I must apologize – without warning I took leave weekend to venture off to Rochester, NY to attend the Toronto Film Society’s yearly raid of the Eastman House to watch two days worth of rarely screened prints of films such as Karl Brown’s STARK LOVE, William A. Wellman’s TRACK OF THE CAT and Mikio Naruse’s KIMIKO. But with a lineup like that, who could blame me?
In my absence, startling news broke that Michael Moore had somehow managed to complete a film completely in secret and that our own Thom Powers and the TIFF programming team would have the pleasure of world premiering it as part of their headlining Special Presentations in Toronto come September. Moore’s film, titled WHERE TO INVADE NEXT, has sparked much excitement in the doc community, instantly shooting to the top of my latest most anticipated unreleased docs list published over at IONCINEMA. Anne Thompson, ruminating over at indieWIRE, wrote a piece detailing just how TIFF came to nab Moore’s latest hot commodity. In addition to WHERE TO INVADE NEXT, TIFF also released their lineup of Canadian features at this year’s fest, including a quintet of docs – Brian D. Johnson’s AL PURDY WAS HERE, Patrick Reed and Michelle Shephard’s GUANTANAMO’S CHILD: OMAR KHADR, Mina Shum’s NINTH FLOOR, Avi Lewis’ THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING and Geneviève Dulude-De Celles’ WELCOME TO F.L.
Prior to TIFF releasing their first wave of films, the Venice International Film Festival also released their staggering lineup of features which includes such notable films as Fredrick Wiseman’s IN JACKSON HEIGHTS, Amy Berg’s JANIS, as well as Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow’s DE PALMA. And while announcements are being made elsewhere, the Locarno International Film Festival is currently in full swing. David Hudson is keeping close tabs on all the coverage coming out of Locarno over at Keyframe, while Basil Tsiokos wrote up preview of the festival’s non-fiction offerings at What (not) To Doc.
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CAIRO DRIVE from director Sherief Elkatsha took home a prize at this year's DOC NYC festival.
This week DOC NYC finished out it’s fifth year. Writing for Indiewire, Ben Travers reported that CAIRO DRIVE, HOMME LESS and MIRROR IMAGE took home DOC NYC’s jury awards this year, while THE HAND THAT FEEDS won the festival’s audience award. Manori Ravindran of Realscreen also had coverage of the awards. Also at Indiewire, Anthony Kaufman took note of DOC NYC’s emergence as a major documentary showcase. At the POV blog, Tom Roston covered Sundance Institute doc head Tabitha Jackson’s DOC NYC keynote address calling for increased focus on artistic practice in documentary, while Scott Macaulay covered the speech for Filmmaker Magazine. Paula Bernstein interviewed Jackson following her address. Writing for Nonfics.com, Daniel Walber shared six discoveries from the festival. VOD platform VHX shared a slideshow presented at the festival. Finally, Indiewire compiled all of their coverage on one DOC NYC news page, containing a host of links to recaps of panels and other events (definitely worth a browse.)
At Realscreen, Kevin Ritchie reported on this year’s winners of the BRITDOC Impact Awards. The POV blog also recapped the winners. In a piece for Indiewire, director Joshua Oppenheimer shared his thoughts on the role of the documentary filmmaker and the idea of impact.
At the What (Not) to Doc blog, Basil Tsiokos provided an overview of the International Documentary FIlm Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) in two parts: part one and part two. Writing for Realscreen, Manori Ravindran covered an IDFA panel on the issues faced by female directors and other women in the doc world. Ravindran also spoke with festival head Ally Derks about the event. At the POV blog, Kel O’Neill spoke with IDFA DocLab head Casper Sonnen. Also, The D-Word documentary forum has a dedicated thread to the festival (registration and professional status required). And Inoo Kang spoke with Eline Jongsma about her immersive documentary project EMPIRE.
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