On January 27, Elizabeth Meyer Lorentz died at age 87, in hospital at Mt. Kisco, New York, following a long illness. The New York Times ran an obituary calling her "a movie scriptwriter and author of a book on networking." To anyone who cares about documentary film, Elizabeth was much more important than that brief description implies. In our community, she was the wife of filmmaker Pare Lorentz Sr. Known as "FDR’s moviemaker," Pare was responsible for the classic American documentaries The River, The Plow That Broke The Plains, Nuremberg and others, including the film on which he and
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The first-ever Irish documentary film festival, dubbed Doclands, was launched with a flair, appropriately honoring one of the living legends of documentary, Albert Maysles, with a retrospective of several of his most acclaimed films. Maysles also graced the event with a directors workshop. The three-day film marathon and market took place October 24-26 at the Irish Film Center in Dublin. The reputation of the Irish warmth and hospitality is not exaggerated, particularly with Jameson’s being one of the sponsors of the event; the whisky was flowing, indeed, and that’s no blarney. May The Road
When I was a college student in the early ‘60s and first discovering feature films, documentaries meant next to nothing to me. I connected them with the stodgy industrial films I saw in grade school—the ones about plastic or progress, the booming voice of the narrator intoning, “Since the Dawn of Civilization…” Then I saw Primary. That a documentary could have such immediacy and raw energy dazzled me. I haven't seen Primary in over 30 years, but I can imagine (if memory serves me right) Senator Kennedy making his way to a speaker's platform, the camera tracking from behind held high above his
Dear IDA Members: IDA 2001 is up and running. In January and February we held our annual seminar series, Documentaries from A to Z: Putting It All Together, at Eastman Kodak in Hollywood. Many thanks to our good friends at Kodak, and particularly Board member Lawrence Cate, for hosting this invaluable program. And thanks also to Board members Barbara Leigh Gregson, Carol Munday Lawrence, Dianne Estelle Vicari, as well as former Board member Steve Roche and Lance Webster and IDA’s Programs & Festivals Administrator Melissa Simon Disharoon for putting it all together. They all performed a yeoman
Dear Readers, Please allow me to introduce myself. While I have produced five issues of International Documentary as Acting Editor, and I had served for four years as Associate Editor, this is my inaugural issue as Editor. And while I will surely miss the archly hip, post-mod, post-deconstructionist, post-semiotic resonance of “Acting” Editor (my quotes), I can certainly acclimate myself to the ponderous actuality of Editor (my italics). I’ve always made my editorial presence felt over the years through feature articles and reports, but I’ve reserved my commentary and observations, up to now
Editor’s Note: In the world of fiction, places like Yoknapatawpha County and Dublin have afforded a rich mother lode of stories and compelling characters for their respective authors, William Faulkner and James Joyce, to return to over and over again. For filmmaker Jonathan Stack, the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola is that sort of strangely mystical place that has inspired him to produce no fewer than seven documentaries. Mr. Stack talks about the power of place and time in creating his oeuvre. I have often said that in the real world of documentary filmmaking, stories rarely end, just
When the central government of a nation state chooses to spend money to subsidize independent documentary screenings, it’s clear that its economy is booming. Such is the joyful case with the first Doclands film festival and market held in Dublin, Ireland. The much-vaunted Celtic Tiger has delivered energy, color and a shiny patina of hipness to the Temple Bar area of Dublin, home to the National Film Theatre and headquarters to Doclands. Unprecedented growth has undoubtedly created its own pressures: Traffic in Dublin seems at gridlock, except that there is no grid. As with every economic
The annual New York Film Festival, in business at Lincoln Center since 1963, customarily screens up to four documentaries. But the festival this year was busy with a feast of Asian narrative cinema, leaving space for only one documentary—Agnes Varda’s The Gleaners and I. A film of great joy and affirmation, the film nonetheless deals in part with poverty and homelessness within a sub-class of “glaneurs” -- those who glean in the fields for overlooked crops after the harvest. Given the plethora of festivals in New York that do serve up ample helpings of documentaries, as well as the healthy
The International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) was really three events, all of extreme interest to documentary filmmakers. First there was the Festival, where from 9 a.m. til past midnight, some 200 films, from more than 1,600 submitted, were screened in eight theatres. There was also the Docs For Sale market, with 300 titles available for viewing by prospective buyers on 30 monitors that were never idle. And finally, there was the Forum where over a period of three days, filmmakers seeking finance pitched 58 projects before an audience that included more than 50 commissioning
When a film series is named after an anthropologist and staged in a museum, you expect certain things—like an air of earnestness and a near-constant sense that you are being educated. So it is with the Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival, the United States’ oldest ethnographic fête. At this year’s event at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, when I wasn’t watching a grainy, silent, 1898 film of the surgical separation of Siamese twins, I was observing mollusks copulate and elderly Bulgarian peasants awaiting death. Not the lightest fare, but still the makings of a fairly