Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. The Korean-American artist Nam June Paik once said, “What matters today is what I would call the Archaeology of the present, and video is its privileged instrument.” Erik Nelson’s Apocalypse ‘45 combines filmmaker John Ford’s graphic World War II footage, archival material, and narratives of 12 men who witnessed the Pacific War. Premiering May 27 on discovery+, the film, as Paik would say, “digs ruin after ruin to try to understand the past as if one understood the present.”
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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! Over at Variety, Elsa Keslassy speaks to Thierry Fremaux, the artistic director of the Cannes Film Festival, two weeks before the festival is slated to announce its lineup. It will be magnificent. We already have the music of the opening credits to Cannes, the one composed by Camille Saint-Saëns, in our heads. The desire to be at the center of ovations, perhaps boos
Sue Ding is a documentary filmmaker and artist based in Los Angeles. She directs and produces nonfiction projects for platforms including The New York Times and PBS. Her most recent film, The Claudia Kishi Club, was an official selection at SXSW and premiered on Netflix. Her work explores identity, storytelling, and visual culture. Sue also leads the XR media program at the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, and consults on interactive, immersive, and multiplatform projects. She writes and lectures on documentary, participatory, and emerging media storytelling. Sue is an alumni of MIT’s
We’re excited to announce a partnership with Argo, a new streaming platform and global curator of short films, starting this month exclusive to IDA members. With the goal of elevating shorts above the oceans of social media content, Argo provides a discovery home for filmmakers and film fans alike. Argo is building a community with all genres of short film curated into themed playlists by film festivals, filmmakers, and influencers. IDA will be joining a host of partners including Sundance Film Festival, The Guardian and Kickstarter. Yes, filmmakers do get paid! The platform works on a revenue
Aldo López-Gavilán and Ilmar Gavilán, the sibling protagonists at the heart of Marcia Jarmel and Ken Schneider’s Los Hermanos (The Brothers), are two Cuban-born virtuoso musicians, now in their 40s, whose lives have forever been at the mercy of ideological politics. While still in his early teens, elder brother Ilmar was sent to the former Soviet Union to perfect his string instrument talent—eventually ending up as a chamber violinist in the US, never to live in Cuba again. Meanwhile, kid brother Aldo stayed home to train with some of the most respected classical and jazz pianists on the
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. When the pandemic put a halt to our travel plans, little did we imagine that we’d find an unlikely travel guide in Orson Welles. Six extant episodes of the 25-part Around the World with Orson Welles are streaming on metrograph.com through June 20. Contrary to what the name suggests, this series takes us only around Europe, as Welles takes a break from the rigidity of his filmmaking form and presents us a more laid-back look at the cultures and people of the Basque country
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! Over at Immerse, Lauren Lee McCarthy, Tony Patrick, and Grace Lee talk about creating the 2021 Sundance New Frontier browser-based project Beyond the Breakdown—facilitated by a digital voice and on-screen text As we all suddenly moved to remote life this past year, we quickly adopted available tools—Zoom, Google Docs, Slack, Clubhouse—with little questioning of the
Like many of us struggling through the pandemic, Kizzy Corbett has turned to guided meditation to help manage her anxiety. But Corbett has more to worry about than most: The 35-year-old immunologist has spent the last year leading the National Institute of Health’s Vaccine Research Center team in partnering with Moderna to develop a vaccine. “When you give 30,000 people a vaccine or a placebo and allow them to go out into the world, you are really asking the world to give you the answer,” she says in an interview on her couch, the smoke from incense wafting around her. “There’s really nothing
When may a documentary producer record a telephone call or conversation? On January 2, 2021, former President Trump and his counsel called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to cajole, berate and threaten him to find votes and overturn his state’s election result. The Washington Post published the transcript and audio of the hour-long call the next day. Other journalists and publications followed suit and released the recording. Was it lawful for the Georgia Secretary of State to record the Trump telephone call? Was Raffensperger required to ask for consent or advise Trump and his
Richard Ray Perez succeeds Simon Kilmurry as the Executive Director of the International Documentary Association (IDA).