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Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. The Washington Post presents America’s Pandemic, a three-part documentary series by Whitney Shefte and Jorge Ribas that explores a failed response to the coronavirus pandemic that has claimed the lives of over 225,000 Americans, despite decades of preparation in Washington, DC. Making its broadcast premiere November 8 on National Geographic, Ron Howard’s Rebuilding Paradise takes viewers back to the morning of Nov. 8, 2018, when a devastating firestorm engulfed the

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! On her website shondaland.com, TV superstar showrunner Shonda Rhimes interviews filmmakers Dylann McGee and Sara Wolitzky, the duo behind the new PBS series Not Done: Women Remaking America, about the power of the women’s movement over the past five years. But because this documentary was covering a chunk of recent history, we kind of we knew what we were taking on

PJ Raval is a Filipinx-American filmmaker who has been making waves in the filmmaking industry for two decades.

At Double Exposure Investigative Film Festival, come for the recent festival winners that share a common DNA: investigative journalism. And stay for the conversations about how to do it right. This elegantly curated (by Co-creator/Co-director Sky Sitney) and expertly organized (by Founder/Co-director and former New York Times journalist Diana Schemo) is a rare and much-needed site to discuss journalistic documentary and see its latest exemplars. The Stuff of Nightmares There were nightmare-inducing films, with actionable political revelations here in the US. Erika Cohn’s Belly of the Beast

The feature documentary shortlist includes 30 films from 21 countries. 38% of directors and 55% of producers are women, 30% of directors and 28% identify as BIPOC. Additionally, 8% of directors and 7% of producers are LGBTQ. 5% of directors and 3% of producers are disabled.

There are plenty of films made by creators in the IDA family to catch. Check out the IDA-supported titles at DOC NYC this year, including IDA Enterprise Documentary Fund and Pare Lorentz Documentary Fund grantees, fiscally sponsored projects and DocuClub alumnus.

It’s been more than nine months since the deadly movement of COVID-19 from China to North America and Europe—and nearly every other continent—utterly changed the world. Since that time, more than a million people have died. Now, most of us wear masks when we go outside and use hand sanitizers before entering shops. When we meet friends, a six-foot social distancing rule is applied by most of us. The world has, for the time being, become something else, something that some documentarians want to shoot—or, in any case, must deal with in what is, at least temporarily, a “new normal.” While a

Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. City So Real, a five-part series from Steve James, Kartemquin Films and Participant, premieres in its entirety on October 29 on National Geographic; all five episodes will be available October 30 on HULU. This complex portrait of contemporary Chicago delivers a deep, multifaceted look into the soul of a quintessentially American city, set against the backdrop of its history-making 2019 mayoral election. The series opens in 2018 as Mayor Rahm Emanuel, embroiled in accusations

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! Equal, a new docuseries about the history of the LGBTQ+ movement, premiered October 22 on HBO Max. The Los Angeles Times’ Laura Zornosa talks to some of the artists behind the making of the series. In a lot of ways, what we’ve done is a primer: a very slick, beautiful, edgy, hip primer for all this history,” showrunner Stephen Kijak told The Times, “that we hope kicks

By Julie Angell, Steven C. Beer & Neil J. Rosini