“Always balance, everything in balance,” intones Raul Niño Zambrano, all smiles and relaxed on the last morning of his fourth year as creative director of Sheffield DocFest. It’s an aspirational mantra for a festival that seeks to elevate the documentary art of drawing meaning from chaos; in a capsizing world that needs independent media more than ever but would rather attack it, a confident and constructive place to rally is vital. Brexit cut off Creative Europe and Creative Media funding and visa-free visits from Europe, the pandemic hammered revenue and audience habits, and the UK remains in a deep industry recession with more than half its freelance workforce out of work and its once-mighty broadcasters on the back foot. And yet the festival has steadied.
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In Tatyana Tenenbaum's Everything You Have Is Yours, we see dancer Hadar Ahuvia as she develops her performance by the same name, the culmination of years spent celebrating her own Jewish identity while also challenging Israeli tradition. After its theatrical run in NY, Documentary spoke to Tenenbaum about adapting her work in dance documentation to documentary, dance film tropes, and political activism in a nonverbal art form.
Slowness has been an established mode of cinema for many decades, but the commercial demands of television meant it took longer for that medium to adopt such a form, thanks to the medium’s mass-market nature and heavy ties to advertising interests. PBS's Ambient Film arrives amid a glut in such works. But vectors like Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok long ago outpaced what traditional networks and streaming platforms can offer, in terms of both quantity and length.
For her immersive artwork Burn From Absence, artist Emeline Courcier creates an archive where there was none. Using artificial intelligence, she recreates a family album, visualizing and verifying a history that has been hidden, documenting it from her perspective. In the four-channel installation, digitally created images illustrate an audio track layering her family members’ memories of life in Laos, the ‘Vietnam’ war, and new beginnings in France. After its premiere at IDFA last November, where it won the DocLab Special Mention for Digital Storytelling, Documentary spoke to Courcier about truth, archives, and working with deeply personal material.
While Karlovy Vary may be best known for its star wattage and warm midsummer embrace of fiction auteurs, this year’s 59th edition (July 4–12) once again made a powerful case for documentary’s enduring vitality. Across the official selection, sidebars, and special screenings, nonfiction titles proved indispensable in reflecting Europe and the region’s evolving identities, eccentricities, and contradictions. This festival dispatch includes reviews of Grand Prix-winner Better Go Mad in the Wild, TrepaNation, Action Item, and Divia.
Documentary is pleased to announce that the Disability Media Alliance, or DMA, has launched today. Incubated through IDA’s own Nonfiction Access Initiative (NAI), DMA came about after research to address enduring inequities in the documentary community.
Since its founding in 1971 in the small town of Giffoni Valle Piana in southern Italy, the Giffoni Film Festival has grown into a global reference point for cinema made for—and with—young people. In this interview for Documentary, Minervini shares insights about his journey as a programmer of GEX:DOX, the distinctive qualities of Giffoni, the challenges and opportunities of curating documentary films for young audiences, and the spirit that animates this dynamic festival section. This interview has been edited.
It seems like the world wakes up to new information about artificial intelligence technology every day. From the lawsuits over the use of unlicensed works to train AI models, to the controversies that arise from late actors’ resurrections in Hollywood’s biggest franchises, it’s easy to see how the use of artificial intelligence can be daunting to filmmakers. To help filmmakers navigate through the tricky waters of AI, our firm has compiled a few items of practical advice that we believe can be helpful to documentary filmmakers who want to utilize AI in a cautious yet effective manner. And although these tips are based on U.S. law, we’re hopeful that their practical nature will benefit filmmakers in international jurisdictions as well.
Billy Shebar is an Emmy-nominated filmmaker whose feature documentary Monk in Pieces was an official selection and Teddy Award nominee at the 2025 Berlinale and will be released in U.S. theaters starting July 24th. He is also known for High Noon on the Waterfront (2022), with voiceovers by John Turturro and Edward Norton, which premiered at the Telluride Film Festival and was broadcast on TCM and HBO; and Dark Matter (2007), starring Meryl Streep, which won the Alfred P. Sloan Prize at Sundance. Billy collaborated with animator Bill Plympton on The New York Times viral web series Trump Bites
Joel DeMott, renowned cinema vérité filmmaker, died on June 13, 2025. DeMott is best known for her films Seventeen (1983), which she co-directed with Jeff Kreines, and Demon Lover Diary (1980). Alongside Kreines, DeMott created a model of intimate cinema vérité filmmaking that has inspired countless filmmakers.