Your Source for Documentary News
Your Source for Documentary News
Spotlight
“20 Feet from Stardom” director Morgan Neville shares how he got his start
Source: Peninsula Daily News Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker Morgan Neville found his life’s work at a young age. Neville, Academy Award winner for "20 Feet from Stardom," was interviewed by actress and educator Akuyoe Graham at Port Townsend High School...
Oakland, California police documentary “The Force” is second film in director’s trilogy
Source: hoodline A new documentary opening this week offers a look inside one of the most tumultuous periods for the Oakland, California police department, including a period of intense protests, a string of deadly officer-involved shootings, and an explosive...
Director Greg Barker talks about capturing Obama’s last months in office
Source: Variety Greg Barker set out to make a thematic bookend to “The War Room” with “The Final Year,” a look at Barack Obama’s foreign policy team over their last 12 months in office. Whereas "The War Room," the 1993 documentary about Bill Clinton’s White House...
Errol Morris on Alternative Facts, CIA Coverups, and His New Netflix Series “Wormwood”
Source: Variety Errol Morris, the Oscar-winning director of “The Thin Blue Line” and “The Fog of War,” is back with the most formally daring project of his career, “Wormwood.” The six-part Netflix miniseries defies easy categorization. It is equal parts documentary...
Ron Howard on why he loves making documentaries
Source: Screen Daily Ron Howard’s documentary, "The Beatles: Eight Days A Week - The Touring Years," earned five Emmy nods including one for outstanding documentary. The director tells Screen Daily how documentary film has been a new creative outlet in his career,...
Meet the Broadway producer who directed one of the best documentaries of the year
Source: Playbill Among her theatre industry friends and colleagues, Amanda Lipitz is primarily known as a producer, with a Broadway résumé that includes "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels," "Legally Blonde The Musical," "The Performers," "A View From the Bridge," and...
How the “Cocaine Cowboys” filmmakers built a career interviewing Miami’s most notorious gangsters
Source: Business Insider Born and bred in Miami, Florida, director Billy Corben and producer Alfred Spellman grew up knowing a simple fact: their city has been, and will always be, a sunny place for shady people. Whether it’s the refuge for retired mafia kingpins of...
“Primal Screen” director Rodney Ascher brings childhood fears to life
Source: Miami New Times Director Rodney Ascher has made a career of exploring fascinating concepts via documentaries. His first feature, "Room 237," was all about a variety of interpretations that obsessed fans found in Stanley Kubrick’s "The Shining." His second,...
Netflix’s “The Keepers” director Ryan White on unburying institutional injustice
Source: Deadline When "The Keepers" debuted on Netflix in May, it was instantly linked to another of the streaming services’ true-crime documentary series: "Making a Murderer." Another haunting story of institutional injustice, director Ryan White’s seven-part...
How a filmmaker uncovered the biggest doping scandal in Olympics history
Source: Business Insider Bryan Fogel became one of the biggest success stories at Sundance in 2017 when his doping scandal documentary “Icarus” sold to Netflix for a staggering $5 million (unheard of for a documentary sale). But his journey actually goes back 14...
How filmmaker Jeff Skoll is fighting climate change in the Trump era
Source: CBC In the past decade, many of "An Inconvenient Truth's" ominous predictions about the consequences of climate change have come to pass. But for Jeff Skoll, it wasn't dire warnings but rather optimism and the opportunity to empower today's audiences that...
Laura Poitras talks Julian Assange, her final version of “Risk,” and Donald Trump’s tax returns
Source: Filmmaker Magazine Just now released on Showtime, Laura Poitras’s "Risk," which found its way to theaters in May via upstart distributor Neon, is in a vastly different form than when it premiered last year in Cannes. The documentary traces a thread running...
Everardo González talks about his new documentary on the Mexican Drug War, “Devil’s Freedom”
Source: ScreenAnarchy Everardo González's latest documentary, "Devil’s Freedom" (La Libertad del Diablo), tackles the consequences of the Mexican Drug War from the personal perspective of several individuals. There are testimonies of victims who lost their familiars...
From Civil War to Civil Protest: A director looks back on three decades of filming Guatemala
Source: The Washington Post Over the past 35 years, Pamela Yates, an American filmmaker, has been visiting Guatemala, documenting the often painful sweep of its history, with particular attention to the indigenous Mayan communities. Read the story at The Washington...
Matthew Heineman on “City of Ghosts” and his affinity for picking (seemingly) futile battles
Source: The Washington Post Matthew Heineman has, at an age when most filmmakers are just getting started, already made a deep dent in the documentary world. After breaking out in 2012 with “Escape Fire: The Fight to Rescue American Healthcare” — a film he co-directed...
The filmmaker behind “App: The Human Story” talks about the struggles developers face
Source: The Verge Ever since smartphones became the default computers that we carry in our pockets, the apps that run on them and the stores that sell these apps have created a new kind of economy for software. Apple’s App Store has swelled to more than 2.5 million...
An Interview with Charlie Phillips, Head of Documentaries at The Guardian
Read the interview at Storyhunter.
A late legend of documentary film spends his swan song with Americans “In Transit”
Source: A.V. Club. For those who believe that death represents a journey from one plane of existence to another, it will seem apropos that the final feature directed by the late and legendary documentary filmmaker Albert Maysles, made when he was nearly 90 years old,...
“Night School” Director Andrew Cohn: “Why I (Only) Make Films in the Midwest”
Read the story at Filmmaker Magazine.
A leader of the Lithuanian school of poetic documentary, Audrius Stonys’ latest is a meditation on time and nature
Source: The Calvert Journal. Lithuanian veteran Audrius Stonys’s award-winning new film, “The Woman and the Glacier,” is a stunning meditation on time and nature. The Calvert Journal spoke to the director about his vision and the Baltic school of “poetic documentary”...