documentary
Preview: POV’s 25th Season
Launched in 1988 to showcase new and challenging point-of-view documentaries on PBS, POV (Point of View) has grown to become American television’s longest-running series dedicated to contemporary nonfiction programming.
Watch POV Season 25 Preview on PBS. See more from POV.
POV launches its 25th season on Thursday, June 21, 2012 at 10 PM (check local listings) with award-winning filmmaker Jennifer Fox’s My Reincarnation, the story of a father’s spiritual persistence and a son’s spiritual awakening. The regular season runs through Thursday, Oct. 18 and continues with two special presentations in the fall and winter.
Click here to see the full broadcast schedule.
The ITVS Indies Roundup
A curated list of indie news and recommendations from ITVS’s Rebecca Huval.
Are you obsessed with GIFs yet? If you’re not, now’s the time to start. PBS Off Book produced an excellent primer into the art of the moving still image, known as the Graphic Interchange Format, from its uncool, corporate beginnings in the 1990s to its current heyday.
Here’s a chuckle-worthy photo of Bill Murray looking twee against a wall of paparazzi at the Cannes Film Festival 2012. The festival featured the premiere of Wes Anderson’s latest whimsical confection, Moonrise Kingdom, in which Murray stars.
Also at Cannes, Saudi Arabia experienced a lot of firsts. The country’s first female director, Haiffa al Mansour, brought Wadjda, the first film ever shot in Saudi Arabia, to the festival. The coming-of-age drama follows an 11-year-old girl in the outskirts of Riyadh. › Continue reading
A Look at the World Through Israeli Documentaries
By Claire Aguilar
Vice President of Programming, ITVS
Since its inception in 1999, DocAviv has become one of the leading cultural events in Israel with the aim of promoting Israeli and international documentary film. ITVS’s Claire Aguilar attended the 2012 DocAviv International Film Festival May 3-12, as a juror for Israeli Competition.
Over the last 10 years, Israel has become one of the leading sources of independently-produced documentary films. There is a dizzying abundance of documentary films and filmmakers in Israel — and not only are there many, they have also been successful: showcased in international festivals, sold to broadcasters in Israel and in the U.S. and Europe, winning prizes and garnering international press. It has been amazing to witness the growth of strong, innovative, and diverse Israeli films — covering subjects that you would expect to see from Israeli filmmakers, such as the Arab-Israeli conflict — but also covering the personal and global experience, films about family, identity, and culture, with other films covering globalization, immigration, and homophobia.
I heard from one filmmaker that there are at least 20 film schools in Israel, and that is mostly counting only Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. The community of documentary filmmakers is intimate, diverse, and full of talent — and here at ITVS, we have been fortunate to work with many Israeli filmmakers over the past eight years and have showcased them on U.S. public television: Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir, Dalit Kimor’s Pickles, Inc., Yoav Shamir’s Flipping Out, Ran Tal’s The Children of the Sun, Nati Baratz’s Unmistaken Child, Ruthie Shatz, and Adi Baratz’s The Collaborator and His Family, and many others. › Continue reading
The ITVS Indies Roundup
A curated list of indie news and recommendations from ITVS’s Rebecca Huval.
Get your creativity on! Longshot Radio and Radiolab talked about creativity, revision, and failure at the 99% Conference in New York City last week. For your listening pleasure, they compiled their editors’ picks of podcasts from the event.
Behold the TV of the future: using an iPad as a remote, you can control the features that appear on your screen and the overall size, which can stretch the length of your living room wall. Wired claims this is just “what the TV industry needs to stay relevant.”
“I want a man like Putin, who doesn’t drink. I want a man like Putin, who won’t make me sad.” These are the actual lyrics to a Russian pop song. This gem is explained in the new PBS show SOUND TRACKS that will broadcast in Fall 2012. Until then, you can watch their series on the web to learn the political and cultural stories behind music around the world.
› Continue reading
The ITVS Indies Roundup
A curated list of indie news and recommendations from ITVS’s Rebecca Huval.
Sadly, film festivals are wrapping up this week. Hot Docs in Toronto, the largest North American documentary festival, closes this weekend. The event brimmed with films about edgy artists, such as Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry.
At Hot Docs today, filmmakers are protesting the Canadian government’s cuts to CBC, NBF, and Telefilm Canada. The industry has lost 1,500 full-time documentary jobs in the past two years, according to the Documentary Organization of Canada. (via Realscreen)
To succeed as a documentary filmmaker in such dire economic times, read advice from first-time filmmakers who are screening their work at Hot Docs. › Continue reading
The ITVS Indies Roundup
A curated list of indie news and recommendations from ITVS’s Rebecca Huval.
Good news continues to pour in from the passage of the JOBS Act. For example, indie filmmakers could raise up to one million dollars. Cue the Dr. Evil face.
Can the art-form of cinéma vérité and Werner Herzog benefit from the input of technologists? MIT Open Documentary Lab thinks so. “There’s this perception that documentary is this staid medium,” Sarah Wolozin, director of the new Open Documentary Lab, told Nieman Journalism Lab. “It’s not. It is this place of innovation. And I think a lot of documentary filmmakers have lost their connection to that history.”
› Continue reading
A Filmmaker’s Embrace of Nonlinear Storytelling
By Musa Syeed
Filmmaker, 30 Mosques
Musa Syeed is one of the hottest up and coming filmmaking talents in the U.S. His work includes documentaries such as A Son’s Sacrifice, Bronx Princess, and a narrative feature, Valley of Saints — which is currently on the festival circuit. He has also been experimenting with new, interactive forms of storytelling, and we asked him to write about his experiences for BTB.
For most of my life, I’ve been something of a technophobe. Maybe it was that I watched The Terminator at too young an age or perhaps it was my father’s insistence on the superiority of the microwave, but either way, an epic struggle with artificial intelligence and subsequent robot armageddon has long seemed to me not only possible but imminent.
And I felt that as a filmmaker, I had reason to fear technological advancements in the field. New media/interactive/transmedia was making a medium I revered as a child seemingly obsolete, banishing motion pictures from the majestic big screen to pathetic, paltry iPhones.
› Continue reading
POV’s 2012 Documentary Lineup Revealed
POV has just announced the slate of documentaries for its 25th season on PBS, starting in June.
Since POV went on the air in 1988, it has championed the documentary art form, offering filmmakers a venue to take creative risks. It’s where you’ve seen work from documentary greats including Errol Morris, Jonathan Demme, Albert and David Maysles, Michael Moore, Freida Lee Mock, and Frederick Wiseman.
This year’s films reveal humanity’s faith, courage, and resilience. Remarkable individuals challenge authority and their own limitations to indict a dictator, keep investigative journalism alive, rebuild after Katrina, and find strength in love.
Explore the films and the 2012 broadcast schedule here.
New Partnership Reimagines Documentary Storytelling on the Web
By: Jonathan Archer
ITVS has partnered with Mozilla, the Tribeca Film Institute, BAVC, and the Center for Social Media to create the Living Docs Project — a new film community inspired by our original collaboration with Mozilla last October.
Launching Monday, the Living Docs Project brings together documentary filmmakers, developers, funders, and the audience to make the case for a new kind of storytelling on the web.
The web has given documentary filmmakers a powerful mechanism to distribute their films, but we have only scratched the surface of how it can change storytelling. The Living Docs Project sees the web as a canvas on which new types of documentaries can be told.
› Continue reading
ITVS in the News
A sampling of coverage from The New York Times, Realscreen.com, and more…
The New York Times: Dot Earth Blog: If a Tree Falls, Can it when an Oscar?
…an extraordinary documentary by the brilliant young filmmakers Marshall Curry and Sam Cullman that explores the prosecution of members of the Earth Liberation Front for a series of costly arson fires.
The New York Times: Year-End Lists: Top Ten Movies of 2011
David Weissman’s documentary We Were Here was among the top films (fiction & documentary) selected by Stephen Holden.
Womens eNews: Daughters of Imprisoned Moms Regroup for a Sequel
Troop 1500, rebroadcasting tonight on PBS’s Independent Lens, is about Girl Scouts who trek together to visit mothers behind bars. Director Ellen Spiro talks here about the reunion sequel she is making with the daughters, five years later.
Realscreen.com: PBS unveils 2012 Black History Month line-up
U.S. public broadcaster PBS has unveiled the programming for Black History Month in February, including a number of specials and feature docs looking at a variety of historical events from the post-Emancipation era to the rise of the Black Power movement.
Visit our pressroom to find additional coverage of ITVS programs >>
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