Documentary
DOC NYC Women Directors: Meet Meghan O’Hara — ‘In Country’
Meghan O’Hara is a San Francisco-based filmmaker and educator. She is a 2014 Fellow of the Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program and was named one of the 10 Filmmakers to Watch in 2014 by...
DOC NYC Women Directors: Meet Johanna St. Michaels — ‘Penthouse North’
Johanna St. Michaels’ first documentary Best WishesBernhard was awarded the Swedish national film award “Dokumentärfilmspremien” in 2003.Her second work, Snap Shots from Reality,was nominated...
Laura Poitras’ ‘Citizenfour’ Tops Cinema Eye Nominations
Laura Poitras’ Citizenfour has emerged as the nonfic to beat this awards season. The Edward Snowden documentary led the Cinema Eye Honors nominations with nods in six categories, including best...
DOC NYC Women Directors: Meet Norah Shapiro — ‘Miss Tibet: Beauty in Exile’
DOC NYC Women Directors: Meet Lesley Chilcott — ‘A Small Section of the World’
ProducerLesley Chilcott partnered with Davis Guggenheim on the 2006 AcademyAward-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth, the documentary feature It Might Get Loud (2009), the Barack Obama...
DOC NYC Women Directors: Meet Abby Ginzberg — ‘Soft Vengeance’
Filmmaker Abby Ginzberg has been producing and directing award-winning documentary films for nearly three decades. Her most recent feature-length documentary, Soft Vengeance: Albie Sachs and the New...
DOC NYC Women Directors: Meet Mary Dore — ‘She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry’
Mary Dore is an award-winning documentary producer who brings an activist perspective to her films. Dore grew up in Auburn, Maine, and began her career working with a Boston film collective that...
DOC NYC Women Directors: Meet Geeta V. Patel — ‘Meet the Patels’
Geeta V. Patel is writer/director of the upcoming feature film Mouse. Patel made her directorial debut with the documentary war thriller Project Kashmir, which led to directing fellowships at...
DOC NYC Women Directors: Meet Rachel Lears — ‘The Hand That Feeds’
RachelLears’ most recent feature documentary, TheHand That Feeds, co-directed with Robin Blotnick, won the audience awardfor best feature at Full Frame Documentary Film Festival 2014, Best of...
DOC NYC Women Directors: Meet Natasha Verma — ‘Hardy’
Natasha Vermawas born in New York City and raised in South Texas. She is a 20-year oldtelevision journalist, producer, and filmmaker. Her work has been featured onABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox News. Verma...
DOC NYC Women Directors: Meet Yuki Kokubo — ‘Kasamayaki’
Yuki Kokubo is a documentary filmmaker and photographer based in NewYork City. Raised in an artists’ community in rural Japan, Kokubo and her familyrelocated to New York City in 1986. She began...
DOC NYC Women Directors: Meet Jessica Solce — ‘No Control’
DOC NYC Women Directors: Meet Sara Newens & Mina T. Son — ‘Top Spin’
DOC NYC Women Directors: Meet Pamela Yates — ‘Disruption’
Pamela Yates is the co-founder of Skylight Pictures, a company dedicated to making films and advanced digital media abouthuman rights and the quest for justice. Her previous film Granito: How to...
DOC NYC Women Directors: Ursula Liang — ‘9-Man’
Ursula Liang is a journalist who has worked in a wide range of media, including posts at ESPN The Magazine, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, The New York Times Op-Docs, and StirTV. She is the...
DOC NYC Women Directors: Meet Linda Hoaglund — ‘The Wound and The Gift’
Linda Hoaglund was born in Japan as the daughter of American missionaryparents and raised in rural Japan, where she attended Japanese public schools.A graduate of Yale University, she subtitled 200...
DOC NYC Women Directors: Meet Stephanie Wang-Breal — ‘Tough Love’
Stephanie Wang-Breal has been producing and directing commercials, television shows, anddocumentaries for the past 10 years. Tough Love is Wang-Breal’s second feature-length documentary. The film...
DOC NYC Directors: Meet Andrea B. Scott — ‘Florence, Arizona’
Andrea B. Scott is a Brooklyn-based documentary filmmaker, editor, and writer. She was an editor and an associate producer on A Place at the Table, directed by Kristi Jacobson and Lori Silverbush,...
DOC NYC Women Directors: Meet Sarah Teale & Lisa F. Jackson — ‘Grazers: A Cooperative Story’
Sarah Teale hasproduced a number of films for HBO, including the recent four-part series TheWeight of the Nation, which was nominated for a Primetime Emmy; Dealing Dogs(Emmy-nominated for Best...
DOC NYC Women Directors: Meet Victoria Campbell — ‘Monsieur Le Président’
I am a visual artist, performer, and filmmaker. My first film, House of Bones, is a personal memoir and meditation on family, past and present, and the way a house/space defines a person.The film...
DOC NYC Women Directors: Meet Brenda Goodman — ‘Sex(Ed)’
Guest Post: Finding the Perfect Animal Doc Subject As She’s Being “Arrested” on the Golden Gate Bridge
Ilike to film relationships, especially those between urban people and wildanimals. Pelicans have intrigued me since I was a child — they remind me offlying dinosaurs: so graceful in the air,...
DOC NYC to Honor ‘Citizenfour’ Director Laura Poitras with Inaugural Award
Filmmaker and “MacArthur Genius” grantee Laura Poitras (CitizenFour, The Oath, Flag Wars) will receive DOC NYC’s inaugural Robert and Anne Drew Award for Documentary Excellence in a ceremony...
‘Invisible War’ Filmmakers Making Doc About Campus Sexual Assault
After exposing the endemic rates of and barriers to justice regarding rape in the military in the Oscar-nominated The Invisible War, documentary director Kirby Dick and producer Amy Ziering will...
Guest Post: Doc Director Edet Belzberg: “If You Find a Good Enough Story, It’s Impossible to Quit”
Young women often ask me what my greatest challengeis when making a film. It is hard to choose just one. I’m very instinctual in my work. I followstories and characters that hit me on a gut...
43% of 2014 DOC NYC Features Directed by Women, But Where Are the Films About Women?
It’s generally not hard to find female-directed features at documentary film festivals, since women filmmakers face less obstacles in the nonfiction world. This year’s DOC NYC Film Festival...
Guest Post: ‘Last Hijack’ Goes Home with a Somali Pirate
In 2009 there was a swarm of news reports aboutpiracy off the coast of Africa. I got intrigued by the subject because of thethrilling hijack stories, but almost immediately focused on the Somali...
LFF Women Directors: Lynette Wallworth — ‘Tender’
Lynette Wallworth is an Australianartist/filmmaker whose immersive video installations and film works reflect onthe connections between people and the natural world and explore fragile states of...
Trailer Watch: ‘She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry’ Chronicles the Turmoil of the Women’s Movement
Feminist movements, then and now, have been largely ignored by the movies. Unlike, say, the civil-rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s, which receives respectful remembrance in high-profile...
Laura Poitras Humanizes Edward Snowden in ‘Citizenfour’
Guest Post: Finding a Rare POV on a Familiar Global Issue in ‘Waiting for August’
There have been many discussions in the film industry lately about the stubborn imbalance against women’s representation in cinema. Although we have gone a long way in theright direction, there is...
‘Makers’ Starts Tonight With History of Women in Comedy
It was less than a decade ago that the late Christopher Hitchens, a respected writer and thinker, wondered aloud in a mainstream publication “why women aren’t funny.” Many rational people...
Trailer Exclusive: Vessel Directed by Diana Whitten
One of the fundamental tenets that I hold true is that women’s rights are human rights, and included in those rights is the right to a safe and legal abortion should a woman want or need one. When...
Trailer Watch: ‘E-Team’ Profiles Human-Rights Investigators in Action
In places like Syria and Libya, where human-rights abuses were/are rampant, someone has to compile, analyze, and collect evidence of crimes against humanity in the midst of chaos to tell the world...
TIFF Women Directors: Meet Mami Sunada — ‘The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness’
Mami Sunada was born in Tokyoand studied documentary filmmaking at Keio University. She broke into film by assisting director Hirokazu Kore-eda on StillWalking and Air Doll. She also wrote and...
Katie Couric and Stephanie Soechtig to Take on Gun Violence in New Doc
After tackling America’s obesity epidemic in the “sugar is the new tobacco” documentary Fed Up, Katie Couric and director Stephanie Soechtig are reteaming to take a hard look at another...
TIFF Women Directors: Meet Megha Ramaswamy — ‘Newborns’
MeghaRamaswamy is a Mumbai-based screenwriter and director. She wrote the screenplayfor the feature film Shaitan, and wroteand directed the fictional short Bunny. (TIFF official site) Her 8-minute...
TIFF Women Directors: Meet Tamara Erde — ‘This is My Land’
Tamara Erde was born in Tel Aviv. She studied at the Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem and Le Fresnoy in France. In her first feature film, This is My Land, Erde visits six independently run Israeli and...
America Ferrara to Host Latino Documentary Series ‘Panoramica’
America Ferrera is returning to TV — this time, in a much more serious role than “Ugly Betty.” Best known for her Emmy- and Golden Globe-winning portrayal of the titular character in Ugly...
Trailer Watch: Acrobats Fly and Crash in ‘Born To Fly: Elizabeth Streb vs Gravity’
“Part of the deal is, you walk into the room and you agree to get hurt. You might get a little hurt.” That’s the unapologetic attitude extreme choreographer Elizabeth Streb takes with her...
Trailer Watch: I Am Eleven is a Charming Look at Being Between Childhood and Adolescence
Australian documentarian Genevieve Bailey found herself dispirited working for a newspaper as a college student, reading bad news day after day. She worried especially about how that bad news would...
Sight and Sound Publishes Top 50 Documentaries List
UK’s Sight and Sound magazine published a “Greatest Documentaries of All Time” list last week to accompany their famed catalog of the “Greatest Films Ever.” The top 50...
Sundance Award-Winning Rich Hill Director Tracy Droz Tragos on the Injustice of Rural Poverty and How Motherhood Can Open Doors to Documentarians
“People expect me to have a better future than Ido. I don’t know what to do anymore.” So declares a twelve-year-old boy lessthan five minutes into this film, and at once we are ruthlessly...
Half of Sarajevo Film Fest Doc Contenders Directed by Women
Sometimes it’s necessary to travel far afield to find good news, as was the case this week when the Toronto Film Festival’s first-round lineup was revealed to be only 10% directed by women....
Chicken and Egg Launches New Fund for Women Documentarians from India
Chicken and Egg Pictures, the nonprofit film fund dedicated to incubating socially conscious documentaries from female filmmakers, has partnered up with the Indian Documentary Foundation to launch a...
Stringent New Rules to Push Smaller Documentaries Out of Oscar Race
Several documentarians are crying foul that the Academy has effectively shut out smaller nonfiction movies from the Oscar race. A report from Deadline notes that new requirements to qualify for...
Trailer Watch: It’s Not Easy (But It Sure Looks Like Fun) “To Be Takei”
In his 77 years, George Takei has lived many lives: Star Trek actor, radio announcer, (heterosexual) sex symbol, Japanese-American activist, LGBT activist, social-media icon, and, at long last,...
HBO to Air Docs on Monday Night Year-Round
Documentarians better get their HBO pitch ready, because the premium cable channel is in the market to buy a whole lot more nonfiction content. It looks like the parade of boobs and guts on Game of...
Chicken & Egg Awards 23 Follow-Up Grants; Places Open Call for New Projects
Chicken and Egg Pictures, the only nonprofit film fund devoted solely to supporting women documentary directors, has announced that it will endow follow-up grants to 23 ongoing feature-length...
Women Directors Win Majority of LAFF Awards for Features
A majority of the feature prizes at the 2014 Los Angeles Film Festival Awards went to women-directed projects. Winter’s Bone director Debra Granik took home the best-documentary trophy for her...
Human Rights Watch FF Women Directors: Meet Zeina Daccache (Scheherazade’s Diary)
Zeina Daccache is a Lebanese actress, director, and drama therapist. She has directed the award-winning film and stage versions of 12 Angry Lebanese (2009, First Prize — Muhr Arab Documentary...