While shooting her documentary Somewhere Between, filmmaker Linda Goldstein Knowlton needed access to a remote area of China on a tourist visa with a camera crew. And she got it, thanks to her fixer. On a rooftop in Brazil, a team of filmmakers were trapped; armed drug users had barricaded the only exit. The project's producer Marilyn Ness and director Ross Kauffman knew there was exactly one person to blame: the fixer. Film shoots abroad require a fixer—a local guide whose job duties vary according to the team's needs. Ness said the fixer is "hugely important point in any shooting situation
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At the Tribeca Film Festival, good luck trying to get a bead on the kind of longform documentary you'll find. It could be a hard-hitting, alarming doc like James Spione's superb Silenced, which describes the Obama-era prosecution of whistleblowers as leakers and even potentially terrorists. Or maybe it's a poetic meditation, like Andrew Renzi's deliberately slow-film-style Fishtail, in which you trudge along with cattlemen birthing calves in what seems like real time as both poetry and music cast the experience as art. Possibly it's a sturdy, no-surprises HBO doc like All about Ann: Governor
Interactivity ruled at Tribeca's Innovation Week, whether at Games for Change, the scruffy gamers-for-good conference that was folded into Tribeca activities this year; Storyscapes, the showcase for interactive projects; the mobile apps hackathon; or the all-day Tribeca Interactive Day conference. It even shone at the Disruptive Innovation Awards, where the business folks run things. Links between the old world of linear storytelling and the interactive one are still evolving at Tribeca. At Games for Change, while Tribeca's Jane Rosenthal optimistically said, "We're all in this together,"
China's documentary television sector has travelled light years in a decade. This boom is driven by China's vast-scale, rocketing economic growth, its deep cultural respect for content-rich programming and its top-down media policy. Documentary channels are flourishing at the national level—at CCTV (China Central Television), the predominant state television broadcaster, and in the regions as well. Viewers are hungry for informative storytelling that seems quaint by the "Big, Noisy Character" measure deployed by an increasing number of Western networks. Beijing has rejected reality TV and many
The Farmer's Wife, a documentary by David Sutherland, had a profound effect on me. It inspired me back into producing documentaries. After film school I wanted to make docs, and I did; several years later, I seemed to drift into directing feature films, then episodic TV and movies of the week. By 1998 I felt burnt out and was looking around for something new. I often watched PBS' Frontline, one of my favorite shows. When I saw there was a six-hour documentary scheduled over several nights about a farm couple, I'm sure I groaned at what it might be. But I was hooked into the miniseries in the
Guest post by recent USC Law grad Rom Bar-Nissim ’13, who was on the legal team on the brief.
By Belinda Baldwin and Robert Bahar It was during the height of America's post-war optimism when Richard Griffith, the American film historian who would later write the definitive book on Robert Flaherty, wrote these discouraging words about American documentary, in his review of Paul Rotha's Documentary: "Since few people now have real faith in the causes which documentary customarily promoted, it is hardly strange that they are indifferent to the documentaries themselves," he argued. "This is the background against which American documentary makers have had to work. It is a story of sporadic
In the last year I've been on a number of panels about film festival strategies. It's clear that there isn't one simple plan that will work for every film. But in order to have a positive experience on the festival circuit, filmmakers should do some serious thinking about what it is they want to get out of the experience—beyond getting into a festival and selling their film. A number of strong documentaries have screened at numerous festivals in the past year, but have yet to find distribution. I spoke to Louise Hogarth, maker of The Gift , a controversial film about the practice of HIV self
You've got a big shoot coming up in Asia, and potential disasters start popping up in your mind. What if your equipment gets tied up in customs indefinitely? What if the soundperson the crewing agency stuck you with can't hear the low hum that's so clear to you on playback? What if you can't film at the temple so crucial to your story until you pay the abbot a $10,000 "location fee?" You can rest assured that all these things have happened and will happen to those who come to Asia unprepared. On the other hand, if you do your homework and choose the right people with whom to work, the chances
'Twenty Feet from Stardom' director Morgan Neville offers some great insights into what makes a doc stand out in the crowd.