Stanley Nelson and Marcia Smith are celebrating 20 years of building Firelight Media into a company that tells eloquent stories about Black people, events and movements and is leading the charge empowering filmmakers of color to create their own work. “The very first day, the two of us were sitting there looking at each other in our spare bedroom,” Smith recalls. “It was the fall of 2000 and we were like, ‘OK, great, we did it. Now, what’s it mean?’” The initial conversations between Nelson and Smith about Firelight—who are partners in life as well as film—were about starting a nonprofit and
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When Bonni Cohen and Lisa Chanoff founded Catapult Film Fund in 2010 to support documentary filmmakers with development funding, “The fundamental idea,” according to Chanoff, was to “provide funding for documentaries at a stage when there was, at that time, very little support; and when we were thinking of development, we were thinking before there was any proof of concept, sample or trailer.” Catapult has continued to grow and evolve over the past ten years, providing grantees with continued mentorship and access to follow-up Momentum Grants and Consulting Grants in addition to development
The issue of ethics has driven the documentary field in various ways and in various degrees of emphases and urgency since the beginnings of the art form, when Robert Flaherty’s 1922 documentary Nanook of the North would later be taken to task about its use of reenactments and recreations, and in more recent years, as a prototype for extractive storytelling. The 2009 study from the Center for Media and Social Impact, " Honest Truths: Documentary Filmmakers on Ethical Challenges in Their Work," spearheaded by then Center Director Pat Aufderheide and research fellows Peter Jaszi and Mridu Chandra
In October 2016, when my first son Gray was born in San Francisco, I became intensely aware of the relationship between children and screens. Would I let my baby play with my smart phone? Would I show him baby videos? Would I send him to a screen-free daycare? When would I bend the rules? On a plane trip? With the grandparents? Such banal questions reflect a very complex relationship that we have to technology and to screens in particular. I’ve also thought a lot about the screen as a filmmaker. In the 20 years since I’ve been making films, I've experienced a drastic change in how we watch
Dear IDA Community, We are in an extraordinary time. I have been asked many times how one can process what is happening in America at this moment in history. I have shared my belief that the combination of this strange confluence of events that has caused so much economic hardship, racial disparities that long existed being brought to the surface in the most spectacular way through the coronavirus, along with general feelings of restlessness and hopelessness, has led to this moment. It seems that in every season we deal with a new tragedy. But because these prior incidents appeared to happen
I never intended to become a documentary filmmaker in 1986 when I accepted the receptionist position at a science-focused production company. A year later, by chance, I began watching Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954–1965 (Exec. Prod.: Henry Hampton/Blackside) when it premiered on PBS. It is difficult to describe the intense emotions that coursed through me as I watched the series, but the experience changed me, an African American woman who grew up in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. Unlike students today, most people my age didn’t learn about “The Civil
13 films to receive a total of $850,000 in production funds and 2 emerging women filmmakers of color receiving Logan Elevate Grants of $25,000 each.
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Now streaming on Firelight Media.tv, In The Making is a new documentary short film series, presented in collaboration with American Masters, that follows the lives and journeys of emerging BIPOC cultural artists—most of whom graduated from Firelight Media’s Documentary Lab—who bring insight and originality to their artistic craft. OVID.tv presents Democracy and its Discontents, a collection of films that address the notion and nature of democracy (and democracies) from
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 Center for Media and Social Impact (CMSI) released a new study this past week: “Breaking the Silence: How Documentaries Can Shape the Conversation on Racial Violence in America and Create New Communities.” The study raises questions about how social issues documentaries can address the ideological divide fueled by a polarized news media—and a polarized nation
Dear Readers, With COVID-19 still raging in synch with the fires on the West Coast, the current occupant of the White House in full-on mendacity and corruption mode, and the country tearing itself apart in an ever-widening and irreparable schism, the fourth edition of Getting Real Documentary Film Conference arrives like a much-welcome blast of civility and hope. Access. Power. Possibility. These are the guiding beacons around which the Getting Real team has developed the five-day forum, and as the documentary community is undergoing the deep processes of systemic transformation, what emerges