Last November in Philadelphia, historians of what used to be called the Soviet Union gathered to share ideas and compare experiences on a theme of mutual interest: conveying aspects of the singular, complex, and volatile epoch of Gorbachev's perestroika in documentary film. Rendering history through film generally needs no special pleading these days. The subject turns up on diverse quarters, from academic journals to panel discussions at the Sundance Film Festival, where this year a session subtitled "Animating the Past" centered on such films as JFK and Quiz Show. The Philadelphia session
Latest Posts
For film and video documentarians, what's the best-kept secret film festival in America? Here's my candidate: the Vermont International Film Festival, a sterling one-week event held each November in scenic Burlington, two hours south of Montreal. The Vermont fest is as political and socially concerned as one gets in the meonly 1990s, passionately committed to combating America's surly isolationism. "Images and Issues of Global Concern" is the festival's official mandate. What that means, in addition to a dozen progressive fiction feature films, is a feast of documentaries from around the world
Editor's note: In November 1994, San Francisco filmmaker Lisanne Skyler achieved the dream of many independent documentarians when she was informed that her first feature-length documentary, No Loans Today , about the lives of residents in the African American community of South Central Los Angeles, had been accepted into the 1995 Sundance Film Festival. Following are excerpts from Skyler's Sundance journal. November 24, 1994: Although Sundance Film Festival Programming Director Geoff Gilmore was more than convincing on the phone ( "We love your film," he said. "We want it in"), it is still
BLUES HIGHWAY Producers: Vince DiPersio and Bill GuttentagDirectors: Vince DiPersio and Bill GuttentagWriters: Vince DiPersio and Bill GuttentagAssociate Producer: Amy BucherSound: Albee GordonEditor: Jason RosenfieldNarrator: Alfre WoodardDistributor: National Geographic Society Blues Highway interweaves blues performances with the stories of some of the millions of African-Americans who migrated from the Mississippi Delta to Chicago and other northern cities in the 1930s and '40s. Life in the delta for African-American sharecroppers was a constant struggle against virulent racism and
I've been doing quite a bit of chairing lately. Early in March I was chair of the Directors Guild of America's documentary committee, which gave its award to Steve James for Hoop Dreams. A month earlier, I chaired the blue ribbon panel for Toronto's documentary festival, called Hot Docs. It was interesting to see that the organizing committee divided the festival into two sections: one for straight documentaries and another for journalistic documentaries made for television. It is a difference between apples and mushrooms. One taste of TV's flashing, jazzy opening teases, the palaver of the
For five months in 1989 an abandoned newspaper office in Manchester, England, was taken over by a Granada TV film crew in pursuit of a sombre assignment. The object of the exercise was to make a 90-minute drama documentary showing the events leading up to the destruction of Pan Am Flight 103 over Scotland on December 21, 1988, with the loss of 270 lives. Why Lockerbie?, or The Tragedy of Flight 103 as it was called in the States, is the la rest work of Leslie Woodhead, one of Britain's most noted documentary filmmakers. Woodhead joined Granada TV directly after graduating from Cambridge in
COMPLAINTS OF A DUTIFUL DAUGHTER Producer, Director, and Writer: Deborah Hoffmann Cinematography: Frances Reid Editors: Jennifer Chinlund and Deborah Hoffmann Music: Mary Watkins Distributor: Women Make Movies With profound insight and a healthy dose of visual and verbal levity, the personal documentary Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter chronicles the progressive stages of a mother's Alzheimer's disease and the evolving response of the daughter—who is also the filmmaker—to the illness. The desire to cure the incurable—to set right her mother's confusion and forgetfulness, to temper her mother's
Documentaries at this year's Berlin International Film Festival, which was held February 9-20, were most in evidence at the International Forum of Young Cinema, headed by Ulrich Gregor, who is also co-director (with Moritz de Hadeln) of the entire festival. Another section, Panorama, headed by Wieland Speck, is always generous with time for documentaries, with special attention to low-budget iconoclastic swingers, god bless 'em. Berlin's video sidebar also included documentaries, notably those of activist Jon Alpert, who heads New York's Downtown Community Television. Perhaps 200 international
A little-known chapter in documentary history is that of Japan's pre-World War II proletarian film movement. The organization at the core of this movement was the Proletarian Film League of Japan, known as Prokino for short. The founding meeting for the group was in 1929, and it was active for about five years after that. But these facts were little known after the war, let alone before it, and rarely appeared even in the histories written by scholars of Japanese film. In the 1960s there were some, particularly young activists and filmmakers, who wanted to take up Prokino's work, and people
Like many of you who make documentaries for television, I thought that the advent of multiple channels would lead to a golden age of nonfiction filmmaking. (Someone has to fill up all that time). In one sense there is more work, but in most cases, the minimal budgets that are offered make it quite a struggle to create quality work. One of the reasons for these sparse budgets was made clear by Stan Moger, an IDA trustee and the president of SFM Entertainment, a division of the nation's largest independent media-buying organization, as he shared audience data with me. As always, budgets reflect