Documentary
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“Story Drives the Form”: Laura Poitras and Charlotte Cook on Creative Tag-Teaming
Before IFP Film Week fades too far in our rearview mirror, we’re elaborating upon several of our snaps from our Instagram feed with further comments by the filmmakers, speakers and panelists. View all of Meredith Alloway’s Instagram diaries here at the link. Laura Poitras and Charlotte Cook talked their visual journalism platform, Field of Vision, on an IFP Film Week panel called “Creative Tag-Teams” last month. Poitras, of couse, shook the world with her Oscar-winning doc, Citizenfour, in 2014. Cook, who was Director of Programming at Hot Docs, is an executive producer and co-founder of this new creative platform with […]
by Meredith Alloway on Oct 3, 2016 -
DOC NYC 2016 Short List Films
DOC NYC has announced its 2016 Short List, which has a track record of successfully predicting other awards, including the Oscars. All of the DOC NYC Short List titles will screen during the festival with the director or other special guests present for their first screening. Additionally, all the directors or other collaborators will participate on Friday, November 11 in the DOC NYC Short List Day of panel conversations. Last year, the DOC NYC Short List had ten titles overlapping the subsequent Oscar Documentary Short List, and all five titles that were Oscar nominated. For the last five years, DOC NYC screened […]
by Paula Bernstein on Sep 28, 2016 -
My First Film Shoot: A Lesson in Documentary Filmmaking and Flexibility
If you need any motivation to begin production on your first-ever documentary, here’s a tip: tell thousands of people you’re making a documentary. That’s what I did when I shared the news on Filmmaker and Facebook that I was going to make my first film, a short documentary, tentatively titled Sole Doctor. Of course, I loved the enthusiastic response. But hearing, “Can’t wait to see it!” from more than 100 people sure ratchets up the pressure to deliver. With my subject nailed down and a DP and sound mixer onboard, it was time to begin production. For the first shooting day, […]
by Paula Bernstein on Sep 26, 2016 -
The Orchard Releases Detailed Distribution Revenue Figures for Cartel Land, Launches New Film Analytics Dashboard
Distributor The Orchard launched today what they are calling “the industry’s first fully-transparent dashboard for film analytics.” Using figures for their recent release, the Oscar-nominated doc Cartel Land, the dashboard provides hard figures for film revenues across both different platforms and then tracks and projects them over time. Simply put, this is extraordinary. The lack of digital reporting figures has been cited repeatedly in Filmmaker and elsewhere as an impediment to filmmakers seeking to create business plans for their films. The Cartel Land example posted today provides significantly more granular detail than is typically reported in the trades, and dynamic […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 9, 2016 -
#DocsSoWhite?: A Panel on Diversity in Documentary Filmmaking
#OscarsSoWhite is hardly a new phenomena in dramatic narrative circles and Hollywood, but determining where the doc community fits into the debate – is. Without empirical data, it would seem the doc community is doing a better job at building diverse and inclusive opportunities than Hollywood counterparts. But if that’s true, by how much? What measures are in place to ensure that the people in front and behind the camera better reflect the world in which we live and the stories we tell? How do public vs. private dollars impact this outcome? If, in the end, it is determined that […]
by Chico Colvard on Sep 7, 2016 -
Should Documentary Films Have Footnotes?
Part I: Notes on the Footnote “Woe to details! Posterity neglects them all; they are a kind of vermin that undermines large works.” –Voltaire About a year or so ago I began to think about footnotes. First I wondered if I should write footnotes for the film (NUTS!) I was in the final stages of completing. Then I wondered if footnotes might be useful to the field of nonfiction cinema more generally. What purposes might such a practice serve? This question excited me tremendously. It felt unmistakably like an idea whose time had come. I started blabbing ignorantly about footnotes […]
by Penny Lane on Sep 6, 2016 -
Expert Tips for First-Time Documentary Filmmakers (Like Myself)
Months ago, I got the crazy idea to write, produce and direct my first documentary. I wasn’t completely unrealistic — I knew enough to start small with a short, micro-budgetfilm. I also knew I could count on a supportive network of documentary filmmakers — including pros such as Doug Block, Marshall Curry, Laura Nix, Tracy Droz Tragos, Robert Greene, and others — to help guide me through the process. Later in this piece, I’ll share some of their invaluable wisdom. But first, here’s a bit about my film and my process so far. I had been on the lookout for a subject that […]
by Paula Bernstein on Aug 25, 2016 -
In Defense of Street Photography in an iPhone Age
Last Halloween (my birthday, as it happens), I loaded up my Bolex to shoot some 16mm black-and-white images of a children’s costume parade in my Brooklyn neighborhood. I was thinking of Helen Levitt’s 1948 masterpiece, In the Street. Levitt (and her co-cinematographers James Agee and Janis Loeb) used a small camera to surreptitiously record images (mostly of children) in Spanish Harlem. The film is a poetic time capsule — observational vignettes that become more than the sum of their parts. The Bolex looks pretty big these days compared to digital cameras, so I wasn’t hiding anything from anybody. As I […]
by Mark Street on Aug 16, 2016 -
Redford Center Grants Program Backs Features with Environmental Bent
Last month, The Redford Center announced the launch of Redford Center Grants, a grant program aimed at supporting the production of films that seek to raise global awareness of environmental issues. Funded by The New York Community Trust, The Redford Center Grants program will support filmmakers with feature-length projects that are in early stages of development and that are focused on driving awareness, education and action on environmental topics. Though there is no specification that the films must be non-fiction, on the list of Films We Love, The Redford Center highlights documentaries such as Super Size Me, Gasland, Virunga, The Cove, and […]
by Paula Bernstein on Jul 28, 2016 -
Trailer Watch: Robert Greene’s Kate Plays Christine
In Kate Plays Christine, which premiered earlier this year at Sundance, filmmaker Robert Greene tackles the story of Sarasota TV journalist Christine Chubbuck, who shot herself live on-air in 1974 and died 14 hours later. But rather than taking a straightforward documentary approach to Chubbuck’s story, Greene instead chronicles actress Kate Lyn Sheil’s preparation to play Chubbuck in a film that will conclude with her suicide. While Greene’s previous film Actress explored the real life of actress Brandy Burre, Kate Plays Christine relies on a constructed situation to which Sheil must act and react. Footage of Sheil preparing for the role are intercut with […]
by Paula Bernstein on Jul 20, 2016
