Doc about young Tibetan family wins $25,000 finishing fund grant. Plus, read about other finalists.
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World premiere of Soderbergh's doc on Spaulding Gray among the highlights.
An interview with director/producer Dan Sturnam.
Sundance doc chief talks about career, programming sensibilities.
Last summer, as part of an exchange program with the University of Southern California and the Communication University of China, I set off with six USC students and fellow US filmmaker Johanna Demetrakas to teach a six-week documentary workshop in Beijing, China. With China in the headlines almost daily, I wondered what I'd encounter. I'd spent a month there in 1984--only eight years after Mao died--and I remembered Beijing as a chaotic sea of bicycles, powered by citizens dressed in somber green and blue "Mao jackets." Foreigners were required to stay in cordoned-off hotels; few Chinese
Doc-makers weigh in on their teaching careers.
Over the last half-century or so, documentary filmmaking has evolved as a formidable and expansive institution. In the US, filmmakers have built a soaring and sensible architecture by challenging ideology, pushing creative limits and distilling practice, while helping to legitimize the craft on a global stage. But the new generation of filmmakers faces a shifting landscape, including important changes in how they learn. Ongoing technological advances have arguably democratized the form, while the proliferation of film studies programs in higher education continues to institutionalize the
Radio docs via Skype, David Lynch's 'Interview Project' and more!
The festival circuit plays out for festival programmers like a grand chessboard, with a prime spot in the calendar as the key positioning strategy. The AFI Fest, which has seen some changes at the helm in recent years, has had the unenviable spot of the end of the calendar, on the brink of awards season, when the discoveries from the beginning months of the year are lining up for their accolades and kudos at year's end. So, as artistic director Rose Kuo told soon-to-be-former LA Weekly critic Scott Foundas, "When Bob [director of programming Robert Koehler] came on, we just decided we should
Fifteen delegations of filmmakers and specialists dispatched around the world in 2009.