Last March, when Los Angeles Media & Education Center (LAMEC) celebrated the IDA's 20th anniversary, Linda Grinberg, one of IDA’s founders, was too ill to attend the festivities. She was in our thoughts, but I failed that night to communicate the one thing about Linda that I most immediately recalled some months later, when I first heard about her death. I had failed to talk about her indomitable spirit, her unfailing courage and her ability to invoke in others an unlimited reservoir of optimism and hope that helped keep the IDA alive during those perilous days of creation. In thinking about
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It’s been said that from thought to expression lasts a lifetime, but in a mere year and a half, a corps of commissioning editors, broadcasters, funders, filmmakers and activists from Scandinavia, Southern Africa, Europe, Australia, Canada and the US worked together to create a package of some 40 documentaries, PSAs, experimental films and music videos that address the AIDS pandemic in Southern Africa. The project, Steps for the Future, takes a bold leap forward in the notion of international co-productions and activist media making. The genesis for Steps for the Future came from Finland, in
Filmmaker Justine Shapiro remembers the first time she encountered P.O.V., the PBS television series for independently produced nonfiction films. It was the summer of 1988, and Shapiro was an aspiring actress. “I had just come home from a typical day of auditioning for TV guest spots and commercials, and I was wondering what I was doing with my life. I turned on the TV, and P.O.V. was featuring a wonderful documentary called Las Madres: The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo by Susana Muñoz and Lourdes Portillo. I felt like a seed had been planted in my brain.” Shapiro eventually gave up acting and
Editor’s note: This is an abridged version of an article that originally appeared in the New York Foundation for the Arts arts-in-education supplement Chalkboard (spring 2002 issue, Vol. 11, No. 2), included semi-annually in FYI , a quarterly magazine of art and culture. FYI: What was the origin of Trembling Before G-d? Sandy DuBowski: Trembling started as a video diary, an exploration of whether there is homosexuality in the Orthodox world. But over the six years making it, it became something much larger, more global and complex than I ever imagined. Having grown up a Conservative Jew and
The Center for Social Media was launched last fall at the American University School of Communication in Washington, DC, which is, of course, a hotbed for political discourse, social activism, public sector policy making—and documentary making. With PBS, Discovery Networks, National Geographic and C-Span all clustered in the general area of the Potomac, along with such major distributors/producers as Devillier Donegan Enterprises, the Beltway affords abundant opportunities for media making. But it’s not just the producers and broadcasters here; nonprofit and non-governmental organizations and
While donning my other hat as Associate Director of the Film Program at HBO’s Comedy Arts Festival, I was faced with an interesting conundrum. I have a personal commitment to programming documentaries and getting them out to wider audiences, yet labeling a documentary a comedy has several inherent problems, such as the possibility of implying disrespect towards one’s subject matter. While many serious docs use moments of humor to draw in their audiences, achieving tonal balance can be tricky when juxtaposing weighty issues with moments of lightness. Additionally, those docs that deal with
A week of pitching, hoping, hyping and selling came to a close as the 39th annual television program market, MIPTV, wrapped up in April and the 10,000 plus participants, from over 97 different countries, headed home. While buyers, sellers and producers came to Cannes with every conceivable type of television programming, the documentary form was clearly one of the favorites. You couldn’t walk down an aisle in the seaside convention center without being visually bombarded with colorful flyers announcing the availability of hundreds of wildlife, history, science, arts, lifestyle and current
Donald Richie first arrived in Japan over 50 years ago, when he was hired to work as a typist for the Stars and Stripes American military newspaper. Richie informed the newspaper that they were lacking a film critic, and he was quickly appointed to the position. He recalls, “That’s when I first started being interested in Japanalia. I taught myself, through trying to teach members of the Occupation, what noh was, what kabuki was, what the tea ceremony was.” “I was much more interested in learning about Japanese films,” he continues. “So I would sneak into theaters, and not knowing the language
Dear IDA Members: I report from the Cannes Film Festival, which this year has to be the best I’ve ever attended. For the first time in 46 years, a documentary was in the main competition. Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine was the talk of the festival. Moore has outdone himself. He has never communicated more clearly and more directly about the social issues that are troubling him than in his new film. The massacre at Columbine High School is the launching pad for a discussion of gun control, our national violence—both on an individual domestic basis and as a matter of public policy—and our
The life of the documentary, we all hope, extends well beyond the final cut, festival circuit, theatrical run, television broadcast and nontheatrical distribution. Documentaries can, and do, have the power to change policies, attitudes, opinions—and lives. It takes a well-conceived strategy and a strong infrastructure of filmmakers, advisors, distributors and film subjects who are willing and able to take their documentaries to targeted audiences—wherever they may be—and generate discussion and dialogue. In this issue, we look at a few recent examples of projects that were conceived and