documentary series America to Me. Across 10 episodes, James weaves the stories of a group of mostly minority students navigating life at racially-diverse OPRF—Oak Park and River Forest High School—a stone's throw from where he lives in suburban Chicago. "The location is three blocks from my
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Premiering August 27 on POV is Zaradasht Ahmed's Nowhere to Hide, which follows nurse Nori Sharif through five years of dramatic change in one of the world’s most dangerous and inaccessible areas—the "triangle of death" in central Iraq. Initially filming stories of survivors and the hope of a better future as US and Coalition troops retreat from Iraq in 2011, conflicts continue with Iraqi militias and the simultaneous rise of ISIS. Among the American Masters episodes
Though heroic activists have been pushing for change in policing across the country in recent years, they've mostly sprung from those communities suffering disproportionately under unjust law enforcement policies—not from the institution tasked with enforcing those policies. Which is what makes the NYPD 12, a dozen of NYC's finest who are truly living up to the moniker, so unique. Comprised of minority officers fed up with carrying out racially discriminatory practices and meeting quotas (outlawed, but nevertheless expected), these whistleblowers spent years putting both career and life on the
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Premiering August 20 on Mubi, Thom Anderson's Los Angeles Plays Itself examines the way Los Angeles is represented and misrepresented in film and television throughout history. Detailing the numerous depictions of the city throughout history, Andersen critiques the popularized vision of Los Angeles and the adverse effects it has had on communities—unraveling dark truths and conspiracy’s just beneath the glitzy surface of the city. Premiering August 23 on Logo, Vavani Vérité's
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! Paige Wyant, Associate Chronic Illness Editor for The Mighty, has some things to say about the Netflix docuseries Afflicted. I originally thought Afflicted was going to shed light on less-known illnesses and elevate the stories and voices of those who struggle with them, but the docuseries did the opposite
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Premiering August 17 on Hulu after a wildly successful festival run, Bing Liu's Minding the Gap began as a skateboarding video that he shot among his friends in his hometown of Rockford, Illinois. But over 12 years, the story deepens and darkens from a coming-of-age tale to a full-on reckoning with the daunting transition to adulthood. All three characters in the film, including Bing himself, reveal their troubled upbringings and their shaky struggles to find their grownup
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! The film community stormed the Twitterverse this week, following the announcement from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Science, under pressure from ABC/Disney over declining ratings of the Oscars telecast, announced major changes, including a new category for most popular film and a proposal to relegate the
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. The early days of documentary yielded a handful of now-classic "city symphony" films, including Walter Ruttmann's Berlin: Symphony of a City. Influenced by the early work of Dziga Vertov, the film is structured to follow the life of Berlin and its inhabitants across the course of a single day, from dawn to dusk, to create “a symphonic film with the thousandfold energies that make up the life of a great city.” Now streaming on Mubi. Premiering August 6 on POV, Joan Fan's Still
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! The staff at Current, headed by Karen Everhart, Mike Janssen and Steve Behrens, have created a timeline documenting the history of public broadcasting in the US. Public broadcasting in the US has grown from local and regional roots at schools and universities into a nationally known source of news and