Documentary
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Slurping Docs at Tribeca
The 12th annual Tribeca Film Festival is finis, but not its films. They will live, often for years, particularly documentaries which historically are Tribeca’s strongest category — one of the few things New York festivalgoers agree upon. This year’s crop of wide-ranging docs had me ping-ponging fast and furious, doc slurping from gruesome war to ballroom dancing to stoned hillbillies to weird couple to profound icon to stunningly gorgeous. Maturity seems to be catching up to Tribeca, and in a good way. Certainly for the docs. The Kill Team After a decade of U.S. fighting in Afghanistan and after screening […]
by Stewart Nusbaumer on Apr 29, 2013 -
The Druid City: Interview with Kristyn Ulanday and Max Esposito
Kristyn Ulanday and Max Esposito graduated from the journalism department of Boston University in 2010. They both work commercially as freelance photographers and filmmakers, but in 2011 they also began a collaborative project called Full Frame America to tell the stories they wanted to tell. The first result of that collaboration is a 24-minute documentary, The Druid City, that focuses on the town of Tuscaloosa, Alabama and how the residents have coped after the town was hit by an EF4 tornado in April 2011. Filmmaker: How did you come to make this movie? Esposito: We both felt like we […]
by Michael Murie on Apr 29, 2013 -
The New Digital Storytelling Series: Vivek Bald
In the eighth part of Filmmaker‘s interview project with prominent figures from the world of transmedia, conducted through the MIT Open Documentary Lab, Vivek Bald, filmmaker, Associate Professor of Writing and Digital Media at MIT and a member of the MIT Open Documentary Lab, answers our questions. Bald’s ongoing project, Bengali Harlem, documents the history of two little-known groups of South Asian immigrants. For an introduction to this entire series, and links to all the installments so far, check out “Should Filmmakers Learn to Code,” by MIT Open Documentary Lab’s Sarah Wolozin. MIT Open Documentary Lab: How did you become a digital storyteller? Were there […]
by MIT Open Documentary Lab on Apr 25, 2013 -
Storyscapes: Tribeca Goes Interactive
This image is from Empire Uncut, part of the Star Wars Uncut project and one of the five projects at the Tribeca Film Festival’s first juried exhibit of interactive video projects, which ran this week at the Bombay Sapphire House of Imagination on Varick Street. TFI has been supporting digital, transmedia, and multimedia projects for years through programs like its New Media Fund and hackathons, and now TFI’s Director of Digital Initiatives Ingrid Kopp (who was recently interviewed by Filmmaker) has found a way to bring some projects into a physical space to coincide with the film festival in lower […]
by Randy Astle on Apr 23, 2013 -
The New Digital Storytelling Series: Ingrid Kopp
In the seventh part of Filmmaker‘s interview project with prominent figures from the world of transmedia, conducted through the MIT Open Documentary Lab, Ingrid Kopp, Director of Digital Initiatives at Tribeca Film Institute, answers our questions. Kopp oversees the TFI New Media Fund, runs Tribeca Hacks and produces TFI Interactive during the Tribeca Film Festival. For an introduction to this entire series, and links to all the installments so far, check out “Should Filmmakers Learn to Code,” by MIT Open Documentary Lab’s Sarah Wolozin. MIT Open Documentary Lab: How do you see people making the transition to digital interactive storytelling? Kopp: I think people have […]
by MIT Open Documentary Lab on Apr 18, 2013 -
POV’s Third Nonfiction Transmedia Hackathon
The most encouraging aspect of POV’s third hackathon, which wrapped with a public presentation Sunday night, was the social commitment of the five projects. When they hit close to home, events like Monday’s bombing in Boston can make you step back and reevaluate your work, its purpose and meaning. So it was gratifying, a day earlier, to see how committed the hackathon teams were to remedying some kind of societal problem, including some situated half a world away. Over two days the participants worked together to use new technologies to make real strides against issues like homelessness, war, and the […]
by Randy Astle on Apr 17, 2013 -
The New Digital Storytelling Series: Brett Gaylor
In the sixth part of Filmmaker‘s interview project with prominent figures from the world of transmedia, conducted through the MIT Open Documentary Lab, Brett Gaylor, Senior Director of Mozilla’s Webmaker initiative (including Mozilla PopcornMaker and Popcorn.js) answers our questions. Gaylor has previously been a member of the EyeSteelFilm documentary production company, the founder of Open Source Cinema and the web producer of Homeless Nation. For an introduction to this entire series, and links to all the installments so far, check out “Should Filmmakers Learn to Code,” by MIT Open Documentary Lab’s Sarah Wolozin. MIT Open Documentary Lab: How did you become a digital […]
by MIT Open Documentary Lab on Apr 11, 2013 -
Kathleen Hanna, Sini Anderson and Tamra Davis Talk The Punk Singer
Originally published following The Punk Singer‘s premiere at SXSW, this interview with director Sini Anderson, subject Kathleen Hanna and executive producer Tamra Davis is being rerun today as the documentary opens in New York at IFC Center. Hanna will be doing Q&A’s with Lizz Winstead of The Daily Show and signing copies of her new Julie Ruin record. Check the IFC page for times. In Greil Marcus’s punk-rock critical opus Lipstick Traces, the writer describes a kind of magic created by the sneering music of the Sex Pistols: “… the pop magic in which the connection of certain social facts […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 9, 2013 -
The Full Frame Film Festival, Part Three
Several of the films from this year’s Full Frame Documentary Film Festival dealt with themes of community. Two films in particular that focused on question of community were Patrick Creadon’s If You Build It and Jeff Reichert and Farihah Zaman’s Remote Area Medical. In both cases, we are introduced to both the pleasures and the complexities of providing resources — medical or educational — to rural communities that have been neglected in recent years. If You Build It depicts the efforts of Emily Pilloton and Matt Miller to introduce a design-oriented curriculum to rural Bertie County, North Carolina, and to […]
by Chuck Tryon on Apr 8, 2013 -
The Full Frame Film Festival 2013, Part One
The opening day of this year’s Full Frame Documentary Film Festival has once again provided attendees with an eclectic offering of choices, including a number of timely films that touch on important political issues and a curated series organized by Amir Bar-Lev, Stories About Stories, that focuses on documentaries who engage with the question of narrative itself, as well as a tribute to the innovative documentary storyteller, Jessica Yu. But this variety of choices speaks to the vibrant work being done by documentary filmmakers and the programmers who organized this year’s festival, not to mention the vital questions that documentary […]
by Chuck Tryon on Apr 6, 2013
