Dear IDA Members: Filmmakers from around the world gathered in Los Angeles at the end of October to celebrate the 15th Annual IDA Awards. The enthusiastic spirit of the filmmakers pervaded a weekend that included the annual press luncheon at Eastman Kodak in Hollywood, the Awards Gala and DocuFest screenings at the Directors Guild of America Theater. The pinnacle event occurred Friday evening when over 300 people assembled for the Awards Gala in the newly opened Los Angeles Center Studios. The evening began with an exuberant reception followed by the presentation of awards in a brand new state
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The 1998 Windy City International Documentary Festival is Chicago's only film/video festival specializing in documentary, but the four year-old event has not yet been able to score with Chicago critics despite more visibility on the world's doc circuit. With more than 200 entries representing 20 countries and an audience counted at 3,000, the volunteer-run festival just might not survive another year. "I can't schedule the next Windy City International Documentary Festival until the finances are in place," stated the fest's stalwart but unpaid director Martha Foster, who covered this year's
Les Blank is a prize-winning independent filmmaker, best known for a series of poetic films that led Time Magazine critic Jay Cocks to write, "I can't believe that anyone interested in movies or America...could watch Blank's work without feeling they'd been granted a casual, soft-spoken revelation." John Rockwell, writing in The New York Times, adds, "Blank is a documentarian of folk cultures who transforms anthropology into art." And Vincent Canby, also in The Times, declared that Blank "is a master of movies about the American idiom...one of our most original filmmakers." Major
Czech documentaries seem to be responding to changing times faster than Czech feature films. Documentarists have never lost touch with contemporary life, not even after the political changes in their country in 1989. They know very well what they want to shoot and for whom. True to say, authors of Czech feature films were long accustomed to turning to the past which offered much safer subjects than the present. Under the former Communist regime, films about the past had a better chance of escaping the censor’s attention. Yet, preoccupation with the past seems to have persisted to this day
Les Blank appears and then fades into the hazy Arkansas sunlight. Now you see him, now you don’t. He is like a ghost, an ephemera, a shadow of a soul caught on a summer breeze. He speaks to me in hushed soft-tones. I have to lean my chair in real close just to hear him. It’s tempting to touch him, or poke my finger into his flesh—his presence is immutable, and I want to make sure he is really there. His work speaks for him and through him—and it is clear to anyone watching, that in this instance the axiom is true: Les is really more. Blank is setting up for his next screening and workshop,
Orphans of the Storm (1921)." src="http://www.documentary.org/images/magazine/90s/TheOprhans_Dec1999.jpg" style="width: 647px; height: 411px;"> “The [National Film Preservation] Foundation's primary mission is to save orphan films, films without owners able to pay for their preservation. The films most at-risk are newsreels, silent films, experimental works, films out of copyright protection, significant amateur footage, documentaries, and features made outside the commercial mainstream. Orphan films are the living record of the twentieth century.” —from Title II of the National Film
How Les Blank’s passion for the rich depth of American music—and a bad hand at cards—launches a deeply artistic filmmaking style resembling the very spirit of the music.... I grew up in Tampa, Florida in a white, upper-middle class home and distinctly remember the first live music I ever experienced. It was a neighbor practicing on his trombone. I became transfixed and transported by the deep rich tones of the horn and the beauty of the shiny silver instrument. I later took up playing trumpet in school and was the bugler for the daily raising and lowering ceremonies of the American flag. But
Pinocchio started it all for me, in 1940, when I was four years old. It happened at the Tampa Theater, one of the grand old Depression-era movie palaces thankfully preserved still today, with all of its ornate and excessive decor, in Tampa, Florida. (It was built by the same wizard who created the fabulous Fox Theater in Atlanta and another great one, also still functioning, in Miami.) It has twinkling stars in the ceiling and clouds that float by. Plus lots of bare-breasted women with long flowing tresses seemingly everywhere I looked. One held the water fountain out for me to drink from
Michael Apted would be the first to admit that his career trajectory is somewhat enigmatic. While most filmmakers can easily become pigeonholed in the entertainment world, Apted has managed to build a career out of many genres, including television, documentary, features and music films. He has won a British Academy Award and even a Grammy. Yet despite his massive filmography, he seems to be best known to the public for the UP series. This groundbreaking series documents the lives of 14 British school children beginning at age seven in 1963, and adds a new installment every seven years. It
Richard Fiocca is an Emmy nominated composer who has created and scored music for IMAX, ShowTime, PBS, HBO, ABC, NBC, CBS—just to name a few. His most recent work may be heard on the newly released Discovery Pictures large format documentary film Wildfire: Feel the Heat. How did you create the music for Wildfire: Feel the Heat? The music for Wildfire was created over a three-month period, with about one month devoted to writing and demo-ing the score on synths, a month and a half to orchestrate the music and have the parts copied, and about two weeks to record, mix and layback to picture. This