Two Tribeca titles — 17 Blocks, Davy Rothbart’s decades-spanning documentary about an African-American family living in the shadow of the U.S. Capitol, and Smriti Mundhra and Sami Khan’s award-winning short doc St. Louis Superman — were announced today as the debut acquisitions of  MTV Documentary Films, a division of Viacom’s MTV Studios headed by producer and executive Sheila Nevins. Nevins previously headed HBO Documentary Films and was hired to launch this new MTV division in May. In a press release, Nevins said,  “At the heart of American Democracy, there is an injustice that gnaws at the soul of the have-nots and […]

Now that every 10-year-old has a pocket-sized film studio and multiplex in their hands via the smartphone, and debates over the cinematic legitimacy of streaming platforms rage on, there’s a certain sweet nostalgia associated with dead formats of a less pixel-saturated age. VHS was perhaps the most physical—and vulnerable—of physical media: cheap plastic shells containing magnetic tape that could easily tangle in a faulty player. Yet, along with the camcorder, which likewise came into common use in the early 1980s, it has found a permanent niche in pop-culture consciousness that is, perhaps, greedy for a certain archival innocence—a throwback to […]