Documentary
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Academy Awards Releases Documentary Longlist
The Academy Awards are still a long way off, but the recent Gotham Awards, the Spirit Award nominations, today’s New York Film Critics Circle Awards and now the Oscar doc longlist mean that awards season is truly kicking into gear. The 15 docs still in Academy Award contention are: Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, Never Sorry LLC Bully, The Bully Project LLC Chasing Ice, Exposure Detropia, Loki Films Ethel, Moxie Firecracker Films 5 Broken Cameras, Guy DVD Films The Gatekeepers, Les Films du Poisson, Dror Moreh Productions, Cinephil The House I Live In, Charlotte Street Films, LLC How to Survive a […]
by Nick Dawson on Dec 3, 2012 -
Five Questions with Drivers Wanted Director Joshua Z Weinstein
New York City’s taxi drivers are as ubiquitous as they are invisible. In his new documentary Drivers Wanted, Joshua Z Weinstein takes the passenger seat — often literally — and trains his camera on the men at the wheel, as well as the gristly mechanics and staff who work behind the scenes at a Queens-based taxi company. Though this may be a niche community, larger economic forces are clearly at play: many of the drivers are bankrupt, broke, or struggling to support their families. From the bustle of the garage, full of camaraderie and occasional conflict, emerge several key characters […]
by Esther Yi on Dec 3, 2012 -
Five Questions with Wagner & Me Director Patrick McGrady
Early in Wagner & Me, a new documentary about the music and legacy of Richard Wagner, English actor and writer Stephen Fry says he’d like to time travel to the 19th century. Once there, Fry continues, he would start a letter-writing campaign, urging the composer to rethink his infamously anti-Semitic essay Jewishness in Music: “I say to him, ‘Listen, you’re on the brink of becoming the greatest artist of the 19th century, and future generations will forget that, simply because of this nasty little essay that you’re writing, and because of the effect it’ll have.” Wagner, of course, did not […]
by Kevin Canfield on Nov 26, 2012 -
Producer Robin Klein on Reviving The Rolling Stones’ Charlie Is My Darling
In 1965, a rough-and-tumble band of rock ‘n’ roll upstarts called The Rolling Stones were just beginning to build their legend, when wily manager Andrew Loog Oldham engaged English documentarian Peter Whitehead to follow the band around for a couple of days during a short stint in Ireland. The result was Charlie Is My Darling, a cinéma vérité snapshot of an era when the cultural revolution was only just beginning to crack the façade of the Old World. We see the young Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Brian Jones, Bill Wyman, and Charlie Watts (who gives the film its title) brainstorming […]
by Jim Allen on Nov 23, 2012 -
Hearing Central Pitches at the IDFA Forum
So, I am in Amsterdam, attending my first IDFA, a fest I’ve been dreaming of attending since I first started working in documentary. IFP has 11 films in the fest, and four works in progress in the Forum, so I’m here for moral support, promotion of IFP, and reconnaissance. What is happening in documentary in the rest of the world? In advance of my arrival, I was most anticipating being a part of the Forum, “IDFA’s international co-financing and production market, Europe’s most important breeding ground for new documentary work.” The Forum presents works in progress to the international funding […]
by Rose Vincelli Gustine on Nov 22, 2012 -
A Rogue’s Gallery of Gorgeousness: Charles Atlas and Antony’s Turning
It’s been a banner year for Charles Atlas. In 2012, the filmmaker and video artist was included in the Whitney Biennial, opened his first New York solo show, “The Illusion of Democracy” (the inaugural show of Lurhring Augustine’s brand new Bushwick gallery, no less), had seminal, rarely-screened works revived care of keen programming at local NYC film series’ Dirty Looks and Light Industry, and is now unveiling his long-awaited collaboration with enigmatic singer/musician Antony Hegarty (of Antony and the Johnsons), which opens today at IFC Center. Turning, which had its New York premiere this past weekend at DOC NYC, is […]
by Paul Dallas on Nov 16, 2012 -
Ra’anan Alexandrowicz on The Law in These Parts
Ra’anan Alexandrowicz’s The Law in These Parts sheds new light on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from an unexpected perspective. Interviewing nine military judges, the director explores how Israel created a new legal system to control the Gaza Strip and West Bank after occupying them in 1967. At first, the state may have begun with the understandable desire to defend itself from violence, but its justifications quickly became self-serving. In one of the film’s most memorable examples, a woman was sentenced to a year and a half in jail for giving a “terrorist” bread. The film consists of stylized interviews with the […]
by Steven Erickson on Nov 15, 2012 -
Five Questions with Magic Camp Director Judd Ehrlich
Competition in the performing arts is a staple of non-fiction television and documentary at the moment, but few works step back from the American Idol-style face-off to depict the literal beginnings of their performer subjects. One film that does is Judd Ehrlich’s Magic Camp, a documentary about Tannen’s Magic Camp, a week-long event for budding young magicians where kids learn both stagecraft and sleight-of-hand from an illustrious group of visiting professionals. Ehrlich attended Magic Camp when he was young, and when he became a documentary filmmaker — his previous credits include Mayor of the West Side and Run for Your Life — he knew he had to return to […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 9, 2012 -
ro*co Goes iTunes
“I think we, as an independent filmmaking community, focus way too much on the U.S.,” says Annie Roney, the Sausalito-based founder of documentary foreign sales agent and distributor ro*co films. “There’s a whole big world out there of potential viewers for documentaries. And I think the hunger for them is growing worldwide in the same way that it is here.” Helping to quench that hunger is a new partnership between ro*co and the London-based Bertha Foundation that will enable films from the ro*co catalog to be available digitally in international markets via iTunes. “We share a common goal with The […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 1, 2012 -
Physical Therapy
Jessica Yu revisits the subject of her own Academy Award-winning short documentary Breathing Lessons by speaking with writer/director Ben Lewin, whose The Sessions brings the story of the paralyzed poet Mark O’Brien to dramatic life.
by Jessica Yu on Nov 1, 2012
