Posts tagged documentary
As members of the nonfiction filmmaking community, we want to express our outrage over the ongoing harassment of our colleague Laura Poitras by the US government and the Department of Homeland Security. We call on the Obama administration to investigate this abuse of power and to bring an end to this persistent violation of America’s bedrock principle of a free press.
Laura Poitras is one of America’s most important nonfiction filmmakers, the recipient of the 2011 Cinema Eye Honor for Outstanding Achievement in Direction for her landmark film, The Oath, and the chair of our Filmmaker Advisory Board. She was nominated for a Best Documentary Feature Oscar and twice has been nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for her work. Her long list of credits, awards and impeccable credentials would be easy for anyone to verify.
Over the course of the last several years, as Laura has been working to chronicle the post-9/11 world and the effect of American policies here and abroad, she has been repeatedly harassed, detained, interrogated and has had her cameras and computers seized by Homeland Security officials as she attempts to re-enter her home country.
Not once in more than three dozen detentions and interrogations has Homeland Security found anything to justify this chronic abuse of power.
Within the last week, as Laura was returning from a recent trip abroad, she was once again detained. This time, however, she was also threatened with being handcuffed for attempting to take notes during her interrogation.
Nonfiction filmmakers perform a vital role in a democratic society, serving as observers and investigators of the world around us. It is unacceptable for any American nonfiction filmmaker or journalist to be treated in this manner. They must be able to return to their own country without fear of arrest or fear that their work product will be seized, solely because they are investigating or chronicling subject matter that may be sensitive or controversial.
We ask other members of the nonfiction film and journalism communities to protest this affront to a free press and we reiterate our call on the Obama administration to end these draconian and un-American policies once and for all.
An open letter to the Obama administration from Cinema Eye, an organization that holds the annual Cinema Eye Honors documentary awards. To date, over 60 filmmakers have signed the letter including 10 Academy Award winners.
For background on what’s been happening to Poitras, see Glenn Greenwald’s article in Salon.
Wall Writers
A new documentary by Roger Gasman about the early history of graffiti.
Gasman was nominated for an Academy Award last year for producing Exit Through the Gift Shop, the Banksy film about Thierry Guetta and his obsession with street art.
Afrikaner Blood
Afrikaner Blood from Holland’s Elles van Gelderen and Ilvy Njiokiktjien has won the second annual World Press Photo Multimedia contest.
The documentary follows Afrikaner teenagers in South Africa as they attend a self-defense camp to learn how to defend themselves against the “black enemy.”
Via the British Journal of Photography:
Speaking to BJP ahead of the announcement, jury chair Vincent Laforet explains that the judges felt the winning work had “a squirm factor,” he says. “We were uncomfortable with the subject and what was being said. I, initially, had a negative reaction to it because I was so taken aback by, in effect, the power of the piece. But, when I saw it for the second time I realised that not only was it a very important piece, but also it was by far the single best produced piece in terms of nuance and restraint - they could absolutely have gone over the top, exaggerated things or make points a little bit more bluntly. Instead, there was a lot of subtlety. The piece was very well edited. It had a series of interviews prior to the indoctrination, and interviews after it.”
Run Time - 8:27
Syria: Songs of Defiance
Al Jazeera will begin airing a documentary on the Syria uprising that was shot entirely on an iPhone. According to the network, Al Jazeera cameras are banned in Syria and their correspondent went undercover to meet “resistance fighters, protesters, Syrian army deserters, footballers-turned-revolutionaries and cigarette smugglers who have joined the fight.”
Journalism.co.uk adds the following from an Al Jazeera press release:
I can’t tell you my name. I’ve spent many months secretly in Syria for Al Jazeera.
I cannot show my face and my voice is disguised to conceal my identity, because I don’t want to endanger my contacts in Syria.
Because carrying a camera would be risky, I took my cell phone with me as I moved around the country and captured images from the uprising that have so far remained unseen.
Songs of Defiance begins airing this Wednesday and will run through next week. Al Jazeera has posted its schedule here.
Free the Network
Via Vice:
[H]ere’s a teaser peak at our latest feature documentary, Free the Network, which looks at how DIY hack-tech is changing the discourse of modern day protests. Our story follows the trials of a pair of college dropouts who head up the Free Network Foundation, a peer-to-peer communications initiative seeking to liberate the global Internet from corporate clutches by building their own decentralized, cooperatively owned, free network, one wifi hotspot at a time.
We also need an insurgency of theater owners, distributors, marketers, and moviegoers. Yes, the film business is in flux, caught between dwindling box office and fledgling alternative distribution platforms, but maybe it’s time for the biz to start taking notes from the art. Throw away the boxes, stop pretending there are rules, take some risks. Stop worrying over what documentaries should be, and instead find ways to champion what they can be. Stop treating them like the veggies when they’ve become the main course.
Eric Hynes (via this Slate article)
Of the more than 800 feature films released theatrically in America last year, more than 300 were documentaries. (At premiere marketplace festivals like Sundance and Toronto, the ratio is similar.) Yet at the Academy Awards, where the film industry lavishly celebrates itself, all of those films compete for one measly award: best documentary. By comparison, dramatic features get 20 chances for an Oscar. While it’s technically possible (and eminently justifiable) for documentaries to receive nods for technical categories like editing, cinematography, and sound, in practice it hardly ever happens. And in 84 years, no documentary has even been nominated for best picture.
Great read on the attention documentaries don’t receive, and why.
“Most of the people you see here are dead. My images have not really helped them. Maybe they’ll help people in the future. Maybe they’ll help with fund-raising here and there. But to these particular people, they did not help.” — Misha Friedman, New York Times. Saving Lives or Photographing Them?
The New York Times Lens Blog profiles Misha Friedman, a photographer who left his adminitrative job with Doctors Without Borders in order to document tuberculosis in the former Soviet Union.
Image: A Russian woman with tuberculosis, hepatitis C and HIV at a St. Petersburg hospital, by Misha Friedman via the New York Times.
Subject: Innovation — A $200,000 Filmmaker Challenge
Vimeo, GE and Cinelan have joined forces to launch Focus Forward, a short form documentary series about technology innovations changing lives and industries from medicine to education to energy and beyond.
Via GigaOm:
The series launched in January at the Sundance Film Festival, and some of the biggest names in documentary filmmaking — including Morgan Spurlock (of Super Size Me fame) Gary Hustwit (who made Helvetica and Objectified) and Jessica Yu (who won an Oscar for Breathing Lessons), among others –are signed up to make Focus Forward films that will premiere online and at film festivals throughout the year.
But to me the most exciting thing is that the project, which is hosted on Vimeo, will also be open to submissions from the general public. People who submit videos to the contest, which is called the “Focus Forward Filmmaking Challenge,” will be up for $200,000 in cash prizes, including a $100,000 grand prize. Submissions will open during the Tribeca Film Festival this April, and the prizes will be handed out next year at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival.
So, if you’re a filmmaker fascinated by innovation head over to Focus Forward to learn more about the competition and submitting your work.
Transit: Democratic Republic of Congo
Espen Rasmussen, photography editor for Norway’s largest newspaper VG, has worked with the Nobel Peace center in Oslo on a multimedia project that documents some of the 43 million displaced people around the world.
Called Transit, the seven-year-old project “shows the daily life in a refugee camp in DR Congo, the loss of beloved family members in Georgia, the stateless refugees in Bangladesh and mothers who take care of their children in the slums of Colombia.”
Via The Atlantic. Click through for an interview with Rasmussen.
Egyptian Revolution: “The Flood”
Part one of a three part documentary created by Heba Kandil, a former Reuters journalist, and produced by TrustMedia, the media development wing of the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
The series captures the events through the eyes of one family.
Egyptian Revolution Part 2: The Clash.
Egyptian Revolution Part 3: The Fall.
Run Time: 5:22.
Arabic versions of the documentary can be found here (part 1), here (part 2) and here (part 3).
The Best Documentaries of 2011 via Roger Ebert’s Journal
Why not fold documentaries into my list of the “Best Films of 2011?” After all, a movie is a movie, right? Yes, and some years I’ve thrown them all into the same mixture. But all of these year-end Best lists serve one useful purpose: They tell you about good movies you may not have seen or heard about. The more films on my list that aren’t on yours, the better job I’ve done.
I just received a copy of ‘Page One: Inside the New York Times’ and I can’t wait to watch it! I love a good documentary on a cold or rainy day. (I even like the cheesy ones on Netflix once in a while :3 ) I’m going to watch the NYT doc soon. Let us know about your fav documentaries via Tumblr or Twitter! Happy new year!
-Chao (@cli6cli6)
Life in a Day
Last winter, Oscar-winning director Kevin Macdonald and executive producer Ridley Scott screened Life in a Day at the Sundance Film Festival. True to its name, the film followed a day in the life of people throughout the world.
To achieve this, Macdonald crowdsourced his footage via YouTube and had anyone and everyone upload clips shot during one summer day in 2010.
YouTube has now released the 90 minute feature. Our recommendation, bookmark it and give it a watch when you have the time. The film itself is great. The idea that thousands could come together to create it is amazing.
H/T: YouTube Blog.
As They Consider the iPad, Some Photographers Reconsider Their Work
The British Journal of Photography profiles four photographers about their initial efforts at creating long-form, documentary work for the iPad. Some takeaways include: innovate but understand that less is more, incorporate multimedia but have a real plan for doing so, and remember that the iPad is a different beast than a book.
“The market is changing,” Kadir van Lohuizen tells the BJP. “We’re very aware of this, and we’re learning from each other. It’s only the beginning. We know that more and more people will be consuming content on these devices. It’s just starting.”
Image: Screen from van Lohuizen’s Via PanAm documentary project in which he is traveling throughout the Americas to document human migration across the hemisphere.
Historical Photos of Hungary Brought to Life with 3D Camera Mapping
FJP: The 3D modeling was done with Blender, an Open Source 3D content creation suite.
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