In the business world, we're familiar with the terms CEO, CFO and COO. But Ted Sarandos may be the country's best known and most successful CCO—Chief Content Officer. He holds that title at Netflix, where he has revolutionized the television industry with original programming ( House of Cards, Orange Is the New Black, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt), turning "binge-watching" into a cultural phenomenon. As the Netflix slate grows under Sarandos, so does its ambitions in the nonfiction realm. This month it announced the acquisition of a 10-part documentary series Making a Murderer (upping the ante on
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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! KPCC's The Frame spoke with Nancy Tartaglione of Deadline.com about the role that Parisian cinemas could play in the collective healing process: Within France, the movie theaters were closed beginning Saturday, and that was actually meant to last for two days, but some of the major exhibitors started opening again
Archival and preservation issues took center stage at DOC NYC on Tuesday, as IDA and the Association of Commercial Stock Image Licensors (ACSIL) co-presented a full day of programming in this important area. Following a keynote address by filmmaker and Schomburg Center motion picture curator Shola Lynch, a series of four panels covered a wide range of topics: Negotiating Rights, Monetize Your Outtakes, Preservation & Archives and Crafting a Story with Archival. Featuring a mix of ACSIL members, veteran doc filmmakers and other experts in the field, the discussions highlighted a diverse range
Gordon Quinn co-founded Kartemquin Films, 50 years ago, in the crucible that was the 1960s, when movements and activism proliferated across the country and independent mediamaking was taking hold as a force for social change. From their home base in Chicago, Quinn and his colleagues found the stories that informed their mission. Over the next several decades, Quinn oversaw a trove of work that evolved from agitprop cinema to a rich canon of stories that reached wider audiences with their humanism and deep emotional resonance. Hoop Dreams, The Interrupters, The Trials of Muhammed Ali: These are
"We want to challenge our audience… and to surprise it," says Leena Pasanen, who took the helm as director of the International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Film ( DOK Leipzig) earlier this year. Pasanen has introduced a fundamental change in thematic content of the world's oldest documentary film festival (it was founded in 1955) by doing away with the strict partitioning of documentary and animated films. In that sense, DOK Leipzig is one of the pioneer documentary film festivals in this format, which integrates animated documentaries in the Official Selection and qualifies
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 Point of View magazine, Svetla Turnin tries to go beyond the female gaze to move toward documentary gender equality: Documentary is a more democratic medium than fiction filmmaking. It has featured egalitarian production practices based on collaboration, trust, mutual aid and respectful equity—not just among
In 2005, Judith Helfand, Julie Parker Benello and Wendy Ettinger co-founded Chicken & Egg Pictures to support women documentary filmmakers, and what began with one "I Believe in You Grant" has expanded over the past decade to include new programs like the Accelerator Lab, which provides grants and mentorship to a diverse group of first- and second-time filmmakers, and the Breakthrough Award, intended to recognize and provide mentorship and funding to mid-career filmmakers. As Helfand explains to Documentary, the goal is to support the creation of bodies of work from diverse voices, "not just
IDA is thrilled to be co-presenting "Archival & Survival," a daylong series of panel discussions at DOC NYC on Nov 17th that spotlights a number of issues critical to doc filmmakers in the areas of archival footage and preservation. Co-presented by the Association of Commercial Stock Image Licensors (ACSIL), the events will be sparked by a morning keynote from filmmaker and Schomburg Center motion picture curator Shola Lynch ( Free Angela and All Political Prisoners) followed by four panel discussions featuring members of ACSIL, veteran doc filmmakers and other experts in the field. Panel
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 Foreign Policy, filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer recently talked with writer and analyst David Rieff about whether society is desensitized to the realities of genocide and why it's important to examine its perpetrators: Most nonfiction films dealing with human rights abuse tend to tell us that things are well in
Despite being one of the oldest documentary film festivals in the US, the recently concluded United Nations Association Film Festival (UNAFF) was a new experience for this old San Francisco Bay Area film festival hand. Now in its 18th year, UNAFF presented 60 documentaries, all representing the festival's stated themes of "human rights, the environment, protection of refugees, famine, homelessness, racism, disease control, women's issues, children, universal education, war and peace." The ten days of the festival organized the films into 25 sessions held in Palo Alto (half at city venues, half