The question of how to build a more open and equitable film festival is an old and still pressing concern. Ideally, there will be a plurality of answers and the Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival may be one of them. Its 2024 edition, which ran 7–10 March, felt like a festival whose program was not only deeply engaged with larger political struggles, but also open and malleable in a way that many festivals claim but rarely enact in the relations underpinning the screenings.
documentary magazine
What would life be like in America? By the time we fled Uganda, there had been two attempted kidnappings of my wife, Nulu. I had been shot in the face at close range while filming, arrested, thrown in a crammed police cell, and denied access to a lawyer.
Imagine the hallways of Cornell University, a quiet, comfortable campus in upstate New York, in the mid-1970s. Now imagine, in one of the Ivy League rooms, a Marxist reading group that brings together students and professors from different generations, ethnicities, and countries. They are united by an urgency to make revolutionary art and contribute to the dismantling of imperialist capitalism. This is the origin story of the Victor Jara Collective, a coalition of artists and activists named after the revolutionary Chilean musician assassinated during the Pinochet regime.
In these first couple of months as IDA’s executive director, a few lines by the cultural thinker Paul Gilroy have been on my mind. They indicate, for me, something of the purpose of documentary filmmaking.
This print issue of Documentary comes right before IDA’s biennial industry conference, Getting Real. In the tradition of past magazine issues that immediately precede the conference, this issue previews the conference’s themes of “Strategy, Networks, Access” through interviews with speakers whose work will be featured at the conference.
Dear Readers, Last month, if you were an IDA member who opted into receiving print issues of Documentary , you received a copy of our redesigned print
In 2018, like many others in India, filmmaker Vinay Shukla stopped watching the news. Since the right-leaning Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came into
We first meet our protagonists seated together on a brightly lit set, their figures visible in the gap between a pair of dark curtains. Two hands come
The pioneering American filmmaker William Greaves (1926–2014) produced, directed, shot, and edited more than 100 experimental, documentary, and social issue–based films. His four Emmy nominations cap a lifetime as a successful songwriter, dancer, and actor; he was a member of the Actors Studio and had featured roles in independent, Black-cast movies of the late 1940s.
In July 2021, a letter calling attention to my unlawful and unjust dismissal from my teaching position of 14 years at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul