Internationally acclaimed filmmaker Kim Longinotto has been named the 2009 recipient of the True/False Film Festival's prestigious True Vision Award. Two of Longinotto's films, ROUGH AUNTIES, winner of the World Cinema Documentary Jury Prize at this year's Sundance Film Festival, and GAEA GIRLS, will screen at True/False, where the filmmaker will be on hand this weekend to accept the award. The sole award of the festival is given annually to a filmmaker whose work shows a dedication to the creat...

Sunday, November 30--------IDFA came to a smashing and glamorous climax last evening at the IDFA Awards Ceremony. Winning the Joris Ivens Competition, the Festival's most prestigious prize, was Burma VJ--Reporting From A Closed Country by Danish director Anders Ostergaard. The film is a gripping chronicle of the 2007 uprising by Burmese monks, which creates a political and religious crisis in a country that is viewed as the most repressive regime on earth. Nearly all the footage in this fascin...

Burma VJ (Denmark/Sweden/England/Norway   Friday, November 28-------As IDFA enters its final weekend, the front runners in the various competition categories have been announced. At the nightly IDFA Talks, an assembly of filmmakers, producers, programmers and IDFA staff anxiously awaited the announcements of the final nominees in the main Festival competitions. The list is included below, with information on the award winners coming soon on this blog. ...

Thursday, November 27-----While the accent at IDFA is on the new crop of documentaries being created around the world, there is also a healthy respect for career retrospectives to showcase for both filmmakers and audiences alike the themes and techniques of earlier non-fiction masters.   At this year’s event, the Festival is presenting two such retrospectives. 110 Years of Joris Ivens, named for the most famous Dutch documentarian Joris Ivens, is celebrating the 110th birthday of th...

Wednesday, November 26-----I arrived at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam yesterday to find….an event very much in full swing. The Festival had, in fact, opened the Thursday before, so the hundreds of international visitors who have descended to Amsterdam were already fully oriented. I’ve attended IDFA several times in the past, but this is the first time since it fully relocated from its traditional location on the Leidseplein to the more upscale surroundings of the Re...

A new addition to this year's IDFA is the introduction of Doclab, a new program section that explores the relationship between new media and the documentary form. The main theme for this year is data visualisation. In all modern cultures, a dizzying amount of information is compiled by government bodies, market researchers and large companies like Google. In aggregate, this data offers an accurate if exhausting account of our collective daily comings and going. The amount of data available is ...

As part of the parallel Amsterdam India Festival, IDFA is presenting a program it calls East Side Stories, featuring 17 contemporary documentaries from India. This unique look at the emerging documentary movement in one of Asia's most complex and thriving cultures offers a rare look at different aspects of this fascinating region, a country in transition trying to balance its age-old traditions with its new status of economic development and increased international clout. However, the economic...

Tuesday, November 25------As part of the parallel Amsterdam India Festival, IDFA is presenting a program it calls East Side Stories, featuring 17 contemporary documentaries from India. This unique look at the emerging documentary movement in one of Asia's most complex and thriving cultures offers a rare look at different aspects of this fascinating region, a country in transition trying to balance its age-old traditions with its new status of economic development and increased international cl...

  Monday, November 24--------A new addition to this year's IDFA is the introduction of Doclab, a new program section that explores the relationship between new media and the documentary form. The main theme for this year is data visualisation.   In all modern cultures, a dizzying amount of information is compiled by government bodies, market researchers and large companies like Google. In aggregate, this data offers an accurate if exhausting account of our colle...

  Our Daily Bread Friday, November 21---------IDFA has selected Austrian documentary filmmaker Nikolaus Geyrhalter to present the annual Top Ten program at this year's Festival. As part of the program, Geyrhalter will present a few of his own films and other documentaries that have influenced him. Among those Geyrhalter films being showcased are Pripyat (1999), which won the Diagonale Grand Prize Award at the Diagonale Film Festival, as well as the SCAM Award at...

Sheffield Doc/Fest has confirmed its place as the premier documentary festivals in the UK. This year’s festival saw a record number of 1,545 film submissions, of which 154 were selected: the largest amount of films screened in the festival’s 15 year history.A total of 1,300 delegates travelled to the festival from over 23 countries to attend the festival. There was a total of 140 buyers and 250 speakers this year, held together by over 150 staff members and volunteers.The festival’s succes...

The 15th annual Sheffield Doc/Fest opens today with over 140 films and 50 sessions featuring 250 key industry speakers.The films, including many award-winning documentaries from around the world, take the shape of several themed strands highlighting the current trends of documentary filmmaking. The 2008 strands include last year’s popular Green, Bent, Anti Doc, Sports and Music strands, alongside a new strand, Kinky Docs: a celebration of sex and its representation in documentary. Doc/Fest’...

the 51st International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Film came to an end on Sunday with an Audience Day when all of the prize-winning films were shown once more. Festival director Claas Danielsen is very satisfied despite lower admission figures compared to the jubilee edition in 2007: „Both the cinemas and the digital DOK Market were very well attended. Our special programme „Afghanistan – From Inside“ was practically always sold out, there was an outstanding acceptance ...

Crowded cinemas, many international filmmakers and industry guests, lively discussions and a fantastic atmosphere all over the place are characteristically for the 51st edition of the International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Film. The final audience statistics are not available, yet. However, according to the present data, festival director Claas Danielsen anticipates a slight decline of audience numbers compared with last year's 50th anniversary of DOK Leipzig (31.000 viewers...

  Mary Pickford     Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival will award Michael York the first award ever given for "narration". The Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival (HSDFF) began in 1992, launched by a small group of arts activists in Hot Springs. That year, 10 Academy Award nominated documentary films were screened to the public free of charge. Veteran actor James Whitmore lent his p...

The Paley Center for Media, formerly known as "The Museum of Television and Radio", and "SnagFilms", recently announced a first of its kind collaboration between a leading cultural media institution and an Internet start-up to help documentary producers break down the barriers to reach fresh audiences for their films. Through a shared passion for expanding access to documentaries, the Paley Center, an important convener of documentary film community, and SnagFilms, a groundbreaking Internet docu...

Thursday, October 9-----Despite its simple story and subtle cinematic form, I cannot get the images of the film Tulpan out of my head. Perhaps because the film takes one to a truly exotic location (the vast emptiness of the Hunger Steppe plain in southern Kazakhstan) and brings you up-close-and-personal with the toughened people who inhabit that truly forlorn environment, that it has made an impression that is light years away from a National Geographic special (although its visuals are comparab...

Despite its simple story and subtle cinematic form, I cannot get the images of the film Tulpan out of my head. Perhaps because the film takes one to a truly exotic location (the vast emptiness of the Hunger Steppe plain in southern Kazakhstan) and brings you up-close-and-personal with the toughened people who inhabit that truly forlorn environment, that it has made an impression that is light years away from a National Geographic special (although its visuals are comparably beautiful). Celebra...

The Sheffield International Documentary Festival, the UK’s premier event for international documentary professionals, will present an Audience Award at this year’s festival. This inaugural award, which will celebrate the documentary with the most audience votes, will be chosen from the one hundred or so international films to be screened at Doc/Fest 2008.Heather Croall, Festival Director, comments: “There are loads of awards at film festivals around the world, and many of the jury-driven a...

Doc/Fest offers young people unique access to the documentary industry.Sheffield International Documentary Film Festival is teaming up with 4Talent and The Grierson Trust to give young people an unparalleled insight into the world of documentary. Doc/Fest and 4Talent will be presenting an exclusive HotHouse offering twelve young people contact with industry professionals and access to documentary training. This pioneering HotHouse, hosted uniquely for the documentary voices of tomorrow, will be ...