With the premiere event in our new Conversation Series just one week away, we're getting excited about the stellar lineup of seasoned documentary filmmakers we've hand-picked to bring to the Linwood Dunn Theater in Hollywood over the next few months. The Series, which kicks off on the evening of Tuesday, July 21 with Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering ( The Hunting Ground, The Invisible War), will be hosted by Ben Mankiewicz, whose turns on Turner Classic Movies and What the Flick?! have afforded him the opportunity to interact with the art and culture of movies on an almost daily basis. We wanted to
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For women interested in pursuing a career in directing, the opportunities for gigs in commercial filmmaking in America have never been great. But the American Civil Liberties Union’s recent indictment of the entertainment industry for its unfair and biased hiring practices was an unprecedented move, uprooting the conversation from the small realm of feminist film bloggers and planting it into major conversations in mainstream media outlets. Hollywood and its studios have since been taken to task for their egregious oversights, and it’s been a banner year in the movement toward equality in the
One of the programmatic strengths of the Los Angeles Film Festival is its propensity to find and show compelling—and often little known—stories about LA. Some of these stories happened long ago; some are happening right now, unbeknownst to many of us. In a perpetually jam-packed festival landscape, and in a month in which LAFF goes up against Sheffield Doc/Fest, AFI Docs, BAMCinemafest, Provincetown International Film Festival and Banff World Media Festival, with the Edinburgh Film Festival and Sunny Side of the Doc coming at the end of the month, the Los Angeles Fest held its own: Of the 23
"Why isn't FRONTLINE more like Minecraft?" In her keynote address to the AFI DOCS Filmmaker Conference, FRONTLINE executive producer Raney Aronson-Rath relayed her 9-year-old son’s question posed at an MIT Open Docs Media Lab event. (For the uninitiated, Minecraft, the virtual reality creation game, is the hottest activity around for the most native of digital-natives, the pre-tween iPad generation.) Aronson-Rath spoke of being inspired at her week-long immersion into nonlinear storytelling ideation at MIT, and the importance of paying attention to the Minecraft question—and a Minecraft
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 What Happened, Miss Simone? on Saturday, February 27 at the Writers Guild of America Theater as a part of DocuDay. Liz Garbus first burst onto the documentary scene in 1998 the way all documentary filmmakers dream of. The Farm: Angola USA, which she directed and produced with Jonathan Stack, earned the Sundance Grand Jury Prize, Best Documentary honors from
3 1/2 Minutes, Ten Bullets, which documents the 2012 murder of an unarmed African-American teenager at the hands of a middle-aged white man at a Jacksonville gas station, is a tightly crafted courtroom drama that deals with the idea of storytelling as much as it does with the idea of race. In fact, the issue of race was not mentioned in the trial because the murder was not being considered as a hate crime. The narrative in the courtroom was that the accused, Michael Dunn, was acting in self-defense because he thought he saw a gun. This was a story that his counsel presented, to great effect
There are eight million stories in the Naked City, it’s been said of New York—but none more extraordinary than the one filmmaker Crystal Moselle stumbled upon in 2010. Walking in the East Village one day, she encountered six young men—brothers, it turned out, with long black manes and bearing the names of Indian gods: Bhagavan, Govinda, Narayana, Mukunda, Krisna and Jagadesh. Moselle and the boys bonded over a mutual love of cinema and, as the friendship grew, Moselle gained admittance to their private world within the walls of a public housing project. The strange alternate universe she
In 2001, when Tom Miller began making a film about gays and lesbians in relationships with partners from foreign countries, he would never have predicted how much Americans' position vis à vis same-sex marriage would change by the time he completed the film in 2014. It was a different world back then, recalls Miller. Miller left the medical profession in 1991 and moved to California to attend film school at USC; he received his masters in 1994. "I had come from Ohio," he recalls. "And I was totally in the closet and afraid to be out and gay. I came out while I was in film school, and then I
From a warts-and-all look at a Bay Area tech legend to a very personal meditation on life, love and history along one of the region's major highways, this year's San Francisco International Film Festival provided some memorable, only-in-San Francisco experiences as unique as the city itself. Steve Jobs: The Man and the Machine was the opening night film, one of the few times in the festival's 58-year history that a documentary was the kickoff attraction. But as many in the tech-heavy audience avidly played with their iPhones before the lights went down, it seemed fitting that Alex Gibney's
As I was putting together this quarter’s grants and opportunities blog post, I was made aware of an outstanding response posted in one of our favorite online communities, The D-Word. Lucky for us, the writer agreed to share her knowledge with the IDA community. We are pleased to feature the thoughtful insight of director/producer Tracy Heather Strain, as she shares her key takeaways about the NEH grant application process. She has applied and received two grants each from the NEA and NEH (!), with rejections from both as well, and served as a panelist for the organization three times since