When good intentions meet bad assumptions on the film festival circuit Editor’s Note: The writers are the co-directors and executive producers of The Ride Ahead (2024), a personal-meets-political documentary following Samuel Habib’s navigation into adulthood with the guidance of a community of disability activists. This article was updated on November 26, 2024, with news of the film’s screening at DOC NYC. In June, we had our Washington, D.C., premiere of The Ride Ahead at DC/DOX Film Festival, following screenings at Hot Docs, Seattle International Film Festival, Independent Film Festival
Latest Posts
Today, Catapult Film Fund announces that longtime industry executive Tabitha Jackson is the newest member of its board. One of documentary’s most respected thinkers and funders, Jackson has a 30-year career spanning broadcast commission at the UK’s Film4 and Channel 4 and a relocation to the U.S. to direct the Sundance Institute’s Documentary Film Program. At Sundance, she initiated the Art of Nonfiction Fellowship and received plaudits for decrying the “hegemony of story,” shifting the Documentary Film Program’s mandate toward formal innovation. After seven years in that post, Jackson
Jean-Marie Teno is Africa’s preeminent documentary filmmaker. With a critical eye and a sharp wit, he questions the established truth, exposes the censored stories, and examines the past to comprehend the complex realities of Africa’s present. Teno’s films have been honored at festivals worldwide, and he has been a guest of the Flaherty Seminar, an artist in residence at CalArts and the Pacific Film Archives in Berkeley, and a lecturer at many universities. He is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ documentary branch. Teno’s best-known film is Africa, I Will Fleece You
Turbulence: Jamais Vu gracefully handles the balance of embodiment and empathy in its exploration of the feeling of disassociation that happens during a vestibular migraine. Wearing a VR headset, the viewer sits at a desk and is invited to interact with the objects as the narrator guides them through his experience. An edge detection filter and inverted image fed back into the headset distorts perception, and as the piece progresses, so does the disassociation. Immersive artists Ben Joseph Andrews (who experiences that condition) and Emma Roberts are creative collaborators who explore issues
The intimacy and intricate care that BlackStar puts into the organization and accessibility of its annual film festival make it feel like a deeply considered project brought together by so many experienced and attentive organizers. The ability to facilitate joy and safety in a gathering can create exponential space for growth, a bending of space-time that gives folks true time to be free and travel across waves of distant visions. Amidst all the vibrancy and energy of the people of BlackStar, I tried to see as many films as possible and will mention here films that I saw for the first time with audiences. Like the talks, the focus of many of the films was survivorship—they asked how we propel ourselves through truth and ethical pursuit in an age of disintegration and global instability.
Phantoms of the Sierra Madre Norwegian director Håvard Bustnes made his name with confrontational documentaries in which he explores the motivations of questionable characters, such as in Golden Dawn Girls (2017), which enters the dark and confused world of women from the far-right Greek nationalist party. At one point, he leaves the camera running when the protagonists think it’s off, which results in the most revealing segments of the film. In The Name of the Game (2021), he follows a popular Norwegian politician whose rise is halted by accusations of sexual harassment. Bustnes uses the
For so long, much about Russell Tyrone Jones, known to the world as Ol’ Dirty Bastard and Ason Unique by others, earned both public awe and unfortunate judgment. From the 1990s until his untimely death in 2004, he was a symbol of—and a living allegory for—the self-destructive celebrity in America. His life was marked by defiance against conventional fame, illustrated through stories of lifting Ford Mustangs off 4-year-old girls to bum-rushing Grammy award stages—a precursor to Kanye West’s later antics. ODB gave power to unorthodoxy in both his music and life, embodying a rebellion that
The Academy of Motion Pictures of Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) announced its new members recently. We congratulate ten IDA members who joined The Academy this year joining 600+ of our members who were already AMPAS members.
Ten years ago, on July 30th, 2014, the celebrated German filmmaker, writer, and artist Harun Farocki passed away. Farocki’s output spans short political films with an agitational edge, sharp essay films critiquing the ideologies behind image production in television from the inside, observational documentaries that extended this critique to the broader economic sphere, critical texts that both accompanied his own work and investigated that of others, editing the journal Filmkritik for a decade, teaching at Berkeley, and collaborating with Christian Petzold. Producing a study that properly
On January 24, by unanimous vote, documentary filmmakers got a big boost from Congress. The House of Representatives passed the Protect Reporters from Exploitative State Spying Act (aka the PRESS Act). It’s a journalist-protection bill that could easily have been called the Protect All Documentarians Act. Although the PRESS Act makes no specific mention of documentary filmmakers, federal courts uniformly include documentary filmmakers in their definitions of journalists. In fact, documentarians stand to be one of the bill’s biggest beneficiaries.