The Academy Award is widely regarded as the ultimate achievement in filmmaking. In the case of the documentary categories, winning can catapult a film and filmmaker from relative obscurity to worldwide renown literally overnight. Yet, for all the hoopla surrounding the Academy Awards, is a filmmaker's career really altered by joining the ranks of the chosen few to receive an Oscar? We checked in with last year's winners to see how their lives had changed one year later. Director Jean Xavier de Lestrade and producer Denis Poncet, whose Murder on a Sunday Morning won the award for Best
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And the winners are...'Bowling for Columbine' and 'Twin Towers.'
Oliver Stone's films have been lighting rods for controversy, particularly when he's fictionalized real events (consider the responses to Salvador, JFK and Nixon). In May, HBO will air the three-time Academy Award winner's first documentary, Comandante, a person-to-person encounter between Stone and Cuba's head-of-state, Fidel Castro. His aim was to demystify Castro, to go behind the caricature of cigar, beard and military fatigues. Because Stone is not overtly antagonistic here and does not condemn Castro, expect a strong reaction—perhaps even outrage—from Cuban exiles. For the past 44 years
The Big Apple's crowded festival scene has had room for the New York Exposition of Short Film and Video ( www.nyexpo.org) for 36 years, making it the nation's oldest showcase of independent short films. The energetic and always resourceful festival director Anne Borin shifted venues last December from the usual university setting to a theatrical outlet, Manhattan's Cinema Village, where more films could be screened and programs repeated. There were 96 works this year, including 27 documentaries. NYExpo prides itself on documentary shorts from around the globe in a generous mix of the socially
For the last three years, a highlight for documentarians at the Sundance Film Festival has been the House of Docs, a community space designed to increase awareness of documentary film and to provide support to documentary filmmakers through roundtable discussions, special presentations, one-on-one meetings and informal chats. This year, the House expanded to incorporate a Filmmaker Lodge, open to all festival filmmakers. According to Dianne Weyermann, the director of the Sundance Institute Documentary Program, "This year, we made the decision to create a space which would embrace all
The 2003 Sundance Film Festival opened with a number of palpable changes: longtime festival co-director and documentary impresario Nicole Guillemet departed last year to head the Miami International Film Festival; the House of Docs moved up Main Street, sharing quarters at the Elks Lodge with the Filmmakers Lodge; the Holiday Cinemas reopened this year for doc screenings in spacious and expanded quarters; and Sundance itself relocated its headquarters from Shadow Ridge to the Marriott near Prospector Square. While Sundance ‘02 exuded a post-September 11 malaise, with Park City's skiers
Although Spain now has a vibrant feature film industry-and an icon in internationally acclaimed director Pedro Almodvar-the country has no real documentary tradition. "The marriage of Franco and documentary was the worst kind of marriage," says Joan Gonzalez, the founder of Parallel 40 Production Company in Barcelona. The Franco dictatorship lasted almost 40 years, from 1939-1975, and Franco had tight control over what was made, what was seen and how archival footage was used. NO~DO-Noticiaro Documental, the state-sponsored newsreel program, was the sole means of visual communication that
When the Slamdance Film Festival debuted in 1995, there were 12 features and 12 shorts programmed out of a mere 40 submissions. A motley group of writers, directors and producers joined forces to create what is now one of the hottest destinations in Park City, Utah. Neighboring the renowned Sundance Film Festival, Slamdance created a new outlet for low-budget, high-quality filmmaking and grew a community for these filmmakers in the process. While the festival has moved venues and increased submissions (there were 2,800 this year), its mission statement has stayed true: "By filmmakers, for
Dear Readers, It begins in December with the Best-of-the-Year lists, and, dare I say, the IDA Awards. This is the snappy start of the annual drum roll that picks up speed in Park City, rumbles deftly through the thicket of awards ceremonies in February and March, and reaches a thunderous, death-defying crescendo with the Academy Awards, and IDA's own days-long salute to the nominees in the doc categories, the Oscars Reception and DocuDay. This issue salutes the nominees, and Jason Lyon talks to last year's winners about what a difference a year in the glow of the little golden man has made
For filmmakers, the changes at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences may seem a little mind-bending. There are new rules regarding theatrical exhibition (see www.oscars.org for details), lots of adjustments and the promise that the policies and guidelines may be modified again. That was the basic message that Michael Apted, Arthur Dong and Frieda Lee Mock, the governors on the Academy's Documentary Branch, made very clear during their standing-room-only presentation at the House of Docs at Sundance in January. After their explanation, filmmakers were grumbling. But the new rules