HEADLINES
 

2019 IDA Documentary Awards Shortlists
Free of commentary, the International Documentary Association dropped its 2019 Feature and Shorts shortlists on their homepage. Scott Feinberg of The Hollywood Reporter covered the announcement: “The International Documentary Association's IDA Awards, one of the stronger harbingers of Oscar success in the categories of best documentary feature and best documentary short, on Thursday announced its own shortlists for those categories — 30 documentary features from 375 submissions and 21 documentary shorts from 153 submissions. Features advancing to the next round include Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar's AMERICAN FACTORY, an exploration into the culture clash when a Chinese company opens a factory in Ohio; APOLLO 11, Todd Douglas Miller's assemblage of found footage capturing the lunar launch and landing on its 50th anniversary; and from Asif Kapadia, the Oscar-winning director of the doc AMY, a profile of another tragic figure, this time from the world of soccer, DIEGO MARADONA. Notably missing from the feature shortlist were Showtime's THE KINGMAKER, Netflix's KNOCK DOWN THE HOUSE and Sony Classics' MAIDEN. (KNOCK director Rachel Lears was, however, announced earlier this week as this year's recipient of the IDA's Emerging Doc Filmmaker Award.)

Oscar-Winning Director Laura Poitras Steps Down From Field of Vision
Eric Kohn broke the news at IndieWire: “Laura Poitras became a rock star of the documentary world with 2014’s Oscar-winning CITIZENFOUR, an explosive and definitive account of the Edward Snowden story that brought Poitras’ investigative filmmaking to a global audience. Since then, she has completed just one feature, the Julian Assange portrait RISK, but supported countless others as the co-creator and executive producer behind Field of Vision, the documentary film unit designed to support investigative filmmaking on a wavelength similar to her own. Now, she’s ready to return to her filmmaking full time. Poitras is stepping down from her leadership position at Field of Vision to focus on her next feature, though will remain onboard at parent company First Look Media. Charlotte Cook, who co-founded the project with Poitras and filmmaker A.J. Schnack in 2015, will continue to lead the organization. ‘In the last year, I felt like that Field of Vision established itself in the documentary field, and I felt I was spread too thin, having sometimes 20 films that I needed to look at,’ Poitras said. She added that she would continue supporting a handful of documentaries in development, including three confidential projects about sexual assault and abuse. And there may be others.”

ON THE FESTIVAL CIRCUIT
 

DOC NYC Announces Full Festival Lineup for 2019
Announced via festival press release: "DOC NYC is pleased to announce the full lineup for its tenth edition, running November 6-15 at the IFC Center in Greenwich Village and Chelsea’s SVA Theatre and Cinépolis Chelsea. This year’s festival will include: 300+ films and events, 28 world premieres, 27 U.S. or North American premieres, [and] 500+ filmmakers and special guests in person. This year’s festival is dedicated to the memory of D.A. Pennebaker, who was a constant presence at DOC NYC since its first year until his death this past summer. In 2014, at the festival’s inaugural Visionaries Tribute, he was honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award along with his partner Chris Hegedus. This year’s festival poster features a photograph of Pennebaker taken by Don MacSorley in 1967 during the filming of the classic documentary MONTEREY POP.”

Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival 2019 Lineup Revealed
Announced via festival press release: “The Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival (HSDFF), the longest running all-documentary film festival in North American, announced today the slate of feature films that will screen as part of the 28th edition of the annual Hot Springs, Arkansas festival. The HSDFF is lead primarily by working filmmakers who are crafting an inclusive festival of a diverse group of documentary filmmakers from across the globe. ‘Our programs are designed by and for filmmakers and it is our hope that our festival will inspire, support, challenge and rejuvenate our attending industry guests,’ says Executive Director, Jennifer Gerber. ‘This year we are growing our filmmaker development programs with the goal of HSDFF becoming a central meeting place for independent documentary filmmakers in this Southern region’...The filmmaker-led organization will showcase the best nonfiction films of the year including: 17 BLOCKS, FOR SAMA, KIFARU, THE KINGMAKER, LOS REYES, ONE CHILD NATION and VARDA BY AGNES” The festival is scheduled to run October 18th through October 26th.

DOK Leipzig 2019 Program Announced
Announced via festival press release: “Break out your calendars, because the 2019 DOK Leipzig programme is complete and tickets are on sale! This year we are showing 310 films and interactive works from 63 countries. The 161 films in our Official Selection include six for competition, along with the international programme, and the Late Harvest section, which was introduced last year. There are also 10 Special Programmes featuring a curated film selection for viewers to discover. This year more than half of the directors of films in the Official Selection are female. The works in the 62nd edition of DOK Leipzig present surprising perspectives on commonly held beliefs about the realities of life and (gender) role models. They also question political and economic systems, patterns of thought and concepts such as ‘truth’ and ‘reality’. Other themes include right-wing ideology and violence, along with media phenomena such as ‘fake news’ and whistleblowing – topics currently being addressed by documentary filmmakers worldwide.” The festival is scheduled to run October 28th through November 3rd.

2019 Competition Winners Announced at 63rd BFI London Film Festival
In a festival press release it was revealed that Rubika Shah’s WHITE RIOT has won this year’s Grierson Award for Best Documentary. Yance Ford, Documentary Competition President commented: “In the spirit of the Grierson Award criteria, WHITE RIOT is both a provocation and a tremendous opportunity. In this moment around the world the film implies that perhaps the lessons of the past were never learned. This rhetoric and politics of this moment in our history is familiar. And although language and symbols evolve, their meaning remains. Without nostalgia for 1979, the power of White Riot is that it points directly at 2019. Rubika Shah has used the power of film to remind us of where we have been and asks how long it will take us to change course.’”

NYFF’s Spotlight on Documentary 2019
David Hudson pieced together a solid overview of the nonfiction offerings at this year’s New York Film Festival at Criterion’s The Daily: “One of the most anticipated films lined up for the Spotlight on Documentary program at this year’s New York Film Festival has been the latest installment in a project over half a century ago. In SEVEN UP! (1964), director Paul Almond and producers at what was then Granada Television captured the lives of fourteen British seven-year-olds. With 7 PLUS SEVEN (1970), Michael Apted took over and has been revisiting his subjects every seven years. Reviewing 63 UP, the ninth film in the series, for Variety, Chris Willman notes that ‘moppetry has given way to meditations on mortality, as the participants deal with parental losses and consider the time limit on their own lives, if not the series.’”

Highlights from the Third Week of the New York Film Festival
Writing in The New Yorker, Richard Brody ruminated on Agnès Varda's swansong and the latest from Theo Anthony: “The sublime originality of the work and the life of Agnès Varda, who died in March, at the age of ninety, provides her last film, VARDA BY AGNES, with both its subject and its form. It’s a personal journey through her career, centered on a series of public lectures, interviews, and conversations that mesh with clips from her work—museum installations and videos as well as movies—and with staged sequences that provide a theatrical context for her reminiscences and reflections...Theo Anthony, whose documentary “Rat Film,” from 2016, advanced from an encounter with a single rodent to probing historical analyses and utopian political speculations, directed SUBJECT TO REVIEW, an episode of ESPN’s 30 for 30 series, which screens October 9th and 10th in the short-film “Documentary” program. Here, Anthony also begins with a phenomenon of narrow scope—the video setup, called Hawk-Eye, that has been in use since 2006 as the final arbiter of line calls in professional tennis—and expands it to explore fundamental questions in the game and in society at large.”

Camden and Points North: Shining a Light on Power
Leah Hurley reflected on their experience at CIFF and Points North 2019 in Documentary magazine: “Here I am, three weeks out from the immersive experience of the Camden International Film Festival and Points North Forum, and the rhythms of everyday life are tugging on me hard once again. Still, my mind's eye keeps finding its way back to the vivid imagery of the weekend—young children laughing and playing in the most ordinary way while in a refugee camp in Bulgaria (Midnight Traveler); a female truck driver combing her hair in a roadside truck stop (Driver, the Points North Pitch winner); buckets of silvery baby eels writhing and shimmering after being harvested late at night on the coast of Maine (Elvers); the prolific doodles of artist Alan Magee on Post-its, notes and scraps of paper offering windows into the nuance of the human experience (Alan Magee: Art Is Not a Solace); and fanciful, hand-illustrated deer chasing each other around an endless circle before transforming into something anew in the CIFF bumper. I am so grateful for the tremendous freedom in being reminded how much bigger the world is than me.”

Romanian Auteur Cristi Puiu to Be Sole Juror at Ji.hlava Doc Film Festival
Variety's Will Tizard took note of Ji.hlava fest's announcement: “The Czech Republic’s top competitive doc event, the Ji.hlava fest, announced today the main prize for its 23rd edition will be decided by sole juror director-screenwriter Cristi Puiu, a leading figure in the Romanian New Wave. The Opus Bonum section, screening international non-fiction films, traditionally invites a single juror, who will this year weigh nine works including entries from France, the U.K., India, Madagascar and Palestine. Docs in a wide variety of formats take on issues from racism to environmental disasters along with personal stories of soldiers, reformers and political leaders.”