This month IDA takes special pride in celebrating our rich heritage and the vitality in our field today. "Documentary" was coined by the revolutionary British figure John Grierson, who marshaled the support necessary to begin the first government-sponsored program of information films for the general public. What Grierson was to Great Britain, Pare Lorentz was to the United States. The inroads, the accomplishments—and the disappointments—of these two filmmakers more than a half century ago paved the path that is tread by us all today. When Lorentz joined the U.S. Department of Agriculture and
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If a single word can summarize the theme of the major documentaries at the 47th annual Berlin International Film Festival, last February, that word must be "memory": memories as documents. During thirty years of making documentaries, Johan Yan Der Keuken has shot in worldwide locations, but this is his first about his home town. Amsterdam, Global Village (The Netherlands, 4 hrs.) in effect is his return-to-roots film. He glides along the canals, searches down the side-street, seeking his boyhood neighborhood. And he is amazed that few of the faces he sees are white. "Our lives have global
Pare Lorentz's film Nuremberg, which many of his admirers have never seen (U.S. distribution was long held back on political grounds) is finally taking its place in the spotlight. It has been scheduled for a Los Angeles showing on June 2nd at the Museum of Tolerance, on the occasion of IDA's announcement of its new, endowed IDA/Pare Lorentz Award. And Nuremberg will also be included in the Pare Lorentz Boxed Film Set, also recently announced by IDA. This video collection will contain The Plow That Broke the Plains, The River; The Fight for Life, and Nuremberg, along with an account of Lorentz
Her new film is a shattering reflection on the fragile myths of security and safety, instilled in children during the late '50s, to be permanently overthrown by an adult experience of random sexual assault. For Jan Krawitz, In Harm's Way culminates a twenty-year career as documentary filmmaker and teacher. "I believe in documentary as a form because it's an accessible form: I've chosen it because I'm much more interested in reacting to things around me than in creating stories from my imagination." With an undergraduate education at Cornell University and a Master of Fine Arts from Temple
Meema Spadola, a 27-year-old filmmaker, just returned from Women Make Waves, a Taiwan film festival and the first for her film Breasts, a cable documentary she made for Cinemax that is making a few waves of its own. Breasts aired January 27 of this year and was the highest rated documentary ever shown on Cinemax. It features interviews with 22 women-many topless-ranging in age from 6 to 84-years-old. The women discuss how breasts play a crucial role in a woman's life, from puberty to motherhood, sex, health and aging. What's happening with the film now, and what are you doing? Meema Spadola: I
Politics was in the air last June during the 6th Petersburg Festival, which still bears its original title, "Message to Man." The Festival, once a strictly documentary event that now includes short fiction and animation, coincided with the first round of the Russian Presidential elections , with the incumbent Boris Yeltsin facing a strong challenge from the Communist Gennady Zyuganov. Yeltsin survived and—thanks in great part to overwhelming media support-went on to take the second round as well. My impression was that the Russian film world breathed a sigh of relief. Russian television was
It's difficult to separate the Dallas Video Festival from that of the personality of its founder and guiding force, IDA member Barton Weiss. Truly passionate about diversity in media and committed to presenting all forms of video to a wider audience, Weiss earned his undergraduate degree at Temple University in his native Philadelphia, a school with a reputation for nurturing aspiring documentary film and video makers. In the early 1980s, armed with a graduate degree in film directing from Columbia University, Weiss was programming videos for nightclubs when he founded the Dallas Video
It's that time of year again, time for you and your colleagues around the world to submit documentaries for the 13th Annual IDA Awards. An important mark of distinction in the documentary field, IDA Distinguished Documentary Achievement Awards were initiated to " honor exceptional creative achievement in nonfiction film and video production, and to bring greater public awareness and appreciation to the documentary form." IDA Awards have achieved world status among awards for nonfiction film and video production: Distinguished Documentary Achievement Award to productions that have shown
The annual Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival, named for the renowned anthropologist and social activist, celebrated its twentieth birthday last November at its customary digs, three large and two small theaters, within the huge American Museum of Natural History, in New York City. As usual, a mixed bag of new and old titles-long and short, U. S. and foreign, documentary and fiction, video and film—Mead's weeklong program later began its national tour, to Philadelphia, Washington, DC, Los Angeles, Berkeley and Chicago. Of special interest on this anniversary occasion is a new biography film
Amidst all the black leather jackets, cell phones, pagers, rental cars, and gala soirees, documentaries manage more than just a niche at Park City's Sundance Film Festival. In the introductory remarks for a screening of one of the docs, a Sundance programmer said something to the effect of, "To escape the craziness and [Hollywood] hype of the festival, and come down to earth, I tell people 'go see a documentary. "'People must have listened: documentaries claimed full houses throughout the run of the festival. Sundance 1997 showcased 49 documentary features and shorts out of a total of 194