It had been two days since the last day of the IFP Distribution Lab – ending the yearlong 2012 IFP fellowship for 10 documentaries and 10 narrative films from first-time directors. With two days left in New York, I found myself sitting in a small theater in Brooklyn looking nervously …
1. Hire a professional, and choose carefully! If you have the budget, call a top agency and hire John Williams…I mean, he really is the best! He did the theme for Star Wars! Unfortunately, for 99.9% of filmmakers today, (and those who aren’t Steven Spielberg) this is not …
With the critical and commercial success of such documentaries as Mad Hot Ballroom and the Academy Award-winning short documentary Freeheld, both documentarians and audiences are acknowledging the compelling power of the non-fiction biographical narrative form of storytelling. However, the mediamaker must grapple with a myriad of legal, business, aesthetic and …
By that, I don’t just mean I overshot my deadline. What I mean is, if I was to choose the ideal starting point for a year of monthly dispatches on the release of my first documentary feature – Puppet – six weeks …
Join luminary directors, writers, execs and new media pioneers for in-depth discussions about their experiences in the industry and where filmmaking is heading next. Sheila Nevins, President of HBO Documentary Films, delves into her remarkable Emmy and Peabody-winning career, in which she shepards the …
Learn from veteran filmmakers and rising stars as we delve in depth into their recent success stories. Join Director/Producer/Cinematographer Tim Hetherington and National Geographic Films’ Daniel Battsek for a discussion of RESTREPO, chronicling the one-year deployment of a platoon of American soldiers at one …
Tim Hethrington (director, producer, editor) discusses the difficulty of remaining apolitical while conceiving Restrepo, and expectations for the project from the Left.