'A Band Called Death' opens in theaters June 28 through Drafthouse Films.
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'Nine for IX' premieres July 2 on ESPN.
Cultural diplomacy has served as a vital component of the US Department of State's overall foreign policy apparatus for the past 50 years. One can trace these efforts back to the founding of the United States Information Agency (USIA) in 1953, in the throes of the Cold War, as a means to both confront anti-US propaganda coming out of the Soviet Union and present America in a more positive light. The USIA sponsored tours of performing artists such as Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie; oversaw cultural exchange programs such as the Fulbright Scholarship program; managed the Voice of America
'The Act of Killing' opens July 19 through Drafthouse Films.
'Twenty Feet from Stardom' opens June 14 through RADiUS-TWC.
"My name is Alanis Obomsawin. I am an Abenaki woman from Odenak, Québec," she proclaims. Her life reads like a storybook legend. She was born on August 31, 1932, in Lebanon, New Hampshire, in Abenaki territory, during a lunar eclipse. Soon thereafter, her mother returned to her roots and brought Obomsawin to Odanak, Québec, on the Abenaki reserve northeast of Montreal, where she would live with her aunt and uncle and their six children. Barely six months old, Obomsawin was afflicted by a mysterious disease, and she lapsed into a coma. One night, it was said that she would die. The doctors
For decades both documentary filmmakers and lovers of the documentary art form have relied on the Public Broadcasting Service to provide a forum where the best nonfiction work can reach the audience it deserves. PBS has become our nation's electronic commons—a space relatively free of commerce and commercialism, where diverse American voices can be heard over the for-profit media's roar. But despite its vital role in our cultural life, PBS has always had the same perennial problem: how to pay the bills. Public funding was supposed to keep it independent, impartial and commercial free. But
Shoestring budgets, borrowed equipment, deferred pay, intermittent and interminable production schedules—these have become the required ingredients in a formula all too familiar to documentary filmmakers. Despite their comparatively small budgets, documentaries are still notoriously difficult to finance. So it's particularly ironic that in recent years many documentarians have ventured into the world of commercials and music videos, lending their talents to projects that, in terms of dollars per second of finished product, are lavish by comparison. This temporary migration has become an
The IDA Awards were created in 1984, as part of our organization's intense desire to improve the recognition of documentaries and the filmmakers who made them. This was an era before the existence of multitudinous awards ceremonies. IDA was just two years old and had only a few hundred members. Many doc makers, particularly those in Los Angeles, felt that documentaries had been treated for too long as stepchildren of the motion picture industry. For years there had been growing dissatisfaction with the selections given out by the few institutions that honored nonfiction films. As hands-on
It's hard to discuss the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival without weighing in with superlatives. This is an event that just grows and grows, absolutely dominating the cultural landscape of Toronto for the first half of its 11-day run (from April 25 through May 5 this year) and maintaining a strong interest throughout—rather like Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) does every September. Toronto's TV news shows, magazines and newspapers, both mainstream—the Globe and Mail and Star—and alternative— NOW and The Grid—follow the lead of an early Hot Docs convert, the CBC