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 Re/code, a roundup of the reviews of the long-awaited Oculus Rift. The general takeaway from the half-dozen or so reviews is that the Rift is still built for gamers. And even then, it's probably too expensive for the masses. Product reviewers are not known for brevity; plus, unlike a new Apple product or free
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The 34th annual CAAMFest, produced and presented by the San Francisco-based Center for Asian American Media, blew into the Bay Area, along with some long-awaited rainstorms that tossed our umbrellas up and down the streets of Chinatown, the Mission and Oakland. And in the warm and dry screening venues around town, CAAMFest proved what it does best: showcasing documentaries about Asians and Asian Americans.
Why has A Poem Is a Naked Person, a film Les Blank considered the greatest he ever made, remained virtually unknown and unseen, until now, over 40 years after it was completed? An answer to this question can be found in the newly restored, Criterion-released Blu-Ray. (The film had a brief theatrical run last fall through Janus Films.) It is clear that such a project would never have happened if it were not for the persistence and memory of Harrod Blank, Les Blank's son. As a young boy, tagging along with his filmmaker dad in the backwaters of 1970s Oklahoma, Harrod drew admiring portraits of
This year's Berlin International Film Festival presented a special screening of Life on the Border, a gripping project initiated and produced by Kurdish filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi. Over the past years Ghobadi has tirelessly narrated stories of the Kurds, the largest ethnic group without a state; their population spans from southeastern Turkey to northwestern Iran, northern Iraq and northern Syria.
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 Los Angeles Times, columnist Michael Hiltzik weighs in on the hot discussion this week about the Tribeca Film Festival's decision to screen the anti-vaccine doc Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Conspiracy, from physician-turned-director Andrew Wakefield. Careless actions such as those of the Tribeca Film Festival
I knew I had found a place in the documentary world that I could call home when, on the Friday night of the True/False Film Fest (March 3 – 6) in Columbia, Missouri, I found myself at an event called Campfire Stories, punctuated by campfire cuisine: in front of me, a table piled high with s’mores; on the other side of the room, another table laden with local moonshine. I used to think I was weird for recognizing the divine in the culinary pairing of beer and chocolate cookies. Enter T/F, where moonshine and s’mores co-exist happily and rule the day. Besides s’mores and moonshine (and Harold’s
The final chord of "the Blackfish effect" has finally resounded, with a stunning and unprecedented corporate policy announcement from SeaWorld. In January 2013, the documentary Blackfish premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, telling the story "about Tilikum, a performing killer whale that killed several people while in captivity," according to the official film synopsis. Three years later—a period marked by sustained activism, multi-platform distribution and unrelenting media coverage— SeaWorld officially announced on March 17, 2016, that it will officially end its orca breeding program 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! Following SeaWorld's announcement this week that it would stop breeding orcas, the Los Angeles Times spoke with Blackfish filmmaker Gabriela Cowperthwaite about the major impact her doc has made on changing perceptions and behavior. "It was constant, the amount of information I had to learn every day to continue
At SXSW this year, you could find great pleasure in films at two extremes of the commercially viable spectrum: the idiosyncratic passion project at one end, and the big and shiny, well-crafted work that may already be linked to a brand name. Both were a lot of fun to find, and they shared the ability to deliver a sense of discovery, of seeing past the obvious, while offering respect to both subject and audience. On the passion-project side, one of the quirkiest was Irish film critic Mark Cousins' I Am Belfast. Cousins, a film lover who seems to want to give the form a bear hug at every
We’ve spoken to quite a few of you who are excited to apply to the freshly launched Miller / Packan Film Fund, so we went straight to the source and asked Hugh Rogovy, Founder and President of the Rogovy Foundation, to answer a few questions about their latest philanthropic endeavor. In this #FunderFriday installment, you will hear directly from Hugh what inspired the grant’s creation and how your project can get noticed amidst the many fantastic films applying for this highly competitive doc fund. What inspired the Foundation to create the Miller / Packan Film Fund? Documentary films can have