The ninth annual edition of Double Exposure, a festival celebrating investigative journalism, once again brought together an intensely engaged group of journalists, documentarians, lawyers and funders. Washington, D.C., where antennas prick right up when you start talking about how to influence public opinion, is the precise intersection for these different professional groups to find each other. So, it’s not surprising that this is an event where the (three-day) symposium is at least as important as the festival. The topics were tough. What does collaboration look like for newspapers used to honing their competitive edge and maintaining strict distance from “sources”? […]
by Patricia Aufderheide on Nov 7, 2023“It’s so great that this festival is back again!” In one form or another, I kept hearing that phrase between June 15 to 18 at DC/DOX, a brand-new festival in the Washington, D.C. metro area. Sky Sitney, DC/DOX’s co-founder, was also a founder of the 1990s-born Silverdocs, a partnership between American Film Institute and Discovery Networks mourned by the entire doc community after it passed. Silverdocs morphed into AFI Docs when Discovery bailed, but AFI Docs was run out of AFI’s Los Angeles office and often seemed out of touch with DC. Meanwhile, Sitney co-founded a mini-festival, Double Exposure, with […]
by Patricia Aufderheide on Jun 23, 2023In its second post-pandemic, in-person year, True/False was still trying to convince audiences to come back (there were fewer venues this year than pre-pandemic) to watch artful documentary, but the in-person joy was contagious. For one long March weekend, the True/False Film Fest turns the college town of Columbia, Missouri into an arts extravaganza. The films range from the mainstream (Going Varsity in Mariachi, a high-school competition film from the Texas border) to surprising (Milisuthando Bongela’s Milisuthando, about identity challenges in post-apartheid South Africa), to the strange (Raphaël Grisey and Bouba Touré’s Xaraasi Xanne/Crossing Voices, which uncompromisingly mixes past, present […]
by Patricia Aufderheide on Mar 14, 2023