Dick Cheney becomes the 44th President of the United States when George W. Bush, after addressing the Economic Club of Chicago, is assassinated outside a Chicago hotel, after a speech marked by l0, 000 demonstrators violently protesting nuclear brinksmanship policies in Iraq, North Korea and Iran. The date is Oct.19, 2007.This is the setting for the 93-minute fictionalized, controversial feature,”Death of a President”. The picture won the prestigious international critics (FIPRESCI) prize ...
5th Rewind/Fast Forward Film & Video Fest JULY 28-30, 2006 The moving image, in cinema and broadcast forms, has transformed daily life since the first newsreels transported American families from their living rooms to the battlefields of Europe and then propelled them out of those living rooms to local movie theaters in droves. The Louis Wolfson II Florida Moving Image Archive is a treasure trove of historical and documentary footage for filmmakers. A very unique festival, now in its fifth year...
Jurors for the world’s biggest festival of natural history film and television have warned the industry not to sacrifice content for style simply because new technology is providing increased scope for innovation. Presenting the report from the Nominations Panel for WILDSCREEN 2006, jury chair and festival trustee Carol Haslam, said many of this year’s record 412 entries from 46 countries for the biennial Panda Awards showed the exciting possibilities changing technology offers. “At the hi...
Thursday, June 15----A documentary film festival always has some common threads to it. Many involve hot-button political issues about social inequity, conflict and the abuse of government. SILVERDOCS certainly has its share of those. However, a more personal genre, that can best be described as films that celebrate the triumph of the human spirit, is also in evidence here, in a number of superb films.
BLACK SUN by UK director Gary Tan, had its premiere at the 2005 Toronto Film Festival and was ...
SILVERDOCS: The AFI/Discovery Channel Documentary Festival, which begins next week, has announced the 10 films that will be competing for the Sterling Award Feature Film prize at its event. The Festival, which has become one of the leading showcases of non-fiction film in the world, mixes film screenings with information panels and special events to offer a comprehensive look at the current state of the art of documentary film, and where the art form may go in the future. As one can imagine in t...
SILVERDOCS: The AFI/Discovery Channel Documentary Festival, which begins next week, has announced the 10 films that will be competing for the Sterling Award Feature Film prize at its event.
The Festival, which has become one of the leading showcases of non-fiction film in the world, mixes film screenings with information panels and special events to offer a comprehensive look at the current state of the art of documentary film, and where the art form may go in the future.
As one can imagine ...
Wednesday, June 7---Inspired by the seminal 7 UP films of British director Michael Apted, which followed the same group of youngsters at ages 7, 14 and 21, the SILVERDOCS AFI/Discovery Channel Documentary Festival will present the premiere of 21 UP AMERICA, directed by Christopher Quinn.
The film is the third installment in a series that has recorded the same subjects at ages 7 and 14, and now turns its focus on what it is like to be 21 in America today. The film provides a provocative case s...
The power and impact of British feature documentaries is celebrated at a new festival, BRITDOC 06, an annual showcase and meeting of the best documentary talent from Britain and around the world.BRITDOC 06, in association with Nokia, will be the essential calendar fixture of every key player in British feature-documentary production, bringing the leading international film producers, distributors, and financiers together in the UK for the first time to meet British talent face-to-face.Documentar...
2006 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival Announces Awards2007 Festival Tenth Anniversary Dates Set for April 12-15, 2007Ninth annual Full Frame Documentary Film Festival came to a close Sunday April 9th with record-breaking attendance. The final ticket number for the 2006 festival was 20,121, with an estimated 2540 additional viewers coming for the films showing post-barbecue bringing the total number of tickets to 22,661 for 2006. Last year, as of Sunday's Southern Style Barbecue and Awards Ce...
Details have been announced today on BRITDOC 2006 – a new feature-documentary festival taking place in the UK this summer (26th – 28th July) in recognition of the social, political and cultural importance of documentary films in the UK. The festival was founded by Beadie Finzi, the festival director, and Jess Search, chief executive of the festival and founder of the Channel 4 British Documentary Film Foundation (which launched last year and is behind the festival). It aims to change the lan...
Sheffield International Documentary Festival is delighted to announce the appointment of its new Director. Heather Croall, formerly Director of the Australian International Documentary Conference, will start in post early April. Heather’s career in the Australian screen industry has included working as a company director, independent documentary producer, festival director and consultant. Heather has also worked for government film funding agency the South Australian Film Corporation, has ga...
New Docs: Films in Competition travels around the globe for stories about family, war, and love with stops along the way for tortoises, call centers, art fraud, a war refugee Afro-Pop band, and asparagus as a metaphor for globalization!Full Frame Documentary Film Festival founder, CEO, and Artistic Director Nancy Buirski released the slate of seventy-four new documentaries chosen for the New Docs: Films in Competition, newly sponsored this year by A&E IndieFilms. "The films this year explore bo...
What a superb stage for a film festival. In spectacular Florence, perhaps the world's most renowned city of art, the art of documentaries has been on show.Attending this week's Festival dei Popoli, the oldest documentary film festival in Europe, I have been stunned by both the tragedy and joy of human existence and constantly reminded of the ironic title of Roberto Benigni's Italian drama 'Life is Beautiful'. For looking through the window of the world presented by most documentary film festival...
IDFA International Documentary Festival Amsterdam 200524 November, 4 DecemberLast week, it was announced that a number of documentaries at this year's IDFA will deal with the subject of worldwide terrorism. This year's big festival theme is the environment, however. Under the title Green Screen, IDFA is presenting seventeen recent documentaries exploring aspects of the environment. Each offers insight into the tension between man and his environment. Alongside the films, on Tuesday, 29 November,...
International Documentary Festival Amsterdam 200524 November, 4 decemberSisters in Law (England, 2005) by Kim Longinotto and Florence Ayisi will be the opening film at the 18th International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), to be held from 24 November through 4 December. In addition, IDFA will be presenting a retrospective programme of documentaries by French filmmaker and photographer Raymond Depardon, part of a large-scale overview of his work being organised by the Filmmuseum Amsterdam ...
International Documentary Festival Amsterdam 200524 November, 4 decemberSisters in Law (England, 2005) by Kim Longinotto and Florence Ayisi will be the opening film at the 18th International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), to be held from 24 November through 4 December. In addition, IDFA will be presenting a retrospective programme of documentaries by French filmmaker and photographer Raymond Depardon, part of a large-scale overview of his work being organised by the Filmmuseum Amsterdam ...
The 28th Starz Denver International Film Festival has announced the winner of the Maysles Brothers Award for Best Documentary. The Maysles Brothers Award for Best Documentary is presented to a filmmaker who best represents the truth and purity of documentary filmmaking as established by the Maysles Brothers. Albert Maysles has presented this award at Closing Night festivities. The jury wishes to recognize the haunting, melancholy beauty of Peter Forgacs' EL PERRO NEGRO: STORIES FROM THE SPANISH ...
The 27th IFP market, the largest convocation of aspiring and actual independent film makers in North America closed September 22 expanding to more participants and more industry speed networking. It reduced the number of works screened from 400 in past markets to 199 from the more than 1400 submitted in 2005. Thus IFP is shifting from a market and or festival to an efficient networking event that arranged this year an estimated 1,500 buyer-driven meetings with film makers. A new component, Th...
The prizes of the 48th International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Film were awarded on Saturday evening in Leipzig. The main prizes of the festival went to "Before Flying Back to the Earth" by Arunas Matelis, Lithuania (Golden Dove for the best long documentary); "For a Miracle" by Jarek Sztandera, Poland (Golden Dove for the best short documentary); "Mississippi" by Arash T. Riahi, Austria (Golden Dove for the best animated film); "The North Star" by Erkko Lyytinen, Finland (Ta...
Beside feature-length films in the main competitive section, Ecofilms, the annual film festival (June 21-26, 2005) dedicated to ecology in Rhodes, also screens a series of shorts related to the environment. Among them, it presented this year two short documentaries by Dutch director Jos Neutgens : Reminiscentia (2004, 10 minutes) in the short films competition section and Allocation (1999, 14 minutes) in the non competitive Panorama section.Both are creative documentaries expressing a fascinatio...
A workshop with musician and composer Robert Marcel LepageThe art of documentary relies on artists and craftspeople from many fields, not least on the musician whose job it is to compose a soundtrack for the images a director has assembled. How a composer goes about creating this music is the topic at the next Docu-Monday, with special guest Robert Marcel Lepage, composer of more than 100 original film scores. The evening will be organized as a workshop featuring illustrations from a selection o...
Martin Scorsese To Attend 2005 Full Frame Documentary Film FestivalAcclaimed director Martin Scorsese plans to attend this year's Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham, North Carolina, April 7-10, 2005.At Full Frame, Scorsese will lead a tribute to Italian documentary filmmaker Vittorio De Seta. The Sicilian master made nine short documentaries in the 1950s documenting Sicilian and Sardinian life in his distinctively poetic style. Full Frame will screen all nine short documentaries by D...
Screening and discussion with documentarians: Ève Lamont, Patricio Henriquez, Carole Poliquin, and members of the LuciolesThe resurgence of alternative movements and citizen participation is fueling a renewed interest in documentary film. To try to understand this phenomenon and the various politics behind it, Docu-Mondays presents an evening of screenings and discussion titled “Activist Film: Whose Truth?” Experienced documentarians Ève Lamont, Patricio Henriquez and Carole Poliquin will ...
FILM SERIES ON ARTISTS COINCIDES WITH NEW YORK PROJECTThe husband-and-wife team of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, whose distinctive art pieces include the wrapping in fabric of such architectural icons as the Reichstag in Berlin and the Pont Neuf in Paris, are coming to New York in February with their latest fantasy art project. The couple will transform New York’s Central Park into a fairyland of saffron-colored covered objects and archway gates. It is among the most audacious and controversial p...
The 4th Annual Taiwan International Documentary Festival presents 120 films from December 11th -17th. Organized by the Chinese Taipei Film Archive and sponsored by Council for Cultural Affairs, the festival explores social issues and the documentary form through a dialogue between Taiwanese and international filmmakers and local audiences.The festival focuses on independent and experimental documentaries that push formal and thematic boundaries. It includes three juried sections, the Internati...