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 S undance Institute, Festival Director John Cooper and Director of Programming Trevor Groth break down the just-announced Sundance lineup. "In a year that has rejuvenated the idea of television journalism covering every scandal and every political detail, documentaries are the last bastion of uncovering the
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Last week, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai announced plans to dismantle the agency's net neutrality regulations. The International Documentary Association stands firmly opposed to any repeal or rollback of network neutrality and urges policymakers and the public to stand up for an open Internet and a level playing field online. The Internet is the primary forum for the free flow of ideas central to democratic discourse. In this digital age, it would be difficult to imagine a truly open society or a well-functioning democracy without an open Internet. The open Internet has been crucial to independent
The 30th edition of the International Documentary Festival in Amsterdam (IDFA) was nonstop information overload, in a good way. The events were punctuated by rounds of celebration for founder Ally Derks, who stepped down this year. She is a beloved figure world-wide in the documentary world for her ability to build community, and build opportunity for all. IDFA has become a multi-functional international institution, setting trends in field-building, including: The IDFA Forum, the premier place to pitch upcoming projects to international broadcasters and other funders, now imitated around the
IDA's Amicus Award goes to an individual who has been a great supporter, financially or otherwise, of documentary filmmaking. The recipient of this year's award is Abigail Disney, producer, funder and director of many of the most distinctive and influential recent documentaries. Disney was born into a legendary filmmaking family that put its imprimatur on Hollywood and the world of entertainment. But the movie industry wasn't her primary métier at first; she earned degrees in English from Yale, Stanford and Columbia, then ventured into philanthropy, starting up nonprofits that embraced the
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Newly streaming on Netflix is Jon Alpert's Cuba and the Cameraman, which chronicles the fortunes of three Cuban families over the course of four tumultuous decades in the nation's history. Premiering tonight, Monday, November 27 on HBO is Brent and Craig Renaud's Meth Storm, which tells the story of rural, economically-disadvantaged users and dealers whose addiction to ICE and lack of job opportunities have landed them in an endless cycle of poverty and incarceration
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
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