Dear Readers, It's been a remarkable year for remarkable documentaries, and theater audiences have helped to keep the art form thriving. We close out 2003 by celebrating both those individuals who have helped to shape the documentary and the films that have exemplified artistic achievement. As a natural history documentarian, Sir David Attenborough, the Career Achievement Award honoree, has transformed the arcana of zoology, botany and biology into some of the most compelling and enriching stories about the world around us. Terry Tanner Clark, who, with husband Barry Clark, have made their own
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Dear IDA Members: As we go to press, it looks like our comrades in the independent film movement are making some headway with the Motion Picture Association of America and its declared ban on "for your consideration" screeners. The documentary community has been watching this from a different perspective. There have always been some pretty tight rules about viewing all the documentaries in contention before voting for any of them. It takes a little extra work, but it sure levels the playing field. The documentary Oscar competition works like this: Documentaries are eligible if they run
Dear Readers, National Geographic's flagship program, Explorer, has gone through as many permutations as it has homes. Now part of MSNBC as Ultimate Explorer, the series has this year seen a few high-profile episodes related to the current war in Iraq. National Geographic was pressured to fire correspondent Peter Arnett for his critical remarks about the war. But the channel redeemed itself, through filmmaker Jason Williams, who, in the aftermath of the US invasion of Baghdad, documented the search for—and eventual discovery of—the lost treasure of the ancient civilization of Nimrud. Michael
Dear IDA Members, This fall IDA launched a four-city theatrical exhibition tour—to commercial theaters in Del Mar, California; Little Rock, Arkansas; Austin, Texas; and Seattle, Washington—in which we screened many of the films from the InFACT Theatrical Documentary Showcase that we presented in August. The primary impetus for this tour has been to demonstrate the theatrical drawing power of feature-length documentaries, and to prove that Bowling for Columbine, Winged Migration, Capturing the Friedmans, Spellbound, OT: Our Town and Step into Liquid are not flukes. This tour will also form the
Dear Readers, DVD—whether it stands for "digital video disc" or the more recent "digital versatile disc" to accommodate the uses of the medium beyond video—has, since its introduction to the consumer market in Japan in 1996 and the US in 1997, quickly staked out its frontier in the mediamaking universe. While the format's arguable precursors, laserdiscs and CD-ROMs, made a modest impact, at best, they laid the groundwork for what would be a veritable revolution in home entertainment, whether engaged on the TV monitor or the computer screen. For the documentary, the DVD has presented a range of
On September 2, 2003, a remarkable film made its way to HBO. The journey is worth retelling. In the spring of 2001, three Columbia University graduate students—Stefan Knerrich, Michael Rey and Amy Rubin—finished their senior project, a film called 3rd Reich to 3rd Generation. It was the story of Arthur Lederman, a 101-year-old Holocaust survivor who had never had a conversation with a German during his adult life. But when Dorot, a Jewish aid agency, sent German exchange student Christophe Erbsloeh to help Lederman with his daily life, a dialogue began that explored the Holocaust through the
Dear IDA Members: The International Documentary Association has many objectives, but none is more important than encouraging the theatrical exhibition of documentary films. In no way, however, does this statement detract from the importance—indeed, the pre-eminence—of television financing for documentaries. It is just that the appetite of television for all manner of nonfiction programming is well documented, so to speak. The first and foremost focus of our efforts to spotlight theatrical exhibition takes place this month with the InFACT Theatrical Documentary Showcase in Los Angeles. The
Dear IDA Members: I report to you, as I have during the past few springs, from the Cannes Film Festival—and a very different Cannes it is for the documentary community. Particularly noticeable is the changed attitude at the March de Film, the film market that takes place at the same time as the festival. A record number of documentaries were represented at and screened throughout the market. Perhaps it was because of Michael Moore's success last year with a special jury prize for Bowling for Columbine and its subsequent success at the box office. Perhaps it was because of the increasing number
Dear Readers: We profile three cable companies in this issue. Two are relative newcomers—Discovery Times and TRIO Channel-while the third, MTV, is both the elder statesman of the group and the channel with the youngest demographic—the 18-24 slot. Discovery Times is a union of two institutions-Discovery Civilization, a division of Discovery Communications, and New York Times Television, a division of The New York Times. The channel was launched last spring to weld the journalistic reputation of The Times (recent events notwithstanding) to the programmatic direction that Discovery seems to be