Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. At IDA, we deeply mourn the passing of Melvin Van Peebles, the “the godfather of modern Black cinema.” Van Peebles was an actor, poet, artist, filmmaker and playwright, among other things. Celebrate his humbling legacy with filmmaker Joe Angio’s How to Eat Your Watermelon in White Company (and Enjoy It) on Amazon Prime. In Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue, filmmaker Jia Zhangke speaks to three authors who, like Jia, all hail from China’s Shanxi province. Through their
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International Podcast Day is just around the corner! With more and more people tuning in to podcasts every year—especially as COVID-19 has kept us all at home for perhaps longer than we’d hoped—many of us count on podcast storytelling to stay both informed and entertained while taking our much-needed screen breaks. For this year’s Docs to Listen, we’ve put together a list of podcasts telling true tales of the past that have captured listeners’ attention: Bangalore in Stories (PodMacha Studios) “Made in Bangalore, for the world.” From snakes on the dance floor, to the first Asian heavy metal
BY Steven C. Beer & Neil J. Rosini
"From Pre-Pandemic Flashback to Post-Pandemic Visions of Documentary Distribution" was the long and winding title of a thankfully succinct, nuts-and-bolts discussion held during this year’s edition of CPH:DOX’s all-digital CPH:CONFERENCE. Occurring on the day designated REDISTRIBUTE:ECONOMY (the other four themes were REBUILD:DEMOCRACY, REPRESENTATION:POWER, REBELLION:CLIMATE and RESILIENCE:CULTURE), this insightful, all-white and primarily Scandinavian panel nevertheless included an array of diverse perspectives. And leading the talk was moderator Karolina Lidin of Norway’s Nordisk Film & TV
The overwhelming interest in the first Flaherty book and the comments received by MacDonald and Zimmermann from those who had actually "been there" painted a much fuller picture of the impact The Flaherty Seminar had made on them.
This is a tale of taking our old films and meeting the brave new world of distribution. A lot of ingenuity is called for to keep our films before the public. We want to share with fellow filmmakers what we did and what we learned about taking back your work and repurposing or repositioning it vis-a-vis the new market realities. I made the documentaries Berkeley in the Sixties (1990), an Academy Award nominee and a well-loved classic; A Fierce Green Fire (2012), a big-picture exploration of the environmental movement; and Evolution of Organic (2017), the story of organic agriculture told by
In 2018, a junior soccer team and their assistant coach went into a nearby cave in Thailand’s Chiang Rai province. It was a week before the cave was to close for monsoon season, but that year the rains came early, trapping them inside. The world spent the next 18 days watching a life-and-death rescue mission that involved 10,000 people and more than 100 divers. The Rescue tells this story in full detail. Directors Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin partnered with National Geographic, for whom they’d made the Oscar-winning Free Solo, which documents Alex Honnold’s attempt to climb El Capitan
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. To continue our celebration of documentaries around Hispanic heritage, we wanted to make sure you’ve watched María José Cuevas’s Bellas de Noche. An exploration of Mexico’s burlesque culture of the 1970s and 1980s, the documentary, playing on Netflix, introduces us to fascinating protagonists who were former showgirls living up the disco lifestyle. In Lali Houghton’s Dead Woman’s Pass, join Maxi Manuttupa, a single mother from Cusco, Peru, and an Indigenous woman, who helps
Iliana Sosa is a documentary and narrative fiction filmmaker based in Austin, Texas. Her documentary short An Uncertain Future premiered at the 2018 SXSW Film Festival, where it won a Jury Award for Best Texas Short. She was a Berlinale Talents participant and the recipient of a Firelight Media Impact Producer Fellowship, and was named a 2018-2019 Sundance Institute Development Fellow with her first feature documentary, What We Leave Behind (Lo que dejamos atrás). Iliana has participated in the 2019 True/False Catapult Retreat, the 2020 IFP Documentary Lab, and the Jacob Burns Residency with
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! IndieWire’s Eric Kohn speaks to former TIFF Director Piers Handling, who recalls having to decide whether he’d cancel the rest of the festival after the news of 9/11 reached him and his team. The reality didn’t really set in until right after the towers fell. I was watching TV with a group of staffers in the press office at the Four Seasons Hotel. Of course we were