OK, I admit it. I watched The Apprentice. I TiVo'd The Simple Life. I even tuned in to The Resturaunt. And that's not all. I've become a fan of A&E's Airport. I watched TLC's Trading Spaces. And I've been known to tune into Bravo's Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. And my non-filmmaker friends make polite small talk at parties about how reality TV is good for me and my fellow documentary filmmakers. And you can't blame them for assuming that, after all, most of these shows look like the work that I do—real people, stories that seem to unfold in front of the camera and dramatic story arcs that
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Have you seen J.P. Sniadecki and Libbie D. Cohn's absorbing documentary People's Park, an 89-minute film shot in one continual take that puts the viewer right in the center of Shengdu Park in China? Or Leviathan, by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel? Have you poked around Highrise, Katerina Cizek's interactive Web documentary about the vibrant life inside high-rise apartments around the world? Or Moments of Innovation, a collaborative project of the MIT Open Documentary Lab and IDFA's DocLab that reveals the process of documentation? Perhaps you've seen the human rights/advocacy film
Morgan Neville decided to make 20 FEET FROM STARDOM after realizing what a gap there was in the history of the talent behind the talent.
Although surfing has been around for 1,500 years, its documentation on film didn't crystallize until the 1950s, when such California-based wave-riders/filmmakers as Greg MacGillivray and Bruce Brown began to capture the thrills and death-defying derring-do of what was burgeoning into a craze. Surfing seeped into the pre-Beatles, pre-Rolling Stones, pre-'60s consciousness, with the keening harmonies of the Beach Boys and Jan and Dean crashing against the rip-curl tremolos of Dick Dale, and Gidget, Moon Doggie, Frankie and Annette and The Big Kahuna slapping on a faux Coppertone sheen on what
Filmmaker Heather Winters discusses why she thinks her film is more than just a story for gay audiences.
Like most film festivals, the San Francisco International Film Festival reflects the character of the city itself-sophisticated, eclectic, politically aware—and more than a little self-absorbed. Nothing demonstrates those characteristics like the documentaries in the 2004 festival, which took place in April. The festival has always had a strong documentary component, including both local and international filmmakers. This year, it featured 26 films from around the world, and most were very well-attended. San Francisco is hotbed of progressive politics, and one film that's been making the
We are pleased to finally announce all of the nominees for our 29th annual IDA Documentary Awards ceremony, which will be held Friday, December 6, 2013 at the Director's Guild in Los Angeles. "With over 400 submissions from around the world, this year’s Awards represent a thriving global documentary community," said IDA Executive Director Michael Lumpkin. "Collectively these incredible stories expand our understanding of our shared human experience and foster an informed, compassionate and connected world." The five films nominated in IDA's Best Feature category include The Act of Killing
The Independent Film Producer's Survival Guide A Business and Legal Sourcebook By Gunnar Erickson, Harris Tulchin and Mark Halloran
Shola Lynch talks about not wanting to be pigeonholed as the black female filmmaker who only tells stories about black women.
The Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF) celebrated its 30th anniversary with some 33 docs in the Refracting Reality section, 13 of them earmarked for the documentary competition. It was a wild opening weekend in the Emerald City in late May, with the unveiling of the new Seattle Central Library, conceived and executed by Rem Koolhaus to universal acclaim, happening right next door to SIFF headquarters. This was the first SIFF in quite a while without founding director/impresario Daryl Macdonald, who returned last year to another festival he helped found: the Palm Springs International