Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh are this year’s recipients of IDA’s Courage Under Fire Award. Their film Writing With Fire is the story of Khabar Lahariya (meaning, “Waves of News”), India’s only all-women news publication. Set in Bundelkhand, a rural town in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, and within a context of dwindling personal freedoms and rising Hindu nationalism, Writing With Fire follows Dalit (deemed the lowest in the Hindu hierarchy of castes) journalists Meera Devi, Suneeta Prajapati, Shyamkali Devi, and their co-workers as they take on the mining mafia, inept police force and
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De’Onna "Tree" Young-Stephens is an award-winning writer and director based in Los Angeles, California. She was born and raised in Walkertown, North Carolina where she developed an interest in film at age eight while enrolled at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. After earning a BS in Public Relations at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, Tree moved to Atlanta and got her first job working as a day player on the film 42. She later went on to work as a personal assistant for Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, and Janelle Monáe on Hidden Figures and as
Dear beloved IDA, You are 40 years old! How time flies. Time, consciousness, and cinema are like friends who hold mirrors up for each other. As I am now some 32 years into a life of film work, I think about the three threads that tangle and untangle with each other to affirm how time itself is more than simply linear. The three threads I attempt to acknowledge when I work are these: the history of filming, history itself (not a monolith but a maxilith!), and personal history (of each and all of us). The history of filming is now clocking in at about 130 years. History itself? If we date it to
In 1991, Marlon Riggs made history with the POV premiere on PBS of his groundbreaking film Tongues Untied. It was at the height of the culture wars as well as the AIDS pandemic, and Tongues Untied intersected both crises. It became a lightning rod for conservatives who were looking to maintain the old-world order; they denounced the film on the floor of the US Senate. It also became a beacon and a call for action for those communities and voices marginalized and stigmatized by the status quo of white supremacy and homophobia. In this personal and performative documentary, Riggs comes out not
Brown Girls Doc Mafia (BGDM) started as a secret. It was built to be a safe place for BIPOC women and non-binary filmmakers and industry professionals working in the documentary field, where we could set down our masks, shed our armor, and take a breath in an industry that often felt hostile to communities of color. This was 2015, when the needs of these communities largely weren’t being met by industry initiatives due to a lack of intersectional approaches and a dearth of BIPOC leadership with decision-making or culture-building power at prominent documentary institutions. Over the next six
The founding of FWD-Doc (Filmmakers with Disabilities-Documentary) can be traced to IDA’s 2018 Getting Real conference in Los Angeles. After a panel that highlighted the work of several documentary filmmakers with disabilities, about 40 of us, and our allies, went into an adjacent room for what was more than likely the first-of-its-kind get-together. For many of us, it was the first time that we would meet or talk to another filmmaker who had a similar lived experience of having a disability. A few of us had learned how organizations like A-DOC and Brown Girls Doc Mafia came into being and how
Essential Doc Reads is our curated selection of recent features and important news items about the documentary form and its processes, from around the internet, as well as from the Documentary magazine archive. We hope you enjoy! As the implications of the January 6th insurrection continue to metastasize over a year later, Deadline’s Matthew Carey talks to filmmakers Malachy Browne, David Botti and Haley Willis about their Academy Award short-listed doc Days of Rage, a painstakingly executed reconstruction of the events of that catastrophic day. "I think there’s a very great value in simply
As IDA celebrates its 40th anniversary, we at the MacArthur Foundation are also reflecting on our 40+ years in the documentary field and how independent creators have shaped our program. We funded our first documentary film in 1979, one year after we were established. During the ’80s, we funded 10 more films, and then between 1990 and 2015, we directly supported 250 independent documentary projects and hundreds more through partner organizations. From the very beginning, and still true today, MacArthur’s investments in documentary films were motivated by an appreciation for the role that
IDA and the Black Documentary Collective go waaaay back. BDC’s founder, filmmaker St. Clair Bourne, was an IDA member and served on its board for many years. He was a prolific filmmaker who told stories that celebrated the accomplishments of Black people and our untold history. He was also a mentor to countless filmmakers—myself included—and an activist and organizer at heart. Part and parcel to his leadership was being a disruptor and agitator. I remember him on many panels—often the only person of color—asking the uncomfortable questions, challenging us to interrogate issues of