At the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival, enormous creativity was on display, from many angles. Perhaps most interesting was a critical mass of journalistic work on systemic problems, often expressed in ways that vigorously exercised the flexibility of the form. The fest was of course rich in performance, glamour and celebrity. Contemporary Color captures an extraordinary spectacle of grassroots performance art—David Byrne orchestrating displays by color guards from across the US—in the combination of magical realism and cinéma vérité that the brothers Bill and Turner Ross ( 45365, Tchoupitoulas
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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! New York Business Journal talks to filmmaker Gary Hustwit about his new VR content studio, Scenic. "The seed funding was put in by myself and the partners who started the company. We bootstrapped the seed capital. We're in the initial stage of exploring a Series A round. We have been doing major work for HBO
Now nearly two decades old, the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival is perhaps the closest thing America has to a European doc fest in terms of engagement, both from its prestigious attending filmmakers and its rabid audiences. And for the past six years this finely tuned fest has been hosting its laidback A&E IndieFilms Speakeasy conversations. Free and open to the public, the most recent series of panels was held in the 21c Museum Hotel (which, intertwined with a contemporary art gallery, is definitely the most unique hotel this traveling journalist has ever stayed at), and boasted a wide
Colleges and universities, often at the foreground of providing creative incubation for the research and development of new technologies, are beginning to explore the boundaries of virtual reality (VR). A few of them have funded incubators with agendas that differ in both practice and theory. Graduates and undergraduates are creating prototypes that include everything from documentaries to mapping systems, and off-campus collaborators—be they media giants or government agencies—are exploring a myriad of possibilities with a technology that's still in its infancy. "I'd say when you ask where we
April 18, 2016 Dear Sir, On behalf of the International Documentary Association, I am writing to express our deep alarm and concern at the recent rejection of a visa application for documentary filmmaker Rokhsareh Ghaemmaghami by Immigration New Zealand. Ghaemmaghami was scheduled to attend the prestigious Documentary Edge International Film Festival in May 2016. Rokhsareh Ghaemmaghami is an award-winning Iranian filmmaker who regularly shows her work at festivals all around the world – including throughout Europe and the US. Her recent film, Sonita, won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2016
Following a brief test run in the 1990s, virtual reality has rapidly taken hold over the past few years as a potent tool for exploring the possibilities of storytelling—first among the gaming community, then among such early adaptors as Nonny de la Pena, who started in journalism. The Sundance Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival and SXSW have all incorporated VR programming into their respective new media mixes, and the medium hit the mainstream in Fall 2015 when The New York Times distributed Google Cardboard viewers to 1.5 million subscribers to experience what The Old Gray Lady has to
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! From the Full Frame Documentary Festival website, filmmaker R.J. Cutler shares with director of programming Sadie Tillery his vision behind the program that he curated for the festival, "Perfect and Otherwise: Documenting American Politics." "Looking at the films together reveals all sorts of fascinating through
By shining a light on what is becoming an increasingly dynamic relationship between the documentary filmmaking and journalism worlds, two recent conferences have focused attention on these two separate but occasionally overlapping and intersecting areas of inquiry and art. Add into the mix last year's Dangerous Documentaries report from the Center for Media & Social Impact, which also highlighted this relationship, and there is definitely something in the air. The two conferences, both held within the belly of major journalism schools, reveal key similarities and differences between
Way back in the analog days, in 1993, DocuClub was launched in New York as a means for filmmakers—emerging and established alike—to get together and share their works-in-progress, give and receive feedback, and make the kind of connections that sustain communities. DocuClub attracted enough attention from the New York doc community to establish itself as a membership organization and attract sponsors like HBO and A&E, as well as partnering organizations like IFP, IDA, Third World Newsreel and Arts Engine. As for screening venues, DocuClub grew accordingly, starting out in the offices of 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! From Current, a new report commissioned by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) calls for an overhaul of its relationship with the National Minority Consortia. The major hurdle identified by Coats2Coats [Consultancy] is the impaired relationship between the corporation and the consortia, which "is built