Since IDA's DocuClub was relaunched in 2016 as a forum for sharing and soliciting feedback about works-in-progress, three DocuClub alums have premiered their works on the festival circuit this past month. 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, Jeremy S. Levine and Landon Van Soest premiered their film For Ahkeem at the Berlin International Film Festival, and later screened it at Tribeca, Hot Docs and DOK
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Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Receiving a digital/DVD release on Tuesday, May 23 is Derik Murray and Adrian Buitenhuis's I Am Heath Ledger, which recounts the remarkable (and all too brief) acting career of Heath Ledger, and showcases footage captured by Ledger's own camera. Premiering Monday, May 22 at 10pm on Independent Lens, Ben Lear's They Call Us Monsters goes behind the walls of the Compound, a high-security facility where Los Angeles houses its most violent juvenile criminals. The Hollywood
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 The Telegraph, Isabelle Fraser explains her decision to accept a BAFTA award on behalf of her dad, Nick Fraser of BBC's "Storyville." As the editor of the BBC's Storyville documentary strand for the last 20 years, Dad has commissioned and produced more than 600 films. Over that time, the documentary has changed
Once, when asked about the contributions of the filmmaker Shirley Clarke to the evolution of film as an art form, my mind drew a blank. I made a connection after being reminded that she had directed the mesmerizing cinema vérité Portrait of Jason, an interview with Jason Holliday, a gay, black, male hustler and performer extraordinaire, shot over 12 hours on December 3, 1966. This notable film, edited down to an hour and 45 minutes, had been impossible to see until Dennis Doros and Amy Heller, the founders of the independent distribution company Milestone Films, released the digitized restored
Editor's Note: Some of the greatest documentaries of all time would be inconceivable without their protagonists to drive the stories and keep us viewers enthralled. From the Beales to the Friedmans, from Bob Dylan to Bob Flanagan, these real-life people were transformed, through the dynamic collaborative processes with their respective filmmakers, into indelible and engaging characters of cinema. And it's thanks to the access and intimacy that these protagonists granted to the filmmakers that these films were made in the first place. So when writer Lauren Wissot proposed a column in which she
Nothing stirs you from your morning film festival slumber faster than hearing your own name mentioned out loud in front of a packed audience. There I was on day one of the CPH:FORUM at the CPH:DOX Festival minding my own business, studying my program guide, trying to stay upright on one of the festival's cushy couches in its brand new Social Cinema, when suddenly the words, "I was talking to Ken Jacobson of Documentary magazine…" drifted toward me from the front of the room. "Huh? What? Who, me? Could there possibly be another Ken Jacobson in this room? (It is Denmark, after all, where there
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Premiering Monday, May 15 on HBO, as well as HBO Now and HBO Go, is Erin Lee Carr's Mommy Dead and Dearest, a true-crime mystery about a mother and daughter who were thought to be living a fairy tale life. The New York Times writes: "if you were still luxuriating in the feel-good aura of Mother's Day, this disturbing film will put an end to that." Also premiering Monday, May 15 at 10pm on Independent Lens, Maya Zinshtein's Forever Pure looks at a national scandal involving
In the 1970s, there were few American artists as brazen and as dangerous as the Los Angeles-based Chris Burden. His career-defining series of performances included being confined to a tiny locker for five days, taking a hostage on live TV, getting shot in the arm by a friend, and staging a crucifixion on the back of a Volkswagen Beetle. Years later, Burden transformed into a genre-bending sculptor and installation artist, creating audience-friendly works like the intense kinetic toy-car sculpture Metropolis and the highly Instagrammable L.A. landmark Urban Light, comprised of 202 ornate gray
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! Realscreen reports from Hot Docs on the ins and outs of funding applications, featuring Amy Halpin, Director of Filmmaker Services at IDA. Applicants don’t always properly contextualize their work sample. Halpin said people think the sample speaks for itself, but it needs to be contextualized: who are these
In humans and in landscapes, documentarians have two enormous subjects at their disposal without having to look far, and inexhaustible potential in the convergence of the two. At CPH:DOX's NEW:VISION, a competition that collects works from artist filmmakers working in a documentary mode, the landscape loomed large. From this year's selection, four films foregrounded the landscape, in varying ways and through various means. The latest film from prolific British filmmaker Ben Rivers, following a few films that have taken him in new directions, marks a return to more familiar territory, and also