Nothing epitomizes the challenges confronting a documentary at Cannes more than the contrast of festival screenings with the live-action distractions of the Croissette, the famed beachside promenade. Just around the corner from the theater where Argentinean director Rodrigo Vazquez's dense, political doc, Condor: The Axis of Evil, was screening, stood Arnold Schwarzenegger, hawking his mega-budget spectacular, Terminator 3. Amid such hype, along with the overwhelming attention given to narrative films and the nightly star turns on the red carpet, the 56th Cannes Film Festival would seem to be
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Whether you think that INPUT is a festival for innovative television programs, a workshop for creative television programmers or an extended therapy session for People Who Care Too Much about Public TV probably depends on what you do. Or possibly on the day of the week during this annual, week-long, extraordinary event. Every year, for the last 26 years, people who treasure the notion that public television can serve the public in its widest sense gather in a different city to test the limits of that idea. Programmers, producers and administrators sit down together to, as the current
In 1998, when production began on Bonhoeffer ( www.Bonhoeffer.com), I felt confident that we had an intriguing historical documentary. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a young German theologian who challenged his state church to stand with the Jews in their time of need, and eventually moved from pacifist to participant in the plots to kill Adolf Hitler. Bonhoeffer wrote prolifically from a moral and religious perspective throughout the rise of National Socialism and his own resistance to it. Over the last decades many of his books— Cost of Discipleship, Life Together and Letters and Papers from Prison
Mark Moskowitz was in one of the last remaining independent bookstores in a mall, when he first came across International Documentary. He flipped through, not knowing much about the documentary world, and as he read about the festivals, grants and money available to filmmakers, he thought, "Well, I can do that." And he did. He is the writer, producer, director and now distributor of Stone Reader, a film about books, reading and the impact that an out-of-print novel, The Stones of Summer, had on him. It inspired a journey across the country to find out everything about the book, its creation
Los Angeles has never been much of a hockey town, so the convergence of the LA Kings’ Stanley Cup Championship match with the third day of the 20th Los Angeles Film Festival brought an unexpected flood to Downtown LA. My attempt to navigate from IDA’s offices in Koreatown on Friday the 13th to the Regal Cinemas at LA Live was fraught with traffic jams and last-minute parking changeups. So, I missed the 4:45 p.m. screening of The Great Museum, opting instead for the easier option: throwing up my hands in defeat and heading home. My colleague Thomas White was wiser than I in forgoing the Fest
'Getting Back to Abnormal' airs July 14 on 'POV.'
From June 23-26, Sunny Side of the Doc, France's international documentary marketplace nestled in the charming historic seaport on the Bay of Biscay called La Rochelle, festively celebrated 25 years since its 1989 Marseille launch. La Rochelle, France, the site of the 2014 Sunny Side of the Doc. Courtesy of Sunny Side of the Doc Over 2,000 professionals from 58 countries in Europe, Asia, South, Latin and North America, Australia and Africa attended, including 244 commissioning editors and buyers, and 468 companies exhibiting. A substantial Chinese delegation with daunting financial resources
The Los Angeles Film Festival made its debut in 1995 as the Los Angeles Independent Film Festival, with screenings at the Raleigh Studios' modest screening room. The documentary representation was scant in the first few years; by 1998 the festival had commandeered the then-Laemmle Sunset 5, but that year audiences were treated to just two feature docs, one of which was Bennett Miller's first film (and sole feature-length nonfiction work to date), The Cruise, which screened at 10:00 a.m. on a Saturday. Film Independent (then IFP West) took over the festival in 2002, dropped the "Independent"
I attended the sixth annual Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham, North Carolina last April, planning on paying special attention to the curated thematic series, "Leadership Through a Gender Lens" and "Flights of Fancy," to see if and how these themes might be reflected in the competitive films. However, war seemed to be the unintentional zeitgeist of this particular festival. Welcoming audiences to the festival, Executive Director Nancy Buirski admitted that there had been some concern among the staff about hosting a documentary film festival during a time of war. As if in
It is not surprising that the Tow Center for Digital Journalism's research project, Video Now —which examines current trends of news publications' video departments, focusing on October 2013 through February 2014—comes with this disclaimer: "The organizations that we visited and feature may all have moved on to new models by the time you watch this." It is a swiftly shifting world, with new leaders emerging and partnerships being formed everyday in the race to produce quality video content and maintain and grow audiences. Publications formerly steeped historically in print are forging ahead