Front row: sound supervisor/mixer James LeBrecht. second row, left to right: filmmaker Alex Rotaru; editor Pedro Kos; Ken Jacobson, IDA's director of education and strategic partnerships; Glenn Kiser, Dolby Institute; filmmaker Lucy Walker; IDA executive director Michael Lumpkin. Photo: Humberto Mendes This past fall, IDA presented a daylong Doc U at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences: "Creating Sound and Music for Docs: From Location to Final Mix." The best and brightest sound mavens—recordists, mixers, designers, composers and filmmakers—shared their experiences, wit and wisdom
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As part of The Art of Documentary series, the IDA screened the award-winning film The Naked Room at the Landmark Theater in Los Angeles on Thursday, March 13. The film shows a whole world without leaving a single space: the examination room in a children's hospital in Mexico City. Listening to the children, their parents and the doctors during consultations allows us to have a more profound and complex view of our social reality and of human nature. Filmmaker Nuria Ibáñez was traveling and unable to attend the screening, so we solicited questions for the filmmaker from our Twitter audience
What is a documentary film but the search for a truth or a representation of reality, past and present? In this pursuit, a director can take any number of approaches—using experimental techniques, archival footage and photographs, interviews with historians, vérité camerawork, animation and more. There is "no one way to do it," says Mary Lea Bandy, chief curator of Film and Media Art at New York's Museum of Modern Art. For Bandy, the documentary is a hybrid form. In fact, she has curated a program of films entitled "Hybrid" for this year's Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, held in April in
Popular music is the soundtrack of modern life. But there's a perceived conflict in the creation of such art: in order to be successful, musicians must sell out and play the commercial game, losing the outsider status that once inspired them. The tension inherent in music's creative process is the common thread found in two feature documentaries that were showcased at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival. Ondi Timoner's DIG! won the 2004 Documentary Grand Jury Prize, and Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky's Metallica: Some Kind of Monster played out of competition in the American Spectrum category
Government elections and cultural events don't always go hand in hand. This year's Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival in Greece was rescheduled to take place a week later than planned, due to the elections. It also lasted a week instead of the usual ten days, but that didn't mean fewer films, just a more compact program—and less time to sit and enjoy a cup of coffee in the sun. But then again, the films offered several feel-good moments. The opening film, The Story of the Weeping Camel by Luigu Falorni and Byambasureb Davaa, a German/Mongolian production, was a hit. Inspired by the work of
South by Southwest began in 1987 as an effort by the local Austin music scene to promote itself nationally and offer a more laid-back alternative music conference to NYC's New Music Seminar, which had become both unwieldy and violent. At that first SXSW, there were 172 bands and 700 registrants. The film festival/conference came on board in 1994. By 1997, the festival showed over 100 feature films, and attendance was near 10,000. In 2013, with over 2,200 official musical acts (and seemingly as many or more playing unofficial showcases) and over 130 feature films, there were easily over 100,000
At SXSW panels, you can get the headlines of business trends that overlap techie and filmmaker interests, if you can sift through the hype, the self-promotion, the glib reductionism and relentless branding. This year, the standard "convergence" panels featured issues of overlapping interest, particularly around changing television business models. The big growth area of interest was the "digital domain," or interactive documentary strand, where for the second year, crowds demonstrated that SXSW has to relocate the strand from the tiny room it's given. New this year was a Participant Media
'Anita' opens in theaters March 21 through Samuel Goldwyn Films.
At the annual high-tech attentional food fight that is SXSW, you could see Google Glass-wearers, a Wookie, a flock of foldup bikes, food trucks, an entire portable showroom dedicated to (yes) toilet paper, and...what am I forgetting? Oh, the movies! The standout documentary film of the festival and winner of the Grand Jury Prize, The Great Invisible, was one of several films focusing on ecological issues. Margaret Brown's cinema vérité look at the consequences of the 2010 BP oil spill on the people most directly affected brought audiences in Austin—at the heart of the oil industry—to their
The American Film Showcase in Israel and Palestinian Territories.