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 Alternet, Michael Moore shares his post-election to-do list. You live in a country where a majority of citizens have said they believe there's climate change, they believe women should be paid the same as men, they want a debt-free college education, they don't want us invading countries, they want a raise in
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Since Alex Rivera earned the inaugural Emerging Documentary Filmmaker Award back in 2003, the honor has gone to a distinguished company of filmmakers who have more than met the criterion of having made "a significant impact at the beginning of his or her career in documentary film." Marshall Curry, Jehane Noujaim, Natalia Almada, Danfung Dennis, Zachary Heinzerling: These are a few of the honorees who have gone on to earn Academy Award nominations, Emmys, Peabodys and, for Almada, a MacArthur "Genius" Grant. Dennis has since launched Condition One, a leading VR technology company. This year's
The Pioneer Award, a staple of the IDA Documentary Awards since 2003, acknowledges those individuals who have made "extraordinary contributions to advancing the nonfiction form and providing exceptional vision and leadership to the documentary community." Past honorees have included Ted Sarandos, Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, and the Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program. The 2016 Pioneer Award goes to Ally Derks, the founder and director of the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), who has tirelessly worked towards advancing the non-fiction form and nurturing the
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 POV blog, Tom Roston reports on documentary filmmakers directing political ads. Super PACs are by nature partisan, and Local Voices' opposition to Donald Trump might just be creating a new model for future elections to come, channeling what feature documentary filmmakers do best: create impactful
Shortly after Facebook acquired Oculus VR, which developed the Oculus Rift headset, CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in an interview in MIT Technology Review, asserted, "Immersive virtual and augmented reality will become a part of people's everyday life. History suggests there will be more platforms to come, and whoever builds and defines these will shape the future and reap the benefits." In the short time since that 2014 acquisition, VR has dominated the conversations among the tech and media cognoscenti, establishing itself as a must-program topic among festival, market and conference mavens
At DocLisboa, held in Lisbon, Portugal, in October, slow cinema is front and center. Or, as co-director Davide Oberto says, "It's cinema; it's not television. Our central character is curiosity." Don't come here for the trendiest or best-selling doc in the nonfiction market. Come for the New Visions section, this year featuring the city symphony-esque art explorations of the late US experimental filmmaker Peter Hutton. Come for the retrospective of the first frenetic years of Cuban revolutionary cinema. Or for Ta'ang, the latest from Wang Bing, the Chinese filmmaker whose observational work
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, Anne Thompson profiles three executives who produce some of the world's biggest docs. Each has their strengths and strategies. Nevins and Weyermann feel strongly about social justice; Nishimura taps into the global power of documentary. Nevins and Nishimura both want to lure more subscribers, but
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! Kathy K. Im, Director of the MacArthur Foundation, reflects on the importance of protecting independent journalism and journalists. Increasingly, and for some time now, reporting that takes four months, 12 months, or two years is unthinkable for most commercial news organizations, and so nonprofit newsrooms and
During the 60th BFI London Film Festival, which wrapped on Sunday, one of the most acclaimed dramatic features was British director Andrea Arnold's American Honey, a coming-of-age story acclaimed by critics for its "visually fascinating aesthetic." But far away from the buzz surrounding such Oscar hopefuls, in the relative quiet of the Documentary Competition, I found a clutch of coming-of-age films that equally shone. Together, they employ a battery of storytelling techniques to bring their young protagonists' lives to the big screen. All This Panic, a feature debut by husband-and-wife
The day before they brought together a groundbreaking number of Asian American documentary filmmakers on the first day of the International Documentary Association's Getting Real 2016 Conference, Grace Lee and S. Leo Chiang barely dodged Typhoon Megi in Taiwan. They had been there for CNEX, a Chinese documentary forum during which Chinese filmmakers come together to work on pitches and meet distributors. Lee and Chiang had to board an earlier flight in order to make it out before the typhoon landed. Lee, director of American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs, and Chiang, director