Personal Docs

In this expansive interview, Robb Moss discusses longitudinal personal filmmaking, his influence as a teacher, and The Bend in the River

For her immersive artwork Burn From Absence, artist Emeline Courcier creates an archive where there was none. Using artificial intelligence, she recreates a family album, visualizing and verifying a history that has been hidden, documenting it from her perspective. In the four-channel installation, digitally created images illustrate an audio track layering her family members’ memories of life in Laos, the ‘Vietnam’ war, and new beginnings in France. After its premiere at IDFA last November, where it won the DocLab Special Mention for Digital Storytelling, Documentary spoke to Courcier about truth, archives, and working with deeply personal material.

In Imago, the Chechnya-born filmmaker Déni Oumar Pitsaev journeys to a Chechen enclave in Georgia named Pankissi, where his mother has secured a plot of land for him to settle down. He spends time with his mother, with whom he’s close, and a hearty cousin and a friend, but he has barely seen his father since his parents divorced when he was nine months old. That’s on top of a childhood marked by his and his mother’s stays in Kazakhstan, Chechnya, and—when the Russians attacked Grozny in 1996—St. Petersburg, where she changed his Chechen name for his protection. After Imago won L’Œil d’Or, the best documentary prize of Cannes, Documentary interviewed Pitsaev about starring in a film about his life journey and the balance between pre-planning and responding in the moment.

Documentary is happy to debut the trailer for Peter McDowell’s first feature, Jimmy in Saigon (2024) . The film premiered last year at BFI Flare

Documentary is happy to debut the trailer for Vicky Du’s first feature, Light of the Setting Sun (2024) . The film premiered last year at Full Frame

Documentary is happy to debut an exclusive clip from Beth Lane’s debut feature UnBroken , which won a prize for best documentary feature premiere at

In the Winter 2024/2025 cover essay of Documentary magazine, No Other Land’s collective of Palestinian and Israeli co-directors imagine a reciprocal, shared future in front of and behind the camera.

For the past eight years, the making of Shiori Ito’s feature debut, Black Box Diaries, has consumed the majority of her life. A riveting portrait of

After spending her early career making documentaries for British television, primarily for the public service broadcaster Channel 4, Victoria

At the bottom of page 49 in a 1993 edition of the fabled Argentine film magazine El Amante , there is a sidebar titled “Experimental Cinema,” written