Three minutes…28 international judges…and cash prizes totaling $100,000. No, this is not the latest addition to this fall’s primetime game show line-up. It’s the CTV Canadian Documart, a pitching competition launched this year at the Banff Television Festival to provide three winning contestants with development money for their documentary projects. In front of a 400-member audience and a prestigious panel of international commissioning editors, seven nervous producers have 180 seconds to hook their fish and land one of the three big prizes: a check for $50,000, $30,000 or $20,000. The
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In April 1997 I went to a screening of Claude Lelouch’s Hommes, Femmes: Mode D’Emploi (Men, Women: A User’s Manual). Lelouch introduced the film and dedicated it to one of his actors—“My friend Bernard Tapie, who is in jail tonight.” I remember thinking, “Who in the hell is Bernard Tapie and why is he in jail?” Then I saw him on the big screen. The next question suddenly became, “Who is this amazing actor with all this charisma, and why haven’t I heard of him?” I soon found out that Tapie was not just an actor but a household name in France—a renaissance man who had made his mark as a singer
Teacher Tony Saavedra scoffed when he heard that IDA was bringing 40 weeks of documentary study and production to his high school English class in San Pedro, California. “I didn’t believe an organization of film- and video-makers would have the courage to take on a ponderous school system, or accept classroom teachers as partners,” he maintains. “I had tough questions about how the IDA saw the role of documentaries in education and the IDA had the right answers.” Not only does IDA’s outreach program, entitled Docs Rock, treat documentaries as a form of literature worthy of critical study, but
The verdict is in: Court TV is a hit. In the past two years, the basic cable channel has seen its availability rise from 40 million homes to 60 million and its ratings increase 500 percent. The rise of Court TV’s profile is good news for documentary filmmakers, as the channel’s primetime line-up features a slew of one-hour and half-hour programs, including The System, Mugshots and Forensic Files. New installments of The System include Jonathan Stack’s Big Easy Justice and Gail Buckland and Derek Cianfrance’s Shots in the Dark. Court TV has also expanded its line-up of feature-length
Last June, visitors to the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival at New York’s Walter Reade Theater in Lincoln Center were presented with a choice: turn left and watch a film projected on the traditional big screen, or turn right into the Furman Gallery and log on at a computer screen and watch the short films inaugurating the “Media That Matters Online Film Festival,” sponsored by MediaRights.Org, the social issue support group. The on-line festival at www.mediarights.org hosts 12 short films and PSAs, produced by filmmakers, students and media activists throughout the United States
Leni Riefenstahl, Five Lives by Leni Riefenstahl Taschen Publishers, 2001 336 pages (hardcover) A huge new book—6 ½ pounds, 19 x 11 inches, with perhaps 200 black-and-white and color photos—has just been published in Germany, with robust distribution as well within the US: Leni Riefenstahl, Five Lives. Whenever the name Leni Riefenstahl comes up, the standard accusation is that she is a Nazi bitch, an intimate confidante of ruthless dictator Adolf Hitler and the director in 1934 of the infamous Triumph of the Will, a powerful two-hour documentary glorifying the German Army and the Nazi Party
I came to Maysles Films in the early 1970's—fresh out of college—and I never left. So I guess you could say that, professionally, I'm a child of cinéma vérité, and I continue to live for the vérité style and to be challenged by it regularly. At Maysles, we approach vérité films in ways that are more literary than journalistic. We seek out real-life stories that will unfold dramatically on screen and, like good literature, reveal deeper truths about the human condition. Finding those subjects is tough, however, and having the resources to follow them for months and even years is rare. And so I
Dear IDA Members: My original “Notes from the Reel World” for this October issue addressed the many documentary-related events happening this month in Los Angeles—DOCtober, IDA’s documentary film festival at the Laemmle Monica FourPlex—and New York—HBO’s Frame-by-Frame, in collaboration with IDA—and around the world. But the world is a much more sobering place now—one of unease, deep sorrow, anger and profound loss. September 11, like December 7 and November 22, will forever more be a touchstone in our lives. And where does documentary film and documentary filmmaking fit in the wake of this
Dear Readers, No sooner had we gone to press—on September 11, 2001—when we witnessed a calamity of unspeakable horror and cruelty. By now we have all processed the kaleidoscope of images—the plane hurtling headlong into the tower…people leaping to their deaths…the collapses, 30 minutes apart, of two icons of the Manhattan skyline…the roaring shroud of smoke and soot and ash and concrete and glass and wiring and plumbing…the mad rush of escapees up Broadway…the blizzard of faxes and memos over lower Manhattan…the smoldering wreck of the Pentagon…the wall of prayers…the smiling faces of the
Dear Readers, Welcome to nature, or the world of nature and wildlife documentaries, a genre that has seen a surge in popularity on the international distribution circuit over the past several years. This issue affords you a glimpse at the perspectives of programmers and practitioners alike. Barry Clark, one of the more respected authorities on nature filmmaking, offers his insights into the state of the genre—where it is now and where it can and ought to go. Michael Rose talks to executives at three of the leading programmers of natural history docs—National Geographic, Discovery Channel and