This year’s International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) was (once again) a hybrid affair. Which left me, like many nonfiction aficionados attending remotely from around the globe, feeling a bit conflicted. On the one hand, I really longed to return to covering in person—to see, say, Dziga Vertov’s newly restored “lost masterpiece” The History of the Civil War—screened only once before, exactly a century ago—at the grand Tuschinski (recently rechristened “Royal Theater”). Or to swing by De Brakke Grond for DocLab Live. (Though, to its credit, IDFA DocLab did provide a free online
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In the crowded documentary field, short documentaries don’t always get the love they deserve. Our friends at Argo understand this well and have built a whole platform that celebrates and streams short films. We are excited to partner with Argo to highlight their latest playlist A Sense of Place, which includes four documentary shorts that were nominated for IDA Documentary Awards in previous years. IDA Members with a Doc Maker membership or higher get three months of complimentary exclusive access to Argo. To learn how to access your Argo benefit, visit here. Not an IDA Member? You can visit
“I think every film, fiction and nonfiction, should have a drama therapist as part of the team.” That’s a bold declaration from documentary filmmaker Robert Greene, whose latest film, Procession, has a simple but daring premise: He collaborates with six men, who were sexually abused by Catholic priests as children, to dramatize scenes from their past and, in doing so, help them come to terms with their trauma. That is fraught, potentially re-traumatizing territory, so Greene and the victims worked with a registered drama therapist named Monica Phinney throughout the resulting film, and that
IDA announced the four emerging writers who will participate in the Documentary Magazine Editorial Fellowship Program. These fellows will participate in IDA’s editorial planning process, receive a quarterly stipend to write articles for the publication, partake in mentorship sessions, and attend the Getting Real Documentary Film Conference in September 2022.
Everyone wants an Academy Award. But for the last several years, nonfiction filmmakers working in the nonprofit sector have faced daunting competition in the race for the major film awards. Six years ago, I wrote an article called “Oscar Doc Campaigns Have Become Fast, Costly, and Out of Control”—and the situation has only gotten worse. After winning the Best Documentary Oscar for Icarus in 2018, Netflix has aggressively sought further nonfiction accolades, most notably two years ago when four of its films made the shortlist, two were nominated, and one of its acquisitions, American Factory
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! For the Sundance blog, filmmaker Amanda Spain reflects on her journey as a Sundance Producing Fellow, and how the experience proved to be a life-changing one. If you start to feel yourself wavering, you just have to trust your partner is there to catch you and keep moving the pitch forward. From my memory, Dava and I always caught each other and that trust has carried
DOC NYC 2021 was back in theaters this year, with the in-person festival running from November 10-18, and then virtually through November 28. In a year when IATSE workers continue to demand more humane conditions on narrative film and television sets, documentary workers are organizing to protect themselves in less regulated, real-time production environments. The Cinematography and Producer Panels at this year’s DOC NYC Pro revealed how some members of the documentary community are responding to these growing concerns, while the programming of the festival’s International Competition
Recent years have seen a surge in documentary productions and a growing popularity of documentary film among audiences worldwide. Despite this encouraging development, however, disempowering colonialist legacies linger on within the documentary craft and narrative, resulting in a number of films that are largely exploitative and reductionist. In the hopes of scrapping the historical framework of exploitation, activists and filmmakers have been calling for the reimagining of the nonfiction ethos, built on the values of responsible authorship and accountability. The 64th edition of the
At the end of August 2021, the images of frantic Afghanis crowding Kabul airport were a stark reminder of the despair with which people flee their homeland in search of a safer future. The news unfortunately continues to provide us with a daily litany of tragic images: Haitian refugees rebuffed with whips at the border, North Africans shipwrecked off the tiny island of Lampedusa, or Kurdish women and children drowning in the frigid waters of the English Channel in the hopes of reaching more hospitable shores. For many refugees, each stage of their fraught journey threatens to be their last
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Like everyone else, the Documentary team has been deeply mourning the passing of Broadway titan Stephen Sondheim, but we’ve also been celebrating his life by playing and replaying soundtracks from his musicals, and watching documentaries that honor his amazing legacy. No surprises here, but DA Pennebaker's 1970 documentary, Original Cast Album: “Company" tops our list. The film, as legendary as the eponymous musical, was long unavailable, but you can now watch it on Criterion