Since Beyond Utopia debuted at last year’s Sundance, where it won the Audience Award for U.S. Documentary, the film has screened at film festivals around the world and garnered acclaim for its portrayal of two families defecting from North Korea. It was shortlisted for an Oscar and most recently won a duPont-Columbia Award. But when we learned that the film would air nationally on PBS on Independent Lens on January 9, 2024, we were concerned. While the film’s verité sequences of the Roh and Lee families’ plight are compelling, the film simply points to the North Korean government as the
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"It's about time there was an organization just for us. An organization whose sole purpose is ‘to encourage and to honor the documentary arts and sciences; to promote nonfiction film and video; to support the efforts of nonfiction film and video makers all over the world." Excerpt from the invitation letter sent out by Linda Buzell to the documentary community in 1982. 42 years ago, on February 6, 1982, in Los Angeles, 75 members of the documentary field convened for the first meeting of what would become the International Documentary Association. The meeting stemmed from a grassroots appeal
Nehal Vyas is a film and video artist from India, currently based in Los Angeles. Her work explores the idea of national identity through memory, personal history, and inheritance. She is a graduate of California Institute of the Arts, where she received her MFA in Film/Video. Her works have been shown at the San Sebastian Film Festival, Camden International Film Festival, Indie Memphis Film Festival, True/False Film Festival, REDCAT (Los Angeles), 2220 Arts + Archive (Los Angeles), Automata (Los Angeles), Analogica (Italy) and Mumbai International Film Festival (India). She is the co-founder
Today, International Documentary Association (IDA) announced the 2023 Pare Lorentz Documentary Fund recipients for the 2023-24 grant cycle. May the Soil Be Everywhere by director Yehui Zhao, Powwow People by director Sky Hopinka, and Uncharted by co-directors Ainlsee Alem Robson and Kidus Hailesilassie were selected out of 56 nominees to receive $75,000 in production and post-production grants. Made possible by the New York Community Trust, the Pare Lorentz Documentary Fund has supported 72 documentary projects with $1,285,000 since 2011. The fund supports feature-length documentary films that
Documentarians Stephen Maing (2018’s Crime + Punishment) and Brett Story (2019’s The Hottest August) have wielded different observational filmmaking approaches to explore social and political issues in the United States, from the possibility of police reform to the psychogeography of the carceral state.
Seeking Mavis Beacon follows two fabulously charming e-girl detectives: director Jazmin Renée Jones and associate producer Olivia McKayla Ross, as they pick up the trail of a digital ghost—Mavis Beacon. The eponymous teacher from the 80s and 90s era software, Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, Mavis taught millions how to type as one of the most visible Black women avatars on computer screens around the world, enriching the white men who created the software using her image. Even while being an inspiration and technological guide to so many—especially young Black girls, the true identity of the
A dizzying, fast-paced, 150-minute montage about American jazz, Western imperialism, European colonization, and the assassination of Congolese president Patrice Lumumba, Belgian director Johan Grimonprez’s epic essay-film Soundtrack to a Coup d’État is not your typical Sundance documentary. Like the cinematic love child of Adam Curtis and Raoul Peck, the documentary landed in Park City like a secret weapon, exploding the minds of unsuspecting viewers. As one “Conner B.” wrote on Letterboxd , Coup d’État was “by far the most exciting and electric thing from Sundance 2024.” Although Conner’s
Dear Readers, Last month, if you were an IDA member who opted into receiving print issues of Documentary , you received a copy of our redesigned print quarterly in the mail. In the last month, we’ve been slowly releasing these pieces online, with more to come in February. These pieces include the latest “Making a Production” profile, on Meerkat Media ’s worker-owner cooperative structure and the brilliant work that is produced within this system; a feature essay on plot twists in Four Daughters , which was recently nominated for an Oscar, and other documentaries; Can Candan’s first-person
Since Pedro and I first started filming unseen in May 2016, I’ve always told him that my main audience for our film is no one else but him. After all, unseen is about his life and his decade-long journey to become a social worker. What makes the pursuit of this goal not so straightforward is the fact that Pedro is blind. If Pedro is truly my main audience, how can I make a film (arguably a primarily visual medium) not only accessible for him but, more so, enjoyable?
In 2018, like many others in India, filmmaker Vinay Shukla stopped watching the news. Since the right-leaning Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came into power in 2014, news channels have transformed into hate-mongering sites that actively propagate an aggressive brand of Hindu nationalism and anti-Muslim bigotry. Shukla’s aversion was rooted in wanting to protect his mental health. But he was also eager to understand the mental health of those working in the ecosystem, such as the minority of journalists who still report the truth, instead of being government mouthpieces. The result is While We