It doesn’t seem possible, but this week’s memo is my 150th, so much thanks to Raphaela and Thom for giving me a venue to share each week’s best in documentary news. It a source of info I deeply appreciated before it was passed on to me by Rahul Chadha, and I continue to cherish now that I’m the one sifting through the news each week. I hope you find these weekly roundups as helpful and enlightening as I. And with that, on to the news!
Last Tuesday, the Czech Republic’s Karlovy Vary Film Festival announced its documentary competition lineup for its 53rd edition, which runs June 29-July 7. Of the twelve films in competition, eight are world premieres, notably Vitaly Mansky’s PUTIN’S WITNESSES, Audrius Stonys and Kristīne Briede’s BRIDGES OF TIME. Meanwhile, Basil Tsiokos geared up for San Fransisco’s SF DocFest (May 31-June 14) and Cape Town and Johannesburg’s Encounters Documentary Festival (May 31-June 10) by delving into the new nonfiction offerings making their debut at each festival over at What (not) To Doc.
Tomorrow, our 2018 Spring Season concludes with one of my favorite films of the last year in Jason Kohn’s hilarious and heartbreaking portrait of famed tennis coach Nick Bollettieri in LOVE MEANS ZERO with a live Q&A with the director himself. Tickets for our closing night event can still be had here.
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Adding to the shower of award season shows, the Broadcast Film Critics Association and Broadcast Television Journalists Association, the organizations behind the Critics’ Choice Awards, are launching “the Critics’ Choice Documentary Awards, which will honor both documentary features and non-fiction television,” reports Scott Feinberg of The Hollywood Reporter. The inaugural show is currently slated to take place on November 3rd at BRIC in Brooklyn says Dave McNary of Variety, while the already established Critics’ Choice Awards will take in January, sans documentary and non-fiction categories.
While awards season feels a ways off yet, the fall festival circuit is creeping closer and closer with new lineup announces from both the Irish Film Institute Documentary Festival and the Toronto International Film Festival, whose Canadian lineup revealed new work from Hugh Gibson, Fred Peabody and Brigitte Berman, among others. POV Magazine’s Pat Mullen, IndieWire’s Kate Erbland and Realscreen’s Daniele Alcinii each covered TIFF’s announcement, while Alcinii followed up with several doc filmmakers to get a bit of early insight into their projects. Over at IDA’s page, Matt Turner wrote at length on the hybrid doc highlights of this year’s Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, while at What (not) To Doc, Basil Tsiokos previewed the non-fiction offerings to be presented at Kosovo’s 15th annual Dokufest and the 69th annual Locarno Film Festival.
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In the same week that Rebecca Sun reported the disheartening news that Slated’s new “analysis of nearly 1,600 features reveals a ‘trust gap’ when it comes to movies made by women”, The Academy of Motion Pictures released its complete Class of 2016, inviting a record “683 new members: 46 Percent Female and 41 Percent People of Color” according to Gregg Kilday of The Hollywood Reporter. Meanwhile, POV and The New York Times disclosed that they would be collaborating on a new interactive documentary project about race and are currently “seeking pitches from potential mediamakers, with applications due by Monday, July 25,” reports IndieWire’s Michael Nordine.
Though, The Hollywood Reporter’s Gregg Kilday, the Palm Springs International ShortFest‘s jury named Maxim Pozdorovkin’s CLINICA DE MIGRANTES: LIFE, LIBERTY AND THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS the best documentary of the festival, while the audience declared Annie O’Neil and Jessica Lewis’ PHIL’S CAMINO to be their favorite, festival circuit happenings were a bit low-key this past week. Always looking ahead, Basil Tsiokos surveyed the doc offerings at the upcoming Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in the Czech Republic, noting Manuel Abramovich’s SOLAR, Leire Apellaniz’s THE LAST SUMMER and Alice Diop’s ON CALL among others. Looking back a couple weeks, Christopher Llewellyn Reed reviewed a quartet of films from this year’s edition of AFI Docs for Hammer To Nail, including Werner Herzog’s LO AND BEHOLD, REVERIES OF THE CONNECTED WORLD, Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk’s AUDRIE & DAISY, Nicole Lucas Haimes’ CHICKEN PEOPLE, and Alex Gibney’s ZERO DAYS. Gibney and his production company was also the topic of much discussion by Boris Kachka over at Vulture. The piece convincingly argues that the filmmaker’s studio-like Jigsaw Productions is steadily shifting how investigative documentaries are made and marketed. Continue reading…
