HEADLINES
 

Reality Check
Reeves Wiedeman writes at Vulture: “All this has left the documentary world suffering an identity crisis. What even is a documentary anymore? There is more money than ever, but it has come with expectations that didn’t exist when the industry was closer in ethics and taste to public broadcasting than to Hollywood. The people agreeing to tell their stories are now asking for control, or cash, leaving documentarians navigating a sense of responsibility (or fealty) toward their subjects; the demands of the algorithm; and their desire to make great work. For the audience, it has become almost impossible to sort works of art or journalism from glorified reality TV or public-relations exercises: An HBO Max subscriber can scroll through the documentaries tab and find two movies about Lizzo that she herself executive-produced, 41 films and series described as true crime, an Oscar-nominated movie about Russian dissident Alexei Navalny, and Wahl Street, 'a glimpse into global star Mark Wahlberg’s life as he juggles the demands of his personal and professional worlds and hustles to grow his expanding business empire.' Hollywood is now showing signs of retrenching. With budgets shrinking, filmmakers worry the problems of the doc boom could be exacerbated by a doc bust, and that the old-fashioned idea that documentaries could be trusted to tell honest, complicated stories may go down with it.”

ON THE FESTIVAL CIRCUIT
 

Sundance 2023: Corporate Docs Nab Spotlight, But Bold Indie Nonfiction Shines
Anthony Kaufman writes in Documentary Magazine: "Nowhere is the commercialization of the nonfiction field seemingly more apparent than at the Sundance Film Festival. With entertaining documentaries this year on Michael J. Fox, Little Richard, the Indigo Girls, Brooke Shields, Stephen Curry, and Judy Blume, this year’s festival could easily be framed as the further mainstreaming of the documentary form, packaged into recognizable names and formulas by the likes of Apple, Amazon, Netflix, CNN, Showtime, and Hulu. And yet, there were also some countervailing trends. Despite a perceived ‘rocky’ market for independent docs looking for buyers (as Variety proclaimed), a report by Distribution Advocates (which declared more than 80% of docs don’t sell out of major festivals), and an overall slowdown in doc sales, Sundance 2023 revealed a number of surprises, including acquisition deals for some arguably ‘uncommercial’ documentaries, and buzz around a number of projects that embraced out-of-the-box creative nonfiction storytelling that defied streaming norms. If Sundance is the bellwether of the business of U.S. documentary film, it offered a glimmer of hope to filmmakers working largely outside of the corporate and for-profit systems that have increasingly dominated the nonfiction world.”

DOC NYC 2022: Fringe No More
Will DiGravio writes in Senses of Cinema: “Since 2010, DOC NYC, the largest documentary festival in the United States, has put forth programs that showcase a wide range of works that rally under the banner of non-fiction. This year’s edition took place across three theatres in New York City, including the SVA Theatre and Cinépolis, both in Chelsea, and at its principal venue, the IFC Center in Greenwich Village. The festival also offered a robust online program. Two works that turn to the archive for their materials prove once again that longer and more costly is not always better. Among the highlights of the festival was Sue Ding’s Makeover Movie (2022), a 19-minute film that made its world premiere at DOC NYC. Makeover Movie unpacks 100 years of the makeover trope found in films dating back to the 1920s. The remixing of movie clips recalls the burgeoning practice of videographic criticism, or 'video essays,' works that think critically about media through media. In a reflexive gesture, Ding’s friends react to her assemblage, expressing shock and disgust with the films they grew up watching, and how they internalized the misogyny. Here, form literally comes to dictate content, as the voices of Ding’s friends offer a compelling commentary accompanying the images of women having their eyebrows plucked, glasses forcibly removed from their faces, and complexions altered. By featuring women who watch, react, and reflect on these sequences as they appear, Makeover Movie finds a personal story in its examination of a pervasive phenomenon.”

Rotterdam Looks to the Future of Film Festivals After the Pandemic
Davide Abbatescianni reports at Cineuropa: “On 28 January, IFFR’s Pro Hub hosted a panel titled ‘IFFR Pro Dialogue: Film Festival Redux – What Film Festivals Can Do for Filmmakers’. The talk, moderated by producer and industry consultant Hayet Benkara, saw the participation of filmmaker Laura Citarella (Trenque Lauquen), San Sebastián International Film Festival deputy director Maialen Beloki, Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival head programmer Ellen Kim, Chicago International Film Festival artistic director Mimi Plauché, ICA/Frames of Representation representative Nico Marzano and Anna Datsiuk, programmer at the Kyiv Critics’ Week. First, the floor was given to Plauché, who spoke about her festival – now in its 59th edition – defining its scope as ‘international with a focus on first- and second-time directors’. While in terms of curation, ‘things remained the same’ during COVID-19, she said: ‘The biggest change was our approach to how we’re exhibiting.’ In terms of venues, the team moved from a ‘centralised’ approach to a more widespread one, involving more of the city’s neighbourhoods and working on easing accessibility both on site and online. In terms of volume, the number of films screened decreased, but luckily enough, audience attendance is now back to pre-pandemic levels. ‘We were more than pleasantly surprised,’ she admitted.”

Festival Report: FIPADOC SMART 2023
Steve Rickinson reports at Modern Times Review: “As the 2023 FIPADOC drew to a close, the first international documentary event of the year saw a handful of awards given out to its film selections across Industry Days and Competitions. But, aside from the traditional documentary formats, FIPADOC is also a festival that embraces new forms of storytelling. Its SMART section highlights new media works in various forms, including AR, VR, web series, and more, all within an informative foundation. Unlike some of the other new media selections across the festival circuit, the focus of FIPADOC SMART was wholly on accessibility. This accessibility included that of subject matter and presentation. So, across its selections, end users could easily navigate the technology of the respective project and understand the presented narratives without any advanced theory, academia, or abstraction. The selections featured at FIPADOC Industry Days HQ Bellevue Centre incorporated a myriad of immersive, innovative stories, web series, and 360 film experiences, pushing the envelope beyond the traditional watching experience. And, as I wrote in my highlight of the 2022 IDFA DocLab, the technology is rapidly coming to speed with the project’s narrative presentation. No more is the feeling that the narrative is constructed to serve the tech—instead, the opposite.”

Restarting Indian Doc Film Festival Bhubaneswar (IDFFB) 2022 With a Bang
Dr. Sneha Krishnan reports for Senses of Cinema: “Worldwide, film festivals are slowly emerging in their physical avatars after the pandemic-induced break since 2020. Screening of independent documentary films in small cities had taken a backseat. In Odisha, one of the eastern states in India, Film Society Bhubaneswar (FSB) organized the 3rd Indian Documentary Film Festival of Bhubaneswar (IDFFB) from 14th–16th October 2022. FSB was launched in 2004, formed by filmmakers, artists, cinephiles and academics. The film society is managed by volunteers and has organised an independent documentary festival since 2018. It is the sole surviving film society in the province of Odisha (where the population is 46 million) and the city of Bhubaneswar (with a population of one million), where the festival takes place, is not known for its independent documentary scene. The organised distribution of documentaries is non-existent in India and even more so in Odisha. 'The festival plugs the gap of access to contemporary independent documentary films.' This is achieved by making independent films available to a physical audience and the viewing experience is further enhanced by post-screening conversations with the directors. Previously, the festival was supported by donations from friends and families, annual individual contributions of members (25 USD per person). The effect of the pandemic on membership was immense, and reduced it to just 40 members. Thus, the organising of the festival itself is a larger story that needs to be told. Emerging from the pandemic, working with universities and educational institutions this year’s festival attracted around 3,000 people over three days. All of the films screened at the festival were screened physically for the first time in the province, with a live audience. The film screenings intended to provoke conversation – each work conversing with another preceding or succeeding work.”

CPH:DOX 2023 Unveils Opening Film
Announced via press release: “The Greenlandic-Danish film Twice Colonized by Lin Alluna has been selected as the opening film at this year’s CPH:DOX. It will furthermore compete in the festival competition; NEXT:WAVE. The opening of CPH:DOX 2023 will take place on 15 March at the international concert venue in Copenhagen, DR Koncerthuset. How can we rewrite the history of colonialism and improve living conditions for Indigenous people? These questions are raised by Danish filmmaker Lin Alluna and renowned Inuit  lawyer Aaju Peter in Twice Colonized that has now been selected as the opening feature at CPH:DOX 2023.”

25th Thessaloniki Doc Film Festival: Tributes to Two Unique Directors
Announced via press release: “Two unique directors who change our glance at the world will cross paths at this year’s 25th Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival, through two exciting tributes. One is from Greece, the other one comes from Austria, but they both share the common vision of exploring the truth, the boundaries and the unseen aspects of our world. The TiDF’s tribute to beloved documentarist Stavros Psillakis unveils stories of everyday people often caught in borderline situations, while the movies directed by radical filmmaker Nikolaus Geyrhalter outline the calamitous desire of humanity to place our planet under control. The Festival will bestow to both directors an honorary Golden Alexander.”

Echoes of Ji.hlava IDFF Feb 5 kick-off in Belgium 
Nick Cunningham reports at Business Doc Europe: “The traditional presentation of the Ji.hlava festival selection will commence in Belgium with the winner of the Ji.hlava’s Czech Joy 2022 competition Kapr Code by Lucie Králová. This experimental documentary about the Czech composer Jan Kapr will be receive its Belgian premiere in the Flagey Cinema on Sunday February 5 as part of the Festival Cinema de Ville. The official opening of the Echoes will take place in the seat of the European Parliament on Tuesday, February 7 with the screening of Pongo Calling. The documentary by Czech director Tomáš Kratochvíl captures the story of Roma activist Štefan Pongo and his family who left the Czech Republic for the UK to escape racial stereotypes and discrimination. After the screening, there will be a debate with the protagonist David Pongo and his family moderated by Marek Hovorka, director of Ji.hlava IDFF…The 11th Echoes of Ji.hlava in Belgium are organized by the Ji.hlava IDFF in co-operation with the Czech Centre Brussels, Royal Institute of Theatre, Cinema and Sound, Festival En ville!, KASK School of Arts Gent and are supported by the City of Jihlava, Vysočina Region, and Embassy of the Czech Republic in Brussels. See the full Belgian programme of Echoes of Ji.hlava IDFF.”

MISCELLANEOUS
 

Documentary Filmmakers Need to Stop Saying They Make Documentaries
Eric Kohn writes at IndieWire: “On his recent promotional tour for Pinocchio, Guillermo del Toro went on more than one tirade about how 'animation is a medium, not a genre,' and more than children’s entertainment. That’s a message that documentaries could have used at the 2023 edition of the Sundance Film Festival, which provided a stark reminder that the non-fiction community needs to start talking about its work in broader terms than the so-called 'genre' that limits its appeal. Blockbuster documentaries about treasured icons, thrilling subjects, and complicated pop-culture figures were everywhere at Sundance. For the most part, they came with distribution: Apple had STILL: A Michael J. Fox Movie and Steph Curry: Underrated, Amazon premiered Judy Blume Forever, and Netflix brought diving survival saga The Deepest Breath. Then there was… well, pretty much, everything else. No disrespect to any of the aforementioned titles (I haven’t seen them all), but it was disheartening to find that the festival’s most exciting documentary undertakings — and there were plenty — remained in limbo, as buyers sought the projects with obvious commercial appeal.”

The Way We Were
Anna Shechtman writes in Film Comment: “Annie Ernaux, the most recent winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, made a movie with her son. This sentence is technically true, but The Super 8 Years, which received its general release two months after October’s Nobel announcement, feels like a work by Annie Ernaux proper—not a collaboration with others, not an adaptation from one medium to another, but a translation of her writing from text to speech, by way of the author’s voiceover, and (if, like me, you watched the film with English-language subtitles) back to text again. This is not to say that the images of The Super 8 Years—drawn from home movies shot by the author’s late ex-husband, Philippe Ernaux, and assembled by David Ernaux-Briot—are incidental. Images are never incidental in Ernaux’s writing. In fact, the film’s visuals, shot between 1972 and 1981—depicting the author (in her thirties), her mother, her in-laws, and her two sons (moving into adolescence)—will seem strangely familiar to Ernaux’s readers.”

“A Collaboration of Kindred Expression”: Editor Mark Bukdahl on Twice Colonized
Staffers at Filmmaker Magazine wrote: “Greenlandic Inuit activist and lawyer Aaju Peter is the subject of Twice Colonized, a documentary by filmmaker Lin Alluna. Through her work, she forces colonizing forces Denmark and Canada to pay for their crimes, while also inspiring Westerners to grapple with the ways that they are also complicit in imperialist injustices. As she’s preparing for an Indigenous forum at the EU, however, her youngest son suddenly dies, bringing forth an extended period of intense grief and an eventual path toward healing. Editor Mark Bukdahl talks about cutting the film, including his non-cinematic inspirations and how ‘editing is an exercise in empathy.’”

A Conversation With Helen Hood Scheer & Kristy Guevara-Flanagan
Christopher Reed writes at Hammer to Nail: “The documentary Body Parts is an insightful, hard-hitting exposé of the damage done by the male gaze, whether it be the way it treats women on screen or affects their self-image off screen. It premiered at the 2022 Tribeca Film Festival. where I reviewed it (I also put it on my list of best films of the year). Directed by Kristy Guevara-Flanagan and produced by Helen Hood Scheer, the movie features a varied collection of interviews and archival footage, all of which help to make the case for needed industry change. Body Parts is finally getting both a theatrical and VOD release starting February 3, and I was able to chat via Zoom with both the director and producer last week. Here is a transcription of that conversation, edited for length and clarity.”