Documentary
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On Missing 99% of What You Need: Lucy Walker’s Advice to Documentary Filmmakers
The following is an extract from Jessica Edwards‘ book Tell Me Something, which collects together advice on non-fiction filmmaking from 50 of the world’s most prominent documentarians, in which two-time Oscar nominee Lucy Wakler shares her wisdom. Tell Me Something is also available as an e-book. This piece of advice has been my lifeline, my mantra, my toehold on sanity and encouragement, the bandage for when I am kicking myself so hard I can’t stand up. It was told to me by Barbara Kopple, the legendary two-time Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker. One of my greatest strokes of luck in life was that she came to […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Nov 25, 2013 -
MIT Open Documentary Lab Launches _docubase
As a consumer of new media – to say nothing of its makers – how does one go about keeping abreast of the emerging form’s constant developments? MIT Open Documentary Lab hopes to keep interested parties up to speed with _docubase, a new project that was launched yesterday at IDFA. A curated platform, _docubase will maintain an open dialogue on the “new documentary,” the fledging form that draws from interactive and community-created fact-based storytelling. “No longer must we look back at those unconstrained moments of creativity from a nostalgia-tinged distance,” reads the _docubase manifesto, referring to the unchecked and experimental early years […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Nov 25, 2013 -
Code: Laura Hanna and Matana Roberts on NYC Stop and Frisk
Filmmaker and media activist Laura Hanna — a co-founder of the production company HiddenDriver and director of docs Gattis, James and Hammer — has directed this short documentary about composer and sound artist Matana Roberts’ recent “stop and frisk” encounter on the Williamsburg bridge. Produced by Creative Time Reports and found on their site, it is introduced thusly: As the composer, saxophone player and sound artist Matana Roberts walked across the Williamsburg Bridge one night in May, she asked herself a familiar question: “How am I going to survive as an artist in this town?” It was too enchanting an […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 19, 2013 -
The Act of Killing Takes BRITDOC’s Puma Impact Award
Last night at the Times Centre in New York, BRITDOC’s Puma Impact Award was bestowed upon the visibly shell-shocked filmmakers behind the year’s most innovative film, The Act of Killing. Director Joshua Oppenheimer, co-director Christine Cynn, and producer Signe Byrge Sørensen assumed the stage to collect their iridescent trophy – and its accompanying 50,000 Euro prize, to be split between the team and their activist efforts – from jurors Susan Sarandon, Zadie Smith, and Ricken Patel. Absent were two members of the jury, Gael García Bernal and Eric Schlosser, but, perhaps more notably, The Act of Killing’s anonymous co-director and 60 crew […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Nov 14, 2013 -
Functional Art: Joe Angio on Revenge of The Mekons
The Mekons are the ultimate cult band. They may not have a huge audience, but their hardy host of admirers takes the British-born band and its three-and-a-half-decade history very seriously. The Mekons emerged as U.K. post-punk’s art-school pranksters in the late ’70s, and after major shifts in personnel and approach, eventually evolved into a sort of sonic polyglot encompassing folk, country, world music, and more. Throughout their rough-and-tumble career they’ve maintained a doggedly DIY modus operandi, eschewing complacency and creating more and more fodder for the intensity of their underground acclaim. At the start of 2008, another impassioned admirer, documentarian […]
by Jim Allen on Nov 14, 2013 -
Michael Kleiman on Web, Connectivity, and Social Documentary
Only 32% of the world’s population has access to the Internet. That figure, coming from the organization A Human Right, means that 4.6 billion people are effectively left out of the Information Age that most of us take for granted. Individuals and organizations across the world are working to ameliorate that and spread online connectivity into underdeveloped and rural areas from the U.S. to Kazakhstan. And films like Tiffany Shlain’s Connected (2011) are starting to probe what can happen to global consciousness when the collective wisdom of the world, not just our meager social networks, are finally truly linked together. […]
by Randy Astle on Nov 13, 2013 -
Five Questions for I Learn America‘s Jean-Michel Dissard and Gitte Peng
The coming-of-age tale is a durable independent film genre, but it takes on added political and personal dimensions in I Learn America, Jean-Michel Dissard and Gitte Peng’s documentary about five new teenage immigrants within New York’s public school system. Dissard, a dual citizen who immigrated himself from France when he was a teenager (and with whom I worked with on Raising Victor Vargas), and Peng, an education reform expert who worked in the Bloomberg administration, embrace within the film the emotional complexity of their subjects’ lives while an exhaustive outreach campaign amplifies its various messages and policy implications. I Learn […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 13, 2013 -
Femke Wolting on Submarine Channel and the Online Documentary Unspeak
George Orwell claimed in his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language” that English was in a bad way: common consensus (which he was satirizing) held “that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes.” His own opinion was more that “the decline of language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer.” Thus it could be resisted: “Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and […]
by Randy Astle on Nov 12, 2013 -
Following the Legacy’s Lead: Barbara Kopple on Running From Crazy
The name Hemingway carries a many numbered associations, “charmed” and “gifted” not least among them. But from the inside looking out, a far less sensationalized view slides into focus. Likening her namesake to Kennedy, Mariel Hemingway’s preferential description of her lineage can be summed up as “the other American family that had this horrible curse.” A curse — of suicide, depression, mental instabilities, drug and alcohol addiction — that is both respectfully and holistically probed in Barbara Kopple’s latest film, Running From Crazy. The youngest of Jack Hemingway’s three daughters, Mariel was often at odds with the free-spirited nature of […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Oct 31, 2013 -
Click Here Lifts the Curtain on the Development Process
Any filmmaker knows that the script is but the first brick in a winding pathway to production. The feature documentary Click Here: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Making Movies takes this fact to heart, training the lens on the action that transpires before the camera even rolls. For Pete Chatmon and Candice Sanchez McFarlane, the development process effectively began at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival, where their screenplay $FREE.99 debuted in competition, netting Chatmon TFI’s Creative Promise Narrative Award. While they found their fair share of industry champions, raising production funds proved to be another story altogether. Five years […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Oct 28, 2013
