There was more complaining than I could remember at the 2006 edition of the Sundance Film Festival. Along with a general malaise, audiences had a pretty bad attitude about the films this year. And to be honest, there wasn't that much stuff that rocked this writer's world. But here are a few things that did. Waking up at 7:00 in the morning to get to an 8:30 screening on the first day of the festival is becoming a tradition for me. This year it was for the Documentary Shorts program, the highlight of the bunch being the shortest film in the collection (five minutes): Undressing My Mother by Ken
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Dear IDA Members, Times are changing again. Next up: television on an iPod. Where will this new technology go now? Most people are not going to sit around and watch a small screen for any length of time. There is another level of the business of entertainment that is coming forward with this new technology, and it also applies to the nonfiction world. We are all familiar with pay-per-view (PPV) and on-demand programming, but what Apple has done with its iPod was quite interesting. Click and purchase, and everything is easily accomplished in this transaction for its end use. This simplicity is
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On DocuWeek 2005...
Dear Readers, September means renewal--returning from a summer vacation or retreat, launching a new season, going back to school. While this issue is not the blockbuster education issue of previous years, we do look at how an educational context is utilized in innovative ways, whether for documentary purposes or as the subject for documentary exploration. We all presumably read Shakespeare in either high school or college, but it may have been unusual for many of us to have read the Bard in elementary school. But at Hobart Boulevard Elementary School in Los Angeles, teacher Rafe Esquith is
Dear Readers, There's a certain verve and passion among filmmakers who willfully spend months out of the year in unforgiving conditions, observing and documenting the rituals and habits of exotic creatures. There's a fascination--a yearning, even--among humans to locate some symbiosis, some commonality with creatures fundamentally different from us. Perhaps it's the basic needs of food, sex, family, home and community, or perhaps it's the predatory, tribal and territorial instincts. The animal kingdom sustains our gaze, and we wonder if the fourth wall between nature and man serves to protect
Dear Readers, Earlier this month, I attended the INPUT conference-an international convocation of public television executives and filmmakers-in San Francisco. What kicked off and drove the conference was a report in The New York Times that Kenneth Tomlinson, the chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, had installed "ombudsmen" to ensure "balanced" programming-that is, programs that countervail what the far right perceives to be a left wing bias, as perpetuated by the far right's favorite whipping boy, Bill Moyers. According to The Times, Tomlinson had also paid a consultant $10