If you were looking to see independent films about Quidditch competitions, the life of Olympic diver Greg Louganis, the wild boar invasion in the Netherlands, or the man inside of Big Bird, AFI DOCS (formerly Silverdocs) was the place to be in June. The international festival, celebrating its 12th year in the Washington, DC area, offered 84 feature and short documentaries and 14 premieres over five days. But it wasn't just cultural topics that attracted viewers. Social issues docs were big. There were stories about homeless high school students trying to graduate (Anne de Mare and Kirsten
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In a recent interview with TheWrap, IDA Executive Director Michael Lumpkin was asked to discuss the current boom in documentary filmmaking. Excerpts from his interview were published in the piece Is This the Death of the Big Screen Documentary?, in which filmmaker Joe Berlinger also weighs in on how technology and contemporary distribution methods have been both "a blessing and a curse." "An individual can pretty easily and cheaply put their film online; whether anyone sees or finds it is another matter," Michael Lumpkin, executive director of the International Documentary Association, told
The Media Studies program at The New School is one of the oldest in the United States. Marshall McLuhan's colleague John Culkin brought his Center for Understanding Media to The New School in 1975, and The New School began offering the master of arts degree in media studies, one of the first graduate programs of its kind. Today, the program encompasses media theory, media business and media technology; students create their own media projects, ranging from documentary and dramatic films to websites and other online media, installations and multi-media projects. These programs prepare students
'Life Itself' Opens July 4 through Magnolia Pictures.
In the aftermath of the one-sided American war coverage in Iraq and the Federal Communications Commission's vote to approve further media consolidation, the Tribute to US Television at the 24th Banff Television Festival last June took on a rather ironic tenor. With the world television market in a relentless slump that continues to drag it downmarket, and the Canadian TV industry in its own state of crisis, this year's festival fell short of a true celebration of the medium's achievements. Nevertheless, the festival side of Banff featured many outstanding films, with Power Pictures' Chavez
Theater begins alone, a seed in the mind of a playwright, nourished by imagination until a script is born. Many caretakers—actors, directors, designers—help grow the project until it reaches maturity and blooms in front of a live audience for a fleeting moment. It then lives on only in the memory of those who have witnessed its happening and found recognition, meaning and catharsis in the stories that have been told. The life cycle of a documentary occurs in almost the exact opposite order, beginning with many hands as directors, directors of photography and producers recording life as it is
Documentary filmmaker Andrew Jarecki knew he had something special with his first feature-length documentary, Capturing the Friedmans, released theatrically last month through Magnolia Pictures and HBO. The film, a dark, Alice in Wonderland-like journey, tracks an upper-middle-class Long Island Jewish family's fall from stability, through charges of child molestation and into a Rashomonic maelstrom of recriminations, accusations and, finally, self-destruction. Winner of the Sundance Grand Jury Prize for Documentary, Capturing the Friedmans was originally conceived by Jarecki as a day-in-the
For a reason that has since been lost to me, during my last year of college in 1990, I volunteered to write a thesis on something called "reader response" criticism. Stanley Fish was probably the most fun author on my bibliography and, if you know Dr. Fish, you can imagine that my honors thesis was not much fun at all. I toiled on the project for months. I spent whole days weighing whether to include the word "tractus" in my title. On long breaks from fruitless writing, I would wander down to the Charles Theater, Baltimore's seedy art house and, if I didn't like what was playing there, I'd go
Last year Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine created a lot of waves, one of the biggest of which was that of money; the film became the highest grossing regular format documentary of all time (earning $40 million worldwide). That money wave inspired politically conservative Icon Productions to commit $10 million (more than twice the published cost of Columbine) to Moore's not-so-conservative upcoming project, Farenheit 911. Did Columbine's profit also set in motion a new wave of excitement over documentaries with theatrical exhibitors? Not really. Columbine was not only the most profitable
It wasn't too long ago when documentary films were relegated to the realm of PBS programming and occasional network specials. The emergence of cable television and alternative programming over the past decade-and-a-half has changed the broadcast options for viewers and documentary filmmakers alike. Led by cablers such as HBO, the Sundance Channel, Independent Film Channel, Showtime and Bravo, these programmers have provided outlet and exposure for some of the most varied and novelistic documentary programs to date. One the more innovative cable channels to emerge recently has been TRIO, a