When speaking with filmmaker Barbara Kopple, you find yourself in the company of a woman with more verve, passion and lust for knowledge than many artists half her age. Yet here she is, about to turn 70, as her latest film, Miss Sharon Jones!, is about to premiere. Kopple got her start as an intern with the Maysles Brothers on Gimme Shelter (1970). Her first directorial effort, Harlan County USA, in 1976, took the Oscar for Best Feature Documentary. Not content to work only in nonfiction, she has helmed both feature films and television, earning a Director's Guild America Award in 1998 for an
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Hooligan Sparrow. Courtesy of POV." src="http://www.documentary.org/sites/default/files/images/articles/HooliganSparrow.jpg"> Nanfu Wang feels safe in New York. Surveillance, that essential preoccupation of the documentarian in America, is a chokehold from which she has been temporarily released. From her Brooklyn apartment, the Chinese filmmaker prepares for the release of her debut feature documentary, Hooligan Sparrow. Titled after its eponymous central subject, women’s rights activist Ye Haiyan, the film takes on, among other things, government censorship, police brutality and civil rights
Jack Pettibone Riccobono’s debut feature, The Seventh Fire, which opens today in New York and July 29 in Los Angeles through Film Movement, takes an elliptical approach to exploring gang culture on the White Earth Indian Reservation in Minnesota. The film is a powerful work of social advocacy that pushed its case for criminal justice reform all the way to the White House. At the same time, it’s a poetic and immersive work of cinema that bears the official imprimatur of visionary director Terrence Malick. Riccobono’s camera vividly depicts the reservation’s Pine Point Village as a stagnant and
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 AL Monitor, Mazal Mualem argues that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is waging a battle against public broadcasting. This delay raises enormous questions about the future of public broadcasting in Israel. It now seems that as long as Netanyahu is prime minister and communications minister, public
Crossing the Anacostia River back toward Northwest Washington, DC, tails between our legs, I thought, "Pick-up shoots are supposed to be easy." We'd spent all day driving around the entirety of Southeast DC searching for iconic establishing shots for City of Trees, a doc we were making about a nonprofit organization working in this area. We stopped on top of a beautiful hill overlooking a small valley of medium-sized homes and blooming trees that climbed up over the opposing horizon, where I set up my tripod. It was a good shot. Behind me, a woman started hollering. Like a dutiful shooter I
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 Variety, Maureen Ryan calls attention to two documentaries of particular relevance to a heartbreaking, chaotic week in America. News organizations need to be offering much, much more in the way of in-depth coverage of how we got to this point, when it comes to both police-connected violence, gun violence and
Editor's Note: Aman and Zeshawn Ali were among five film teams selected to participate in the second annual filmmaker Camden/TFI (Tribeca Film Institute) Retreat in partnership with CNN Films. The Camden International Film Festival (CIFF), Tribeca Film Institute (TFI) and CNN Films held this five-day intensive seminar in Camden and Rockport, Maine, to provide five US-based filmmaking teams with professional guidance, master classes and mentorship, led by a cross-section of industry experts to help the emerging talent advance their documentary filmmaking careers. The projects selected for the
Cinephiles the world over are just beginning to come to terms with the loss of the restlessly inventive Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, who died of cancer last week in Paris. Working within the religious and political constraints imposed by the post-1979 Iranian government, Kiarostami eluded all generic categories, using each new project to express a new challenge to film form. In his art, he brushed aside censorship in order to set up a series of self-imposed limitations, creating a recognizable sensibility that wed postmodern skepticism to neorealist humanism. It risks cheapening the
Most Americans know about the "War on Drugs," but fewer people are aware of the "War on Sex Crimes." Over the last 25 years, the punishments for these transgressions have gotten harsher, especially for crimes against children, and once individuals are convicted, the crime stays with them for the rest of their lives. In many places sex offenders are prohibited from living near, or even having contact with, children. One Florida-based woman, who struggled to find a place for her son to live after he got out of jail, established a motor-home community to help offenders transition back to society
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! In advance of the IDA's Getting Real conference, Realscreen presents a special report on documentary financing and the economic pressures on filmmakers. The democratization of technology and abundance of distribution platforms allows most anyone to make docs, but with so many opportunities and a saturated market