Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Premiering tonight, Monday, July 24 on POV is Kahane Cooperman and Raphaela Neihausen's Oscar-nominated short Joe's Violin, in which a donated instrument forges an improbable friendship. Huffington Post calls it "a powerful testament to our potential as human beings to have a lasting impact for good." Available to stream this week at Le Cinema Club is Albert and David Maysles' 1966 doc Meet Marlon Brando. The New Yorker's Richard Brody calls it "rare and essential." Streaming
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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! From the Sundance Institute blog, Jess Fuselier asks, Why is data important for independent filmmakers? In today’s independent film industry, data analysis is the unknown for many and a superpower for the elite few. For giants like Netflix and Amazon, data analysis permeates their overall strategy and acts as a
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Premiering Saturday, July 22 on Showtime is Laura Poitras' RISK, which chronicles the complex relationship between the filmmaker and Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Time Out calls it "A jaw-dropping profile of one man's battle with world governments, common decency and his own out-of-control ego." Premiering tonight, Monday, July 17 on POV is Ido Haar's Presenting Princess Shaw, the story of an aspiring musician who inspired an internationally famous video artist to create
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 R ealscreen, Jessica Mach asks if exposure to disturbing content is taking its toll on TV producers. This is not an entirely new concern. In explicitly high-risk labor like that of human rights workers and first responders, stress and trauma stemming from overexposure are gaining recognition as occupational
Filmmaker Matthew Heineman floored audiences two years ago with his third feature film Cartel Land, an in-the-foxhole, vérité tale of the ongoing drug problem along the U.S.-Mexican border. It earned him an Academy Award nomination and won him an Emmy, after dominating at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival with a directing award and a special jury prize for cinematography. This January, he was back in the snowy peaks of Park City with City of Ghosts, a powerful cinematic experience that follows the journey of "Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently" (RBSS) over a year of their lives. RBSS is a small
August 2015—Guatemala City: On my iPhone are images from 800 feet looking down over tens of thousands of demonstrators on the street below, besieging the National Palace in a citizens' uprising in Guatemala City. A GoPro-mounted drone lets me capture the enormity of the anger that’s led to the largest demonstration in Guatemala's history. It will become the climax of our new film 500 Years, the final episode in our Guatemalan trilogy. But I'm actually in New York directing the shot by sharing texts, photos and overseeing the filming itself via WhatsApp. What did we ever do before the digital
The annual AFI DOCS Filmmaker Forum was held this year from June 15-18 at the AFI DOCS Festival Hub in downtown Washington, DC. The forum opened with the panel "Going to the Source: Documentary Funders Share Their Insights," which was moderated by Kathryn Washington, director of television content at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). The panel featured Maida Brankman, founder of Genuine Article Pictures; Dan Cogan, executive director and co-founder of Impact Partners; Jax DeLuca, director of media arts at the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA); Melissa Fondakowski, a consultant
When the Los Angeles Film Festival (LAFF) moved from its downtown digs to Culver City last year, I noted that the relocation marked a return in spirit to its previous residency in Westwood in the 2000s--where its cluster of venues within walking distance of one another and its close proximity to UCLA gave it the self-contained energy of a festival. Well, I thought that, anyway, but according to IndieWire's Anne Thompson, LAFF lost 45 percent of its audience last year in the wake of its westward move. So this year, under the leadership of Jennifer Cochis, LAFF expanded its presence, retaining
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Premiering tonight, Monday, July 10 on P.O.V. is Feras Fayyad's Last Men in Aleppo, a vivid and heartbreaking account of wartime Syria told through the eyes of the White Helmets volunteer rescue workers. The film won the 2017 Sundance World Cinema Grand Jury Prize for Documentary. Currently streaming on MUBI is Sophie Huber's Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction, an intimate and impressionistic portrait of the enigmatic American actor. The Boston Globe calls it "an unexpectedly
Since IDA's DocuClub was relaunched in 2016 as a forum for sharing and soliciting feedback about works-in-progress, four DocuClub alums have premiered their works on the festival circuit over the past few months. In an effort to both monitor and celebrate the evolution of these films to premiere-ready status, we reached out to the filmmakers as they were winding their way through the festival circuit. Following their DocuClub screening last fall, Jamie Meltzer premiered his film True Conviction at the Tribeca Film Festival, where it earned a Special Jury Mention for Documentary Feature. The