This year’s GETTING REAL conference fell at an introspective and ripe time in my life as a documentary filmmaker. For most of my career, I have felt decidedly on the outside looking in at those special folks who visit war zones, interview presidents, whistle-blowers and celebrities, get the big grants and commercial work, and generally manage to make a living at filmmaking. I have envied those who, as Sundance Documentary Film Program Director Tabitha Jackson describes it, are "Curators of Outrage." Especially during my hiatus for motherhood, I was a complete outsider—in a world of diapers
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I love hanging out with other documentary filmmakers. It's way cheaper than therapy! Because let's "#GetReal": It's hard out here, y'all! But it's also an amazing time for nonfiction filmmakers. So hanging out at the GETTING REAL 2014 conference was a great way to re-charge and get inspired. It was a welcome break from the grind of raising money, researching the kaleidoscopic distribution landscape and arguing with my tween daughter that Nicki Minaj offers no redeeming cultural value whatsoever. One thing stood out to me after seeing everyone together: There are a lot of people making
Myth #1. Filmmakers who tackle exposés of human rights abuses, or illuminate social issues, are not artists. We are. We give equal weight to being artists as well as human rights defenders. We know that as we get better and better as artists, we create wider audiences with far greater impact. Because we aren’t just developing a narrative story arc, we are developing ideas across the length and breadth of the documentary film. It’s the interplay of the two that creates dramatic tension. The power and beauty of cinema are our artistic and political tools. Our canvas is global; our palette, the
Last spring, Al Jazeera America announced a partnership with Chicago-based Kartemquin Films ( The Interrupters, The New Americans) on a six-part documentary series that will explore the hopes, fears and realities of low-wage American workers. The result, Hard Earned, slated to air beginning May 3, looks at the lives of five struggling families, representing a diversity of races, ages, industries and regions. Al Jazeera America began conversations with Kartemquin early on—even before the channel’s launch in August 2013—on how to make an impact with stories that dig deep below the surface of
Bruce Sinofsky, who with Joe Berlinger made the celebrated Paradise Lost trilogy along with Metallica: Some Kind of Monster and Brother's Keeper, passed away this morning after a longtime struggle with diabetes. He was 58 years old. Joe Berlinger contacted us with the news via email, and offered the following tribute: "Bruce encouraged both of us to throw caution into the wind to start capturing what would become Brother’s Keeper in 1991 with no money in our pockets, in the pre-video 16mm age of documentary-making, when making a no-budget film took a little more ingenuity to get in the can
"In the 21st century, people will recognize and realize that there is a man who in 20 years created a body of work that will stand the test of time: Ten plays that documented the African-American experience in the 20th century. No other playwright in the American canon has done that." Sam Pollard, the Peabody, Emmy and IDA Award-winning editor/director/producer ( Four Little Girls, Slavery by Another Name), is referring to August Wilson, the subject of the forthcoming American Masters documentary August Wilson: The Ground on Which I Stand. Pollard got a call from WQED Executive Producer Darryl
Four years ago, filmmaker Tomasz Śliwiński and his wife, Magda Hueckel, welcomed a baby boy, Leo, into their lives. The moment of joy quickly turned to pain and despair when they were told that Leo was born with a respiratory disease: congenital central hypoventilation syndrome, commonly known as Ondine’s Curse. Over the next six months, Tomasz and Magda decided to film themselves, initially as a coping mechanism and a means to channel their angst into something creative. From the outset, Śliwiński’s intent was to make the film only for his family, to document this particularly trying
America’s veterans are killing themselves at a rate of nearly one every hour, a shocking reality when you think of the number of younger men and women returning home from recent deployments in our most recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The realities of combat can be so difficult to bear that veterans often return to their hometowns and their families feeling alone in this world, their problems seemingly comprehendible to no one but themselves. But one call center in Upstate New York is attempting to help these men and women in their times of deep crisis by lending an ear to listen. The
One would never expect a film about a place where cows go to die to be so visually and emotionally beautiful. But the deliberate pacing and slow reveals in the 29 minutes of Gabriel Serra Arguello's The Reaper ( La Parka) make the violence and gore inherent in a documentary about a slaughterhouse surprisingly tolerable. Unlike an advertisement you might see for an animal rights campaign, the visceral parts aren't the most weighty; instead, the film is heavily focused on the realities of death as experienced by Efraín Jiménez García, the film's titular "Reaper—the one who delivers the final
Just as California beckoned Americans westward in the mid-19th century and then the Great Depression, with the promise of a better, more prosperous life, North Dakota, with its burgeoning oil industry, has transformed itself into a mecca for farflung chasers of the American Dream. And while the state has enjoyed the lowest unemployment rate in the nation over the past several years, North Dakotans have witnessed a significant disruption in culture and community. Filmmaker J. Christian Jensen, like several documentary makers before him, went to North Dakota in search of a story. He came back