Alex H. Rafi is a St. Louis-based documentary filmmaker and educator. Originally from Miami, FL, Alex earned his BA in Communication and Cinema Studies from the University of Pennsylvania and his MFA in Documentary Film at Stanford University. His short film, On Task (2019), screened at several film festivals including Mammoth Lakes, SF DocFest, and the New Orleans Film Festival. His most recent film a door away (2021), premiered at Brooklyn Film Festival and has since screened at the 10th annual BlackStar Film Festival. Alex is invested in foregrounding the stories of people of color
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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! Variety’s Rebecca Davis speaks to Afghan female filmmakers about their anxiety, despair, and the future of filmmaking under the Taliban rule. “I feel like I’m watching a [Quentin] Tarantino film. I look at what’s actually happening and think, ‘No, that’s an American movie, not real American actions,’” says Afghanistan Documentary House founder Sahra Mani, requesting
By Elizabeth Mirzaei and Gulistan Mirzaei We are writing this with sleepless eyes, shaking hands, and knots in our stomachs that grow tighter with each bit of news coming out of Afghanistan, as if an invisible but unbreakable string connects our hearts over continents and oceans. There is an Afghan proverb in Dari, “Dil ba dil rah dara"; There is a way from heart to heart. And our hearts, while broken, are not shattered. We believe Afghanistan is worth fighting for and we won't give up on the country we love. We are Gulistan and Elizabeth Mirzaei, an Afghan/American couple and documentary
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. The onslaught of images our news cycles throw at us often ends up benumbing us to the most distressful and saddest of our realities. As we watch news from Afghanistan and read of numbers in our papers, it is important to remind us of the humanity of the people who are suffering and who stand to lose every freedom we take for granted. Head over to our call to action to know how you can help. If you’re a member of The D-Word, please login for the latest on how you can assist in
This Sunday, August 15th, 2021 India celebrates 74 years of its independence from British imperial rule. It has been an incredibly challenging year for South Asian communities, both within the subcontinent and the diaspora and we thought this would be a good time to come together, even if virtually, to watch some of the best documentaries to come out of the country in recent years, and celebrate the very unique stories that show us the resilience, resistance, and the fascinating lives of its people. This year, we decided to partner with the Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles (IFFLA) to create
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! We wanted to start off by relaying an important message on behalf of our colleagues from the Human Rights Film Network. We request our readers to read, sign, and circulate this call for action that demands Malaysian authorities to stop harassing dissenting voices. On 2nd July, Anna Har, the festival director of the FREEDOMFILMFEST, and cartoonist Amin Landak were
Several of my former 'Angels are Made of Light' are targets for execution by the Taliban because of their work for US-funded projects in Afghanistan. We hope that with your help, we can draw attention to the SIV applications of my friend and bring him to safety.
Winner of the Jonathan Oppenheim Editing Award: US Documentary at this year’s Sundance, Homeroom is the final piece in Peter Nicks’ Oakland Trilogy. The vérité project began with 2012’s The Waiting Room and continued on through 2017’s The Force, which notably provided Documentary with the chance to chat with the Oakland Police Department’s Deputy Chief LeRonne Armstrong for this very column. Interestingly, the OPD—specifically the battle over where and how it should be deployed—also figures quite prominently in Homeroom. Embedding with Oakland High School’s class of 2020, Nicks and his team
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. When filmmaker Ayo Akingbade finished making Tower XYZ (2016), she wrote a manifesto “for the underdog, the unsung, the pissed off and the tired.” Three of her films―hybrids of documentary, experimental cinema, and personal essay― Claudette’s Star, Fire in My Belly, Dear Babylon are now streaming on MUBI. Also on MUBI, The New York Stories: A Jackie Raynal Double Bill features two of Raynal’s films― New York Story (1981) and Hotel New York (1984). Raynal, who edited Eric
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! The new Locarno Film Festival artistic director, Giona A. Nazzaro, speaks to Variety’s Nick Vivarelli about his plans to make the festival more “audience friendly.” My idea is that a festival can be quite highbrow and entertaining at the same time. That is why in this year’s lineup we have three comedies––or sort of, it depends on your idea of humor––we also have some