Dear IDA Community, As we have been working these past few months to prepare for the biennial Getting Real ’16 documentary conference, I’ve been struck by the broad range of challenges that the documentary community is facing. The themes of Getting Real—career sustainability, diversity and the evolving craft of documentary storytelling—came from a series of meetings with filmmakers around the country. They are big, all-encompassing themes that can sometimes feel overwhelming. Can you really build a life-supporting career in this odd business where filmmakers are often driven not by financial
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I first saw Marlon Riggs' documentary Tongues Untied in 1990 as a young staff producer at WNET/Thirteen. I had been asked to organize a New York-San Francisco LGBT town-hall meeting around the June broadcast of a series of films that culminated in Tongues Untied's premiere on PBS' POV. Tongues Untied was a life-changing event for me. It was the first time I had seen such an honest, raw and powerful film that uncompromisingly tackled the interplay of desire, race and racism, homophobia, sexuality, gender, HIV and class—from a Black Queer perspective. Formally, the film was groundbreaking. It
After over two decades of living in New York City (half in the Village, when "no-man's land" began east of Avenue B; half in Greenpoint, when it was still a Polish majority), this film writer/maker/programmer had had enough. The combination of rising cost of living in the midst of disintegrating infrastructure—and, not incidentally, my inability to bear another Northeast winter without wanting to slit my wrists—proved crucial in my decision to leave the Big Apple behind. Yet, strangely, due to the fact that we're now firmly in the online age, I never truly did. I simply packed up all my East
The comments—and the fetishizing perspectives—were naively unexpected: "What is he?" "Where is she from?" "Are they adopted?" "So exotic." These are just a few of the remarks I've experienced in my decade-long journey as a white mother who gave birth to two brown children—alternatively called biracial, mixed, mulatto, swirls, black, depending on the perspective and region of the country. The aesthetic input is fairly innocent. But other moments have teeth: white parents and teachers who confuse my brown daughter with the one other girl of color in the ballet class; endless discussions about
The international documentary field has never been harder to navigate, with thousands of worthwhile films vying for the limited attention of audiences. As a result, the film festival programmer continues to serve a powerful and necessary curatorial role. The best programmers expand the spectrum of nonfiction cinema by selecting and showcasing challenging new works alongside adventurous retrospectives of older, perhaps underappreciated classics. We posed several questions to programmers at four eclectic and globalized international film festivals—two big, two small—that are committed to an
A Perfect Candidate'. Courtesy of POV" src="https://www.documentary.org/sites/default/files/images/articles/perfectcandidate1.jpg"> Editor's Note: At the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival last spring, filmmaker R.J. Cutler was invited to curate the festival's Thematic Program—which, in this presidential election year, focused on politics, political campaigns and the electoral process, as reflected in six decades of docmaking. Cutler, whose distinguished canon of docs includes The War Room, A Perfect Candidate and The World According to Dick Cheney , relished the opportunity to assemble a
I teach film history to production students. Why do they come to class? It’s required, that's why. Otherwise they would be off experimenting with our equipment, sniffing out the best internships, auditioning actors and musicians, attending corporate mixers or toiling in the editing room. But they leave happy, because they have discovered how much less alone they are in their hopes, dreams and struggles. They have discovered themselves as part of a community that threads through time and tells its own story. At the outset of History of Documentary, I tell them about the time I came to my
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 Film School Rejects, Christopher Campbell considers the way that certain films, mostly docs, get a second chance for awards recognition. The allowance for overlap between the Oscars and the Emmys, which tend to be associated respectively as an honor for film and an honor for television, has been a place to find
This past summer, the 3rd annual Podcast Movement Conference was held at the Hyatt Regency in Chicago. Gathered were podcasters from all kinds of backgrounds and levels of podcasting expertise, from novice to professional. As a nonfiction media-maker, film professor and public radio devotee, I've been keeping tabs on the upsurge in podcasts. And I've been giving a lot of thought to the crossover between documentary filmmaking and audio storytelling. When my summer plans unexpectedly changed and I was unable to attend in person, I took advantage of the Virtual Ticket: access to every keynote
Jenni Olson's The Royal Road, which recently arrived on DVD and VOD via Wolfe Video, is a movie whose actual scale is nearly impossible to discern. It's clearly a minimalist work, composed of static, long-take 16mm landscape shots paired with Olson's lyrical voiceover, and it's brief, running just 65 minutes. But it's also a film of expansive ambition, tackling the Spanish conquest and colonization of California, the mythical power of classic Hollywood, and the value of nostalgia. These 65 minutes are the result of a 20-year process. Loosely following Junipero Serra's titular trail between San