Debra Chasnoff passed away earlier this month at age 60, of metastatic breast cancer. Although I didn't know Chas (as everyone called her) personally, I certainly knew of her groundbreaking social issue work that she distributed through New Day Films, the exemplary docmakers co-op of which she was a brilliant guiding light. And she was a force in the Bay Area documentary community, and above all, a trailblazer in LGBTQ storytelling. While earning a 1992 Academy Award for Deadly Deception helped to catalyze her career, Chas was most committed to getting her work out there—through both New Day
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Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Newly streaming on Netflix is Chris Smith's Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond, which chronicles Jim Carrey's method performance as Andy Kaufman in the film Man on the Moon. Newly streaming at Filmstruck is the Oscar-nominated 1986 doc H ellfire: A Journey From Hiroshima. After the atomic blast in Hiroshima, Iri and Toshi Maruki began working on a series of paintings depicting the event that haunted them. The fifteen monumental works, known as the Hiroshima Murals, portray hope in
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! At IndieWire, Jenna Marotta reports from a morning-after brunch celebrating Agnès Varda's honorary Oscar. The morning after receiving her honorary Oscar at the Governors' Ball, visions of dancing with Angelina Jolie still danced in Agnès Varda's head. "Can you believe they were surrounding me, protecting me?" she
It's been a rich autumn in London for documentaries, culminating in the Grierson Awards earlier this month, the annual awards ceremony celebrating the documentary form, named after the pioneering practioner who first coined the term "documentary." It's a sign of the times that two of the winning docs came from the migrant crisis. As the humanitarian crisis shows no sign of abating, filmmakers and broadcasters alike are struggling with how to tell the narratives emerging from the crisis in fresh ways. Both Grierson winners were stories filmed in large part by refugees fleeing Syria. In the BBC
For nearly 40 years, Lourdes Portillo has been at the vanguard of documentary film, pushing the boundaries of content and form. Whether validating the experiences of women suffering a mother’s greatest loss in Las Madres: The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo and Señorita Extraviada; interpreting the vibrancy and beauty of Mexican culture in La Ofrenda, while exposing its underbelly in The Devil Never Sleeps; or portraying the purity and evil of fandom in Selena, the constant in Portillo's work is that she defies convention, even the conventions that she creates. "There was always a sense of play in my
The International Documentary Association has announced the host for the 2017 IDA Documentary Awards. Iranian-American comedian Maz Jobrani will host the 33rd edition of the annual ceremony which takes place Saturday, December 9 at the Paramount Theatre in Los Angeles. “I’m very happy to be hosting the IDA awards,” Jobrani said. “My sister was a documentary filmmaker and her love of the medium made me appreciate and admire what documentary filmmakers to do make this a better world for all of us!” Jobrani was a founding member of The Axis of Evil Comedy Tour, which aired on Comedy Central in
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. This week we highlight documentaries about American veterans. Premiering tonight, Monday, November 13 on POV is Michael Collns and Marty Syjuco's A lmost Sunrise. In an attempt to put haunting combat experiences behind them, two friends embark on an epic 2,700-mile trek on foot across America, seeking redemption and healing as a way to close the moral chasm opened by war. Premiering tonight, Monday, November 13 on HBO is Deborah Scranton's War Dog: A Soldier's Best Friend
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! At D avidBordwell.net, film scholar Kristin Thompson offers an extended commentary on Bill Morrison's archival doc Dawson City: Frozen Time. The subtitle "Frozen Time" is a bit misleading. The reels of nitrate sealed away in the permafrost were no doubt frozen, and the temporal fictional and newsreel images they
In 2010, a charismatic, Minnesota-based Iraq War veteran named David Crowley began work on his debut film project, a paranoid action film about a United States taken over by martial law. He called the project Gray State, and when he posted a dystopian, high-production-value concept trailer for the film in 2012, it struck a chord among libertarians and anti-government activists. It has since been viewed nearly three million times. Despite copious crowdfunding support and a hungry fanbase, the film was not completed. During Christmas week of 2014, Crowley killed himself, his wife and their young
Strong Island is Yance Ford's cinematic nonfiction exploration of racial injustice in the Long Island suburbs, told through the murder of the filmmaker's 24-year-old brother at the hands of a 19-year-old white mechanic 25 years ago. Nabbing the Special Jury Award for Storytelling at Sundance this past January, the film is as unconventionally riveting as it is emotionally searing. It's also been long in the making, having been on the indie film radar for over half a decade (or at least since Ford made Filmmaker magazine’s annual " 25 New Faces of Independent Film" back in 2011). Nonetheless