One of your characters confesses a life-changing secret to his wife while you're filming—should you use it? Your character said something terrific in pre-interview but didn't in the filmed interview—should you prompt him? A secondary character who's in some essential scenes decides to pull out, and you're on deadline with a fine cut. Do you pressure her? Tell her it’s too late? Say OK and get ready for some long days in the edit room? At the GETTING REAL conference, filmmakers shared their ethical dilemmas with an audience that, often, had faced similar challenges, and got the chance to vote
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In some ways it's difficult to imagine what America was like before 1971. Communism had been represented for decades in the media as an Orwellian hell, where neighbors spied on neighbors, the government monitored every utterance, and even a harmless joke at the government's expense could sentence a person to a Siberian gulag. America, by contrast, was considered the land of free and unbridled speech—the McCarthy Era notwithstanding. Certainly by the late 1960s, many people had come to suspect that the government was keeping tabs on some of the more violent dissident groups of the time. But for
Back in 2001, filmmaker Allison Berg thought she was prepared. She was in the process of editing her first documentary film, Witches in Exile, when a fire broke out in her neighbor's apartment. While her building was evacuated, she watched in horror from the sidewalk below as firefighters doused her building with water, uncertain whether the footage she thought was safe might be lost forever. Berg had made copies of all her footage for Witches in Exile but everything was stored in the apartment. If the fire had spread, she would have lost the entire film. From this experience, lessons were
The 33rd CAAMFest—the Center for Asian American Media’s Asian-American film festival—has wrapped after 10 days of cinema, food and music in San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley. Although the theme of this year’s event, the largest Asian/Pacific Islander film festival in the world, was travel and destinations, my own festival experience resonated with notions of home: leaving home, coming home, staying home, recognizing home after a long absence. And that interpretation is fine with CAAMFest, whose vision is pluralistic and its audience possibly the most diverse of all Bay Area cultural events
At SXSW, documentaries are a big feature of the film component, as SXSW itself metastasizes from a one-time tripartite festival (films, tech, music) into a host of mini-fests that focus on everything from journalism to sports to health to education to fashion to retail. But don’t look for a theme, unless it’s “eclectic.” In the feature competition, Scott Christopherson and Brad Barber’s Peace Officer won the Grand Jury Prize, as well as the Audience Award. Competitors were highly diverse in style and subject, including Ron Nyswaner’s She’s the Best Thing in It, an engaging and compelling
Sebastião Salgado, the subject of Wim Wenders’ latest documentary, The Salt of the Earth, has earned formidable renown for his photography projects over the past four decades. These projects have taken him to some of the most tragic and devastating places, ravaged by war and famine and pestilence, as well as to remote places where the best of humanity still persists. His projects sometimes take him up to ten years, but he comes away with a portfolio that manages to exude some sort of beauty amidst the sorrow. After documenting so much pain, he took a break, then turned his camera to nature—in
Every president since Lyndon B. Johnson has made curing cancer a cornerstone of their health-care initiatives. With each passing administration, the claim that it can be conquered in a lifetime is made, only to evaporate as every advance in treatment is met by the ceaselessly morphing nature of the disease. Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies, the three-part, six-hour documentary, executive produced by Ken Burns, directed and produced by Barak Goodman, and based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee, is a deeply engaging, often riveting account of the world’s
Documentary magazine has been a constant at the IDA from the organization's humble beginnings in the early 1980s, when the magazine's page count was closer to that of a double-sided newsletter than a legitimate glossy publication. Thanks to a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the IDA has started the process of archiving every issue of its stalwart publication to make each issue available online through the organization's website, documentary.org. Understanding that this would be a huge project, the IDA hired experienced journalist and documentary filmmaker Juliana Sakae
Last month, with the help of the UCI Intellectual Property, Arts, and Technology Clinic and Donaldson + Callif LLP, the IDA filed a lengthy comment with the United States Copyright Office seeking an exemption to the DMCA’s prohibition on “ripping” from encrypted media, which makes it illegal to access encrypted material on DVDs, Blu-Ray, and just about any commercially available video source. The exemption we seek would allow filmmakers to “rip” media in these formats and from online media and cable TV for fair use purposes. The exemption is necessary because the DMCA is preventing us from
As we all know, documentaries are a labor of love—sometimes a long labor of a whole lotta love. And given the circumstances, some docs test our perseverance, commitment and dedication. There’s money to raise, there are forces majeures, and there’s the disruptive force of life itself that takes us out of the lives we’re documenting. We’re well familiar with the benchmarks: Hoop Dreams took seven years to make, Betrayal, 23. And the dearly departed Albert Maysles’ long-in-the-works train documentary will finally premiere this April, at the Tribeca Films Festival. And then there’s Denny Tedesco’s