Documentaries were out in force at the 58th New York Film Festival. No longer cloistered in a separate section, they stood shoulder-to-shoulder with narrative features throughout this mostly virtual, streamlined edition. In part, that reflects the increasing fluidity of the form itself. “It’s sometimes even hard to say if a film is documentary or fiction,” observed director of programming Dennis Lim during one of the festival’s many virtual Talks, which you can catch on YouTube. Films like Inheritance, Ouvertures and My Mexican Bretzel seriously mess with boundaries by injecting scripts and/or
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In 2016, Kirsten Johnson, who was then most known for her work as a cinematographer on some of the most challenging and acclaimed documentaries of our time, ranging from Kirby Dick's This Film Is Not Yet Rated and The Invisible War, to Laura Poitras' The Oath and Citizenfour, released the feature-length film Cameraperson, which she directed. The film used footage from many of the films she shot over the last quarter-century to tell her own story. It grew out of an awareness of how she was compartmentalizing some of the vicarious traumas she experienced in her job, how it has affected her and
Premiering at Sundance, going on to open Hot Docs, and now set to air on POV October 12, Nairobi-based director Sam Soko’s Softie is both inspirational character study and unnerving cautionary tale (at least for those of us here in the West who’ve long taken our democracy for granted and may now be paying a costly price). The film follows Boniface “Softie” Mwangi, a grassroots activist-turned-politician, as he faces down his country’s entrenched corruption—paying for votes, power-brokering behind closed doors, and police blithely gunning down protestors is all just business as usual in Kenya
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Now streaming on World Channel is Raúl O. Paz-Pastrana’s Border South, which profiles Gustavo Lopez Quiroz, a Nicaraguan migrant trying to cross into America through Mexico, and Jason De León, a US anthropologist seeking traces of others who never made it. Paz-Pastrana assembles a vivid portrait of the thousands of immigrants who disappear along the trail. Border South reveals the immigrants’ resilience, ingenuity and humor as it exposes a global migration system that renders
Essential Doc Reads is a weekly feature in which the IDA staff recommends recent pieces about the documentary form and its processes. Here we feature think pieces and important news items from around the internet, and articles from the Documentary magazine archive. We hope you enjoy! Just before we plunged into Getting Real ‘20, the Ford Foundation released Creative Futures, a collection of essays (or, as the foundation puts it, “provocations”) to “reimagine the arts, documentary and journalism.” Documentary magazine will be republishing a selection of these in future issues and online, but
This year’s Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) was the strangest ever. There were no red carpets, no galas, no film stars. With Canadian border regulations requiring two-week quarantines for all foreign visitors, TIFF was only international by Zoom and the films selected, not by the people attending the festival. Approximately 20 percent of the films screened in a normal year—50 features and five short programs—were available for viewing, either online or in drive-ins and a limited number of cinemas attended by a few socially distant filmgoers. It’s easy to surmise that quite a number
There is not a moment when Garrett Bradley’s Time could not be considered timeless. But the fact that this story is as relevant today is a tragic reminder of what hasn’t changed in this country and around the world despite the distance of centuries. Whether it be the slow arc of racial progress or the countdown towards an imagined freedom, for Black people there exists a particular terror of time that has its beginnings in slavery, a system that Bradley’s film makes clear is not confined to the past; it persists in the present. That revelation is not solely what makes Time the powerhouse that
Take a moment to imagine the following scenario. You open up your laptop, log in, launch your web browser... and then your screen goes blank. “The rest of your computer works just fine,” they tell you when you take it in for troubleshooting. The processor is still humming, the keyboard can still send commands properly, the speakers are still intact. You just can’t see anything clearly on the display. You’re not alone. Nearly 285 million people around the world can’t see screens clearly either. Not because of faulty hardware, but because they are legally blind. And 466 million people worldwide
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Premiering October 6 on PBS’ Voces, Latino Vote: Dispatches from the Battleground, from Bernardo Ruiz, follows activists, organizers and political operatives who are working to maximize Latino turnout in their local communities while devoting their efforts to COVID-19 relief as the pandemic surges. Taking an immersive approach, Latino Vote delves into the campaigns in the battleground states of Nevada, Florida, Texas and Pennsylvania to explore how Latino voters are poised to
Although the documentary form can take shape in reenactment, animation or other mediums, storytelling through participant interviews continues to command the craft.