The Tribeca Film Festival, which concluded April 28, features so many docs that it's almost as big and broad as many standalone documentary festivals. While I wasn't able to see all of the films at the festival, a number of interesting trends emerged as I made my way through them. New camera technologies help the vérité films sing visually, but some of the most powerful docs relied heavily, if not exclusively, on archival footage—a de facto reaction, it seems, to the powerful impact of today's "media of immediacy." Just as time heals wounds, it gives us the distance that we often need to make
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'La Camioneta' opens May 31 at New York's ReRun Theater.
Alex Gibney's 'We Steal Secrets' opens in theaters May 24 through Focus World.
Documentaries about musicians, families and artists provided some of the most captivating moments at this year's San Francisco International Film Festival. Anyone who's gotten chills listening to a woman's voice screaming "rape...murder...it's just a shot away" on the Rolling Stones song "Gimme Shelter" will want to see Twenty Feet from Stardom, Morgan Neville's wonderfully entertaining film about rock and soul background singers, to hear Merry Clayton's lively account of the recording session that produced that masterpiece. Clayton—one of the few background singers who briefly broke out of
'Stories We Tell' opens May 17 in LA and select cities through Roadside Attractions.
By Carlos Sandoval and Catherine Tambini In Harvest of Shame, the powerful television documentary that brought the plight of migrant workers to Americans' Thanksgiving tables in 1960, Edward R. Murrow smokes. He smokes incessantly. He smokes in awkward, stand-up shots, unashamed of his crooked teeth or stooped posture. The cigarette smoke, like the film's portentous narration, the heavy-handed use of the Aaron Copland score and the bulky equipment, all distance us as vérité-indoctrinated, MTV-consuming filmmakers. They can even cause us to feel smug in our "advances" in technique, technology
The International Documentary Association has moved offices in Los Angeles. Please update your fundraising materials, both print and online, and make sure your donors have our new address. New Address: 3470 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 980 Los Angeles, CA 90010 New Phone: 213 232-1660 Amy Halpin's extension: 209Lisa Hasko's extension: 210 New Fax: 213 232-1669
As part of our ongoing Doc U educational series, we brought together the best fair use lawyers and researchers to help you understand what the DMCA exemption means for your non-fiction film.
With the roll-out of one political doc after another this fall, it's easy to forget that documentarians can start out in art school as well as journalism school. In the early days of documentary filmmaking there was a great deal of crossover between photography and filmmaking. Henri Cartier-Bresson made documentaries; Paul Strand, his mentor in filmmaking, also was a photographer. The Film and Photo Leagues, formed in the 1930s in response to Fox Corporation's suppression of newsreels that documented Depression-era realities, included Strand , as well as Willard Van Dyke, Ralph Steiner and Leo
The 26th Independent Feature Project's (IFP) Film Market, held in New York in September, aimed to "bring together the business and creative communities to foster American independent talent." What the market really feels like is a combination book fair, industry film festival and back-to-school session. It is a field report from the frontlines on the pros and cons of documentary commissioning, programming and distribution, as well as technical promises, philosophical musings and the creative products themselves. Legendary documentarian Al Maysles asserted at one of the panels that if Tolstoy