The eleventh annual Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, in its sixth collaboration with the Film Society of Lincoln Center, New York, took place in June. It is perhaps the only festival in the world solely addressing human rights—although such topics are common as part of the regular programming of many other festivals. This year HRWIFF screened 31 titles, most of them documentaries longer than sixty minutes. Screenings for 16 days enabled the festival to repeat each title twice. Most films were followed immediately by press conferences with the producers, many having come from
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The two events could not be more different. Visions du Réel was a small relaxed Swiss lakeside festival, showing a selection of some 100 documentary films from 25 countries in four theatres. Sunny Side, which is purely a market, took place in the bustling French city of Marseille, and ressembled a mini Cannes MIP, with filmmakers roaming the corridors in search of co-producers and commissioning editors. A good festival needs to be efficient, friendly and have good meeting areas, and in all of these Visions du Réel scored high marks. The centre was in a chalet-like building which housed both
Dear IDA Members: In this issue, you will read the announcement of nominees for IDA's 16th annual awards fur Distinguished Achievement in Documentary. Congratulations to all of this year's films and filmmakers! This was another record-breaking year for entries. Behind the scenes making the awards process work was a huge volunteer corps. As in previous years, a few IDA veterans volunteered to chair our pre-screening committees. Special thanks to Lynne Littman, Marilyn Engle, Barbara Leigh Gregson, Sven Berkemeier and John Mason for their leadership of the 16th annual awards juries. Our thanks
The year 2000 saw Toronto’s Hot Docs Film Festival truly come of age. The success of the screenings, coupled with an auspicious debut for the Toronto Documentary Forum (TDF), made this first week in May a new staple of the documentary calendar year. Credit goes to the festival and forum organizers, especially Chris McDonald, Rudy Buttignol. Michaelle MacLean Amy Briamonte and the Amsterdam Forum’s Jolanda Klorenbeek who worked very hard to create a positive atmosphere for screenings and discussion. The Canadian Independent Film Caucus, a national association of Canadian documentary filmmakers
Media historians will look back on 2000 as the summer when European and American broadcasting reached the same wavelength. "Voyeur TV" is hurtling through broadcasting markets, breaking viewer records and causing critics everywhere to ponder its greater meaning. But the US and Europe have arrived at this common ground from very different directions. In the US, reality-based television represents a sharp departure from major network primetime fare of a year ago. The trend is also significant for its reversal in the usual stream of exports of American formats abroad: Big Brother and Survivor
It happens in the documentary world, as it does in any artistic milieu: Two filmmakers, unbeknownst to one another, set out to make likeminded projects. David Zeiger ( The Band) and R.J. Cutler ( The War Room; A Perfect Candidate) spent the last academic year with their respective crews documenting the lives of high school students. Zeiger filmed at his alma mater, Fairfax High School in Los Angeles, while Cutler filmed at Highland Park High School outside of Chicago. Zeiger’s work, Senior Year, is slated to air on PBS in 2001 as a projected six-hour program, while Cutler’s American High has
Turning their cameras on the problems of American middle-class youth has been a favorite pre-occupation for filmmakers since the word teen-ager was invented. While not focusing on violence and crime, the problems of very poor schools, or the triumph of good teachers over all odds, the films discussed here make some very pithy comments about high school life. How much has actually changed in high school life—and in the way that life is captured in a documentary? In the late 1960s, two widely seen documentaries, which intimately examine the experience of American high school, were made. The
In 1993 film scholars held the first Visible Evidence conference devoted exclusively to “strategies and practices in documentary film and video.” The event at Duke University was so productive that it has been repeated annually at other locations ever since. (This year’s conference took place last month in Utrecht in The Netherlands) The conferences represent an important reconfiguration and redefinition of documentary studies in the academy. They have also given birth to a significant new series of books under the same title from the University of Minnesota Press that seek to challenge
I was recently talking to a manager of a sparse office tucked away in the bowels of Silicon Valley. He wanted to go back to film school and make films. When I suggested documentaries, he replied, "Aren't documentaries like the poor man's idea of filmmaking? Why make documentaries?" It was another widening of an age-old divide between those who create only for money and those who create because of the simple need to create. The former, who possess more will and gall than fail to comprehend that there is no "why." The latter are driven by untold stories, bottom line and “terms of engagement” be
"I don't believe in the objectivity of the filmmaker," Hatem Kraiche asserts as he introduces himself. "l do believe in the honesty of the filmmaker." Hatem, a one-time journalist in Spain and now a first-year student at Cuba's international film school, Escuela Internacional de Cine y Television (EICTV), is meeting—and challenging—his visiting professor, New York-based filmmaker Robert Richter. He has no inkling yet of Richter's reputation for hard-hitting, truth-telling documentaries that have earned two Academy Award nominations, national Emmy Awards and a top prize at the 1998 Havana