It's fulfilling to step back at some remove and acknowledge just how extensive a contribution documentary has made to the art of film. It's not a marginal enterprise: documentary has always been critical to the development of cinema aesthetics. Many other titles belong here; the first draft of this list was comfortably twice as long and could easily have hit 250 titles without lowering standards. Enjoy the richness of the list rather than carping over the omissions. Dates and titles are from U.S. release. Notice that the list is almost entirely American, with Joris Ivens and some Frenchmen
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In today's computer age it is not an overstatement to say that much of the information you will ever need, in your entire life or career, is accessible right now simply by the placement of a local telephone call. The Internet has fundamentally transformed the way that information and ideas are exchanged. It's an exciting time to own a modem. If you view the Internet as the Information Superhighway, then the World Wide Web (WWW) is its biggest exit-the New York City of the online world. The Web, a subset of the Internet, is a place that utilizes a programming language called Hypertext Markup
It is with honor that I greet you as the new president of the IDA Board of Directors. It will be difficult to follow in Mel Stuart's footsteps, but I hope to help guide the IDA through a productive thirteenth year. I want to bid farewell and thanks to our outgoing board members Henry Breitrose, Ann Hassett, Lee Lew-Lee, Marilyn Ryan, Mel Stuart, and Carmen Vega. We will miss each of them and are grateful for their contributions to the IDA. I wish them all the best on their future endeavors. And I'd like to welcome new board members Carol L. Fleisher, Lyn Goldfarb, David Haugland, Carol Munday
Some film festivals have a simple goal: to showcase worthy films to as large an audience as possible. But the organizers of the Rio Cinema Festival are slightly more ambitious: they want nothing less than to make the Brazilian (and Latin American) film and television industries significant players in the world media markets. To this end, the 11th International Rio Cine Festival of Cinema, TV, and Video, held July 24-31, 1995, in Rio de Janeiro, was densely packed with many strands of programming and multiple networking opportunities. There were screenings of international independent feature
Preceded by the "In and Out of the Cold" documentary screening series, the 2nd International Documentary Congress, and the 11th Annual IDA Awards Gala, an exciting month celebrating the documentary came to an end with IDA's DocuFest, the annual all-day showcase of the five IDA Distinguished Documentary Achievement Award winning films and the IDA David L. Wolper Student Award winner. Presented by the IDA and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art at LACMA's Leo S. Bing Theater on October 28, DocuFest featured public screenings of all the documentaries honored at the IDA Awards Gala at Paramount
"The Documentary Eye," the brain child of IDA Executive Director Betsy McLane and a work-in progress, took the audience through the rich cinematic history of the documentary, from the Lumiere brothers to the Burns brothers and beyond. Ricky Leacock and Joan Churchill, veteran filmmakers from different eras, provided entertaining insights and anecdotes about the past, present, and future of the documentary at key points in this seminar. "The Documentary Eye" was an ambitious undertaking for both the IDC and its producers, but they stumbled slightly by opting for slides of stills when the
Nick Deocampo is one of the leading exponents of Philippine independent cinema in the post-Marcos era, and his presence at the IDC underscored one of its predominant themes: the recent evolution in the documentary aesthetic from historical to personal films. In Decampo's case, the evolution is more of a symbiosis. "During the revolution in '86, there was a great element of risk; no one really knew how long the revolution would last, but you're there and you're living the moment," he told his "At One With ..." audience. "And I was capturing those events. In 1987, I made Revolutions Happen as
Robert Drew, 71, was a World War II fighter pilot who became a Life magazine editor and then formed Drew Associates, a documentary unit that included Richard Leacock and Donn Pennebaker. Their films broke the documentary "lecture" mold by recording only unfolding events and using minimal narration, walking hand held cameras, and other devices to keep the experience firsthand for the viewer. Drew's wife, Anne, who started with the company as an editor and has produced with him for 24 years, is now making a verite documentary on the U.S. militia movement. Both were present to screen clips and
IDC's "Distribution and Marketing" panel, moderated by Joe Kennedy, West Coast sales director of ITEL, presented the audience with a look at the challenges and pitfalls of distribution. Geoff Gilmore, director of film festival programming and special projects at the Sundance Institute, observed that the theatrical distribution situation facing feature documentary films in the United States has been "fraught with crisis for the past 50 years—as opposed to something that's hitting right now." While most films that find distribution do so through nontheatrical channels, some do find theatrical
To paraphrase Prospero from The Tempest, "My revels now are ended." After two years, I am stepping down as president of the IDA. A commitment to produce a group of television documentaries will require my full attention. I found my duties as president a very fulfilling experience. Among other things, I was able to meet a wide cross-section of documentary filmmakers, assist others in obtaining funds for projects, and, best of all, help to establish a permanent documentary archive at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. During these years, however, I noticed a further deterioration