'Freedom Summer' airs June 24 on PBS' 'American Experience.'
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Dear IDA Community: Thirty years ago, the International Documentary Association broke new ground by presenting the first IDA Awards for distinguished documentary achievement. The goal was to raise the profile of documentary film as an art form, and bring its greatest practitioners the recognition they deserved. IDA continues to pursue these goals today, though the times and the awards have definitely changed. The year 1985 saw the presentation of just seven awards: five for Distinguished Documentary Achievement, one for Preservation and Scholarship, and one for Career Achievement. That set the
Have you ever wished for a direct line to a funder? IDA is launching a new initiative called #FunderFriday that makes your wish come true. Our members contact us everyday with questions regarding the complexity and variation of the many grants available to documentary filmmakers. #FunderFriday taps into IDA's long-standing relationships with prominent granting organizations so you can ask them the questions that are important to you. We're excited to kick off this new initiative with NEH Senior Program Officer Jeff Hardwick. Our members asked Jeff questions via our Twitter feed using the
Jeff Blitz and Sean Welch created new fans for the National Spelling Bee with their thrilling documentary Spellbound, which now ranks fifth on the list of all-time documentary theatrical box office grosses. The filmmakers recently announced plans to form The Spellbound Foundation, which will provide educational scholarships to the students profiled in the film. A large part of the doc's success comes from the connection the audience feels with the eight spellers and their stories. The audience roots and cheers, holds its breath when a child gets a particularly challenging word and cringes when
FEATURE DOCUMENTARY AWARD Balseros Directors: Carlos Bosch, Josep M. Domenech Producer: Loris Omedes Writers: David Trueba, Carlos Bosch Cinematographer: Josep M. Domenech Editor: Ernerst Blasi Composer: Lucrecia HBO/Cinema Documentary Films, Seventh Art Releasing, Televisio Catalunya, Bausan Films In the summer of 1994, Fidel Castro sanctioned the opening of Cuba's coastal borders, allowing a mass exodus of 50,000 balseros—rafters—to set sail from Havana on dangerous makeshift rafts for Miami, Florida. This epic story of Cuban castaways caught between two worlds finds richness in real-life
Sitting at the annual dinner of the Committee to Protect Journalists, you get a world perspective on free speech that's hard to understand as an American citizen. Here, the newspaper comes every morning, the TV news is on eight channels, Amazon.com has a billion books and ideas flow freely—or at least so it seems. Around the world storytellers are risking their lives—and dying—exploring corruption, crime and governments that operate without any fear of repercussions. Why do they do it? Why do they risk their lives? Why do they die? When I took on the challenge of trying to understand why so
Hot fun in the summertime—get ready for the Summer 2014 issue of Documentary! Out of school...fish are jumpin'...the time is right for dancin' in the streets...we're on safari to stay...and the Summer 2014 issue of Documentary is the beach-reading of choice for discerning perusers everywhere! This edition, we offer you a glimpse at New Online and Cable Venues for Docs The digital space is the volatile frontier, with stakeholders large and small jockeying for a piece of it. We look at a few of the newer players who are staking their claim, including Al Jazeera America, which in less than a year
It was the mid- 1950s and my sociology professor announced to our class one day that he was about to show us a documentary film. Students began to groan. Documentaries to many of us—unless they were about sex education—meant B-O-R-I-N-G. The film our professor had selected was The River by Pare Lorentz. Lorentz had made the film in 1937-38, during the Great Depression, a time when the Midwest had become a giant dust bowl as a result of drought, soil erosion and deforestation. The River was designed to show how industrialization had ravaged the beauty and richness of the land, through erosion
'Korengal' opens May 30 in New York City through Goldcrest Films.