The three-day agenda of IDA's Getting Real '16 conference contains as many strands: art, diversity and sustainability braid together to form a rope, offering the entire documentary community a way to climb. "Programming a conference" accurately describes the Getting Real team's ultimate task, but it doesn't adequately evoke their process, which has been responsive, mindful and organic. Ken Jacobson, the conference's director of programming, with IDA Executive Director Simon Kilmurry, launched a dialogue in early 2016 with artists around the country, inviting them to unpack their needs. "We
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The arts and creative practices are inextricably embedded in American life, are uniquely positioned to tell the story of our nation’s people, and are inseparable from our diverse heritages. Just as the arts are interwoven into the economies, health care, expression, and education of our nation and its global partnerships, a vast array of policies impacts our individual and collective cultural well-being. The arts are a powerful conduit for communication, inspiration, and unity, and their inclusion will inform and improve the policy-making process. We urge the new Administration to leverage 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 Wall Street Journal, Ben Fritz explores the tricky business of tallying box office revenue for independent films. In a bid to stand out from competitors, one independent distributor, the Orchard, is making a radical play for transparency. The company, which recently released Hunt for the Wilderpeople - its
As audiences continue to voraciously consume true crime stories, Deborah Esquenazi's debut documentary, Southwest of Salem: The Story of the San Antonio Four, sheds light on an extreme miscarriage of justice against four openly gay women in the 1990s, and their subsequent fight to clear their names. The film, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in April, unravels the story of a couple, Anna Vasquez and Cassie Rivera, and their friends, Kristie Mayhugh and Liz Ramirez, who were convicted of gang-raping Liz's young nieces, ages 7 and 9. We quickly learn that the case is far more complex
In the ninth grade, punk rock was writer-musician Laura Albert's salvation. Punk would also become part of the reason she would trust documentarian Jeff Feuerzeig with the story of her life - and the lives she created in a masterful, decade-long hoax cum performance art project. Albert, 50, conjured up JT LeRoy, and through this teenage wunderkind avatar, created a series of darkly lurid, hardscrabble books about male prostitution and drug addiction that shook the world and seduced an avid corps of artists - Lou Reed, Gus Van Sant, Asia Argento, Courtney Love among them - to champion and
Over the last quarter-century, Kirsten Johnson has lensed some of the most challenging and impactful documentaries of our time, ranging from Laura Poitras' The Oath and Citizenfour to Kirby Dick's This Film Is Not Yet Rated and The Invisible War. She contributed additional camera work to Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, and early in her career she shot many interviews with Holocaust survivors for the Shoah Foundation. Her other credits include Darfur Now, Pray the Devil Back to Hell, 1971 and Two Towns of Jasper. In 2009, Johnson decided to make her own documentary, focusing on two young
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 Filmmaker, director Penny Lane asks whether documentary films should have footnotes. In "Honest Truths: Documentary Filmmakers on Ethical Challenges in Their Work," an excellent report put out by the Center for Social Media, a sample of 45 filmmakers expressed daily frustration at the lack of standards and
There are moments of subtlety and nuances of character development to be discovered in the visual narrative of the documentary, The Eagle Huntress, but they are easy to miss. It is a classic example of the spectacle of the big picture—golden eagles soaring through blue and white marbled skies—overshadowing the quieter, more intimate moments. If this was a Western it would be a case of the director, Otto Bell, facing off against the cinematographer, Simon Niblett. Although Niblett did envision the heroic tableau of a western while composing the shots for this documentary, both men are on the
" Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth … The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies."- Pablo Picasso This past spring, archivist/professor/filmmaker Rick Prelinger wrote a post on Facebook that drew my attention: "I find it amazing that documentary filmmakers are accorded such great authority by audiences, reviewers and scholars when they are not obliged to cite their sources (especially egregious when archival materials are used.)" He added that if he were to write an academic paper or peer-reviewed article without citing sources, he
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 No Film School, Liz Nord covers Errol Morris's IDFA talk on the similarities between documentary and virtual reality. Referencing a David Hume theory, Morris explained, "We tend to see causality in the world...and this need to see a 'before' and 'after' in how we explain the world around us is part of who we