Recently, a student in my production class at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism wielded the term "talking heads" to dismiss an interview-driven documentary. My initial response was physiological: a tightening of the muscles in my jaw and chest area, a certain twitching of the eye, and a notable increase in respiration, not unlike heavy sighing—in fact, exactly like heavy sighing. My next response was to screen for my class a scene from Rob Epstein's The Times of Harvey Milk. The first time I saw The Times of Harvey Milk—it must have been in a high school class—I was swept away by its
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Every film tells a story. Bottom line. But some films have a double bottom line, a two-fold mission: to tell a story, and to propel social change. To make an impact. In the past decade, the means of measuring a film's social effect have grown increasingly sophisticated, inspiring numerous studies that measure impact—among them, Participant Media's 2014 study Storytelling Matters: Measuring the Social Impact of Entertainment on Audiences; the Media Impact Project, based at the USC Annenberg Norman Lear Center; and, from the Center for Media and Social Impact at American University, Assessing
The Millennial and Gen Z generations who are native digital users will be the largest segment of the population worldwide within the next decade. It's a demographic shift that will have a significant, continual impact on the way we communicate across media, including how we incorporate a technologically advanced visual dialogue into our everyday lives. While Baby Boomers and older Gen Xers may feel everything from dismissive to perplexed or even paralyzed by the shift to digital storytelling, the upcoming generations fear none of that. To get information delivered via virtual reality, gaming
"Numbers don’t lie" is the adage of business. This also applies to the film industry, with box office figures—posted on websites such as BoxOfficeMojo, Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB—often used as a gauge of a film’s success or failure. But the landscape of film distribution has changed dramatically in the past five years, and as audiences increasingly watch films on other platforms from the comfort of their own homes, box office figures no longer reflect an accurate, let alone complete, picture. Yet, surprisingly, in this age of information and readily available statistics, there’s a paucity of
Simon Kilmurry takes the helm this summer as IDA's new executive director, following 16 years at the venerable PBS series POV—the last nine years as executive producer, and seven years before that as chief operating officer of POV's parent company, American Documentary. During Kilmurry's tenure, POV has received numerous accolades and has helped further the careers of such filmmakers as Marshall Curry, Laura Poitras, Natalia Almada, Jennifer Fox and a host of others. Kilmurry has also overseen a significant expansion in the digital space, not only with its dynamic website, but with such
A few years ago I directed If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front, a documentary about the rise and fall of a radical environmental group that committed dozens of acts of arson against timber companies, developers, polluters and others. The film included conversations with former ELF members, mainstream environmental activists, arson victims and the law enforcement team that sent the ELF members to prison. After screenings of the film, I would often get comments about how "balanced" it was. But that word always made me wince. I didn't intend the film to be balanced; I intended
Night and Fog: A Film in History By Sylvie Lindeperg Translated from the French by Tom Mesv Visible Evidence, Volume 28 University of Minnesota Press, 20140 No subject in history has received as much examination for its visible evidence as the Nazi concentration and death camps, and no documentary about the camps has created as much controversy as Night and Fog (1956), directed by Alan Resnais. I write "directed by," rather than "a film by," because after reading Night and Fog: A Film in History by Sylvie Lindeperg, I realize that this seminal film is the product of many, sometimes warring
There has never been a more dangerous time for documentary filmmakers. Many work independently without organizational backing and are literally on the frontlines, taking on challenging situations, often without the protections that journalists doing similar work have in place. Taking on financial, physical, legal and technological risks, the documentary filmmaker often fights the lone battle, whether in a war zone, or against government, powerful corporations or individuals. In a report released this past winter by the Center for Media and Social Impact, titled Dangerous Documentaries
Editor's note: Over the next few weeks, we at IDA will be introducing our community to the films that have been honored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences with an Oscar® nomination in the documentary category. You can see Cartel Land on Saturday, February 27 at DocuDay, the IDA's daylong celebration with back-to-back screenings of the nominees at the Writers Guild of America Theater. This article was first published in July, 2015. The drug wars among the handful of cartels in Mexico over the past decade have cost tens of thousands of lives, as the nation south of the border
Editor's note: Over the next few weeks, we at IDA will be introducing our community to the films that have been honored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences with an Oscar® nomination in the documentary category. You can see The Look of Silence on Saturday, February 27 at DocuDay, the IDA's daylong celebration with back-to-back screenings of the nominees at the Writers Guild of America Theater. This article was first published in the Summer 2015 issue of Documentary magazine. With the North American theatrical release of Joshua Oppenheimer's The Look of Silence coming up this