By R. Patrick Lile
For years, ESPN had been relatively absent from the sports-doc scene, but after the 2008 release of Dan Klores’s Black Magic, ESPN saw an opportunity to make a statement. Black Magic examined the struggle for civil rights told through the eyes of basketball players at Historical Black Colleges and Universities. This four-hour documentary [...]
Directed by: Rollin Binzer
Length: 1 hour 32 minutes
Development to Distribution: 3 years
Shot on: Sony PDWF800
I wish I had good things to say about The Providence Effect. It’s so rare to see a doc that tackles the subject of education in America head-on, especially one that purports to hold answers to the system’s many woes. [...]
Food, Inc. Trailer from TakePart on Vimeo.
Directed by: Robert Kenner
Length: 1 hour 34 minutes
Development to Distribution: 6 years
Shot on: Panasonic HDX900 & HDX200
The most prevalent metaphor employed throughout the film is that of a veil: one fashioned by the food industry giants to be drawn between the consumer and the source of their food. [...]
If you’re a Doc student taking a production class beyond Doc I, you have two camera options: the Sony DSR-300 series and the PD-150/170. They are both rock solid cameras in their class, and deciding between the two isn’t always easy. I’ll gloss over the differences in each camera line since they are [...]
In Order Not to Be Here is the inspired, award-winning vision from Chicago-based experimental filmmaker and artist Deborah Stratman. Rife with creepiness, In Order feels like a bad-dream—or a leaked surveillance video from a lurking shadow government—it’s a dreamy, objectively-haunting, quasi-surveillance video. It’s also a film that poses many questions, one being the [...]
Chris Marker’s Bullfight in Okinawa is a bizarre, 4 min documentary that introduces viewers to Japan’s subterranean past time of bullfighting. Part of Markers five-film “Bestiary” series, Bullfight employs observational documentary techniques and, in particular, Marker’s camerawork is impressive — tight framed shots, free-hand pans, and quick zooms all contribute to the film’s urgent [...]
In honor of the the end of the NFL season and the beginning of February, I want to share some video that I captured at True/False last year. Some of you may have heard me raving about a film called Bigger, Stronger, Faster, about America’s obsession with steroids. Well, I was going through some footage [...]
In the late 1970s and early 1980s two documentary filmmakers Steven Fischler and Joel Sucher exploring the history of Jewish Anarchism in the United States made the film Free Voice of Labor - The Jewish Anarchists.
Two years ago, a Christmas gift introduced me to a photograph of a giant, orange curtain: The curtain spoke to me with its warm aura and summery temper, seducing me, raising questions, generating fantasies, and leaving me wanting more.
Since Larry Charles and Bill Maher’s new “documentary” about religion is so shamelessly polemical, I think it’s fitting for my review to match its pitiless contempt. Make no mistake, Religulous is an ill-conceived, poorly crafted film through and through. There are scenes when the film lives up to its promise of satisfying humor, but these [...]