Posted by editor@vimooz.com on January 8, 2009 under Documentary | Comments are off for this article
“I.O.U.S.A.” on CNN this Saturday
CNN will run the documentary film “I.O.U.S.A.” on Saturday, January 10th at 2 p.m. The telecast will include periodic breaks for a panel discussion on issues raised in the documentary about the perils of the nation’s ballooning debt. Read more …
“The Tenth Inning” – Coming Soon to PBS
Filmmaker Ken Burns is adding a tenth inning to his nine-part “Baseball” documentary series that aired in the ’90s on public television. PBS said Wednesday that the new film, titled “The Tenth Inning,” will air in spring 2010. Read more …
State Dinners
State of the union, a step at a time Documentary filmmaker Marcus Lucas has kicked off an 80-day tour of the U.S. to capture the spirit of the of the country. Lucas, born and raised in Germany, is traveling in his pickup with trailer, Esmeralda, from one ”state dinner” to the next. Read more …
“The Exiles” – Exclusive Engagement, Hamburg, NY
“The Exiles” is a 1961 documentary written and directed by Kent MacKenzie that will be coming to the Hamburg Palace Theatre for an exclusive engagement at 7 p.m. from Tuesday, Jan. 13 through Thursday, Jan. 15. The film chronicles a day in the life of a group of twenty-something Native Americans who left the reservation life in the 1950s to live in a Los Angeles district known as Bunker Hill. Read more …
“Immokalee U.S.A.”
Florida filmmaker Georg Koszulinski’s documentary “Immokalee U.S.A.” is a sobering look at the plight of immigrant workers from Latin America who are barely surviving as laborers on a massive tomato farm on the edge of the Big Cypress Swamp near Ft. Myers. The Tallahassee Film Society screens “Immokalee” this weekend at All Saints Cinema, and Koszulinski will be on hand to discuss his movie. Read more …
Posted by editor@vimooz.com on December 31, 2008 under Documentary | Comments are off for this article
Somebody Told Me About… Carla Bruni
Carla Bruni has allowed a British film-maker’s cameras into her home, to give a revealing insight into her private life with French President, Nicolas Sarkozy. The documentary, which was made by Scottish movie-maker George Scott and is entitled Somebody Told Me About… Carla Bruni, will be aired in France on New Year’s Day and broadcast in the UK next month. Read more …
Filmmaker plans to use prosthetic eye camera for documentary
Toronto filmmaker Rob Spence says he is getting a tiny video camera put inside a prosthetic eye to allow him to secretly film his subjects. He’s not alone in his quest for an eye camera. San Francisco artist Tanya Vlach wants a camera implant in her prosthetic eye and has put out a call on her blog for engineers to build her an eye cam, which could let her shoot video from her perspective or “lifecast” events. Read more …
Documentary filmmaker Quentin Aanenson dies
Quentin C. Aanenson, a fighter pilot and a subject of Ken Burns’ documentary “The War” and the producer of his own film a decade earlier, Aanenson died Sunday of cancer at his home in Bethesda, his son, Jerry said. He was 87. He wrote, filmed and narrated the documentary, “A Fighter Pilot’s Story,” which related his wartime experiences and was shown on public television around the country starting in 1994. Read more …
The Rescuers, Heroes of the Holocaust
Filmmaker Michael King is producing and directing the feature-length documentary “The Rescuers, Heroes of the Holocaust,” which focuses on the efforts of non-Jewish diplomats. Read more …
‘Liquid Assets’ Documentary to Air on PBS in Phoenix
“Liquid Assets: The Story of Our Water Infrastructure” tells the story of essential infrastructure systems: drinking water, wastewater, and storm water. These complex and aging systems — some in the ground for more than 100 years — are critical for public health, public safety and economic prosperity. The documentary highlights communities from across the United States, providing an understanding of hidden water infrastructure assets, demonstrating watershed protection approaches, and illustrating twenty-first century solutions.
The documentary is scheduled to air locally January 4th, on KAET, Channel 8, from 2-3:30p.m.
Posted by editor@vimooz.com on December 23, 2008 under Documentary, PBS, Television | Comments are off for this article
The documentary film”Grey Gardens: From East Hampton to Broadway,” airs nationwide Dec. 23 on PBS-TV on the Emmy Award-winning program “Independent Lens.”
It was no secret in the tony East Hamptons enclave that the two reclusive women living together in gothic squalor, with dozens of cats and the occasional raccoon, shared an intimate connection with one of the wealthiest and most celebrated women of her day.
But it wasn’t until documentary filmmakers Albert and David Maysles captured their story in the seminal 1975 cult classic Grey Gardens that the rest of the world discovered the truth: the elderly recluse and her eccentric, spinster daughter, who performed for their own private muses amongst the cobwebs, were Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale and Edith Bouvier Beale-aunt and first cousin of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis.
Grey Gardens, the Tony award-winning Broadway musical, was developed three decades after the Maysles film debuted. The musical is the ultimate homage to the quirky and rebellious Beales. Edith Beale and her daughter Eddie turned their backs on their upbringing, public opinion and polite society to pursue their artistic dreams in the sometimes humorous, sometimes heartbreaking and always sentimental fantasy world they shared together.
GREY GARDENS: From East Hampton to Broadway picks up the thread of this compelling mother-daughter story, weaving together clips from the Maysles brothers’ film with insightful interviews featuring Albert Maysles, societal and cultural commentators and the creators of the Broadway show. The documentary is a backstage pass into the creative process that brought one of America’s most haunted and haunting families from an original cult movie to the Great White Way. [via]
Posted by editor@vimooz.com on December 18, 2008 under Documentary, Television | Comments are off for this article
The two principal characters of James Moll’s documentary “Inheritance,” which airs as part of “P.O.V.” on PBS tonight, occupy opposite sides of the historical dark story.
One of the women, Helen Jonas, survived the horrors of the Plaszow concentration camp in Poland, while the other, Monika Hertwig, is the daughter of the man who inflicted many of them, Amon Goeth, who was hanged for war crimes in 1946.
Plaszow is the camp depicted in “Schindler’s List”; Goeth was the brutal, murderous commander portrayed by Ralph Fiennes.
Posted by editor@vimooz.com on December 13, 2008 under Documentary | Comments are off for this article
Maryland alum and Hall of Fame member Darryl Hill, a 1964 graduate of the University of Maryland, will be featured in an HBO documentary focusing on the integration of college football in the south. Hill was the first African-American athlete to play football in the Atlantic Coast Conference and at a Division I school south of the Mason-Dixon line.
The hour-long documentary will debut at 10 p.m. ET Tuesday on HBO. It will also focus on teams in the Southwest and Southeastern conferences, as well as how the civil rights movement affected college football in those communities. Other athletes interviewed for the story include Thom Gossom, Jerry LeVias, Willie Lanier and Bubba Smith. Read more …
The fantastic Arcade Fire are gearing up to release a 70-minute documentary of the making of Neon Bible directed by Vincent Morisset. The documentary will include tour footage from the band’s 2006 and 2007 tours shot by Vincent Moon. The titled of the film is Miroir Noir which is French for “Black Mirror.”
The film will be available as a digital download via miroir-noir.com on Monday, December 15. Read more…
BioWare® and LucasArtsTM share the vision for Star WarsTM: The Old RepublicTM in their first video documentary short, complete with new concepts, new screenshots, and real-time pre-production gameplay video. Read more …
PBS, has agreed to air “Torturing Democracy” on January 21st, 2009, one day after President Bush officially leaves office. The film may be viewed in its entirety ahead of the scheduled January 21st, 2009 broadcast at TorturingDemocracy.orgRead more …
Trailer from Blindsight, a movie that follows the gripping adventure of six blind Tibetan teenagers who set out to climb Lhakpa Ri on the north side of Mount Everest. Read more …
Posted by editor@vimooz.com on December 10, 2008 under Documentary, PBS | Comments are off for this article
More than a century after she became the first woman to run for president, the controversial and colorful Victoria Woodhull is chronicled in a compelling documentary produced by Victoria Weston and is available to individuals and libraries free for the holidays
“America’s Victoria, Remembering Victoria Woodhull,” a feature length documentary previously featured on PBS television is now available for free. Victoria Woodhull became the first woman to campaign for U.S. President in 1872. “America’s Victoria” is a wonderful chronicle of the life of one of the most important and unrecognized women in U.S. history. “If you spliced the genes of Hillary Clinton, Madonna, Heidi Fleiss and Margaret Thatcher, you might have someone like Victoria Woodhull,” wrote the Atlanta Journal & Constitution.
Although she was a radical suffragist, Victoria Woodhull refused to restrict her Presidential campaign to the issue of women’s suffrage. Instead, she advocated a single sexual standard for men and women, legalization of prostitution and reform of marriage. “America’s Victoria” combines rare archival images, Woodhull’s own words performed by Kate Capshaw and illuminating interviews with contemporary feminist Gloria Steinem to present a fascinating portrait of this remarkably brave woman.
“Ahead of her time, Victoria Woodhull was an advocate not only of women’s suffrage but of legalized prostitution and free love, by which she meant a commitment untrammeled by governmental regulations. She ran for president four times and generally lived a life unimagined by most people. She was an electrifying woman who teaches women to be daring, courageous and outrageous,” says Victoria Weston.
For more information about on how to acquire a free DVD of “America’s Victoria, Remembering Victoria Woodhull”: www.ZoieFilms.com/homevideo.html
APPALACHIA: A History of Mountains and People is the first environmental history series ever made.
Narrated by Academy Award Winner, Sissy Spacek. A Film Series by Jamie Ross and Ross Spears
An all-star cast, including Pulitzer Prize-winning biologist E.O. Wilson and best-selling novelist Barbara Kingsolver, explore the intersection of natural history and human history in one of America’s grandest treasures.
Presented in four parts, the series comes to PBS in early 2009.
Producer Jamie Ross and director Ross Spears will be at Berea Thursday through Saturday, Nov. 20-22, for the screenings and a public talk. On Thursday, Nov. 20, they will present a program as part of Berea’s Convocations Series, beginning at 3 p.m. in Phelps Stokes Auditorium. For their program titled “Appalachia: Where Is That, and Why Haven’t I Been There?” Ross and Spears will show excerpts from the film and discuss their philosophy of film as social commentary.
The documentary will be shown on Nov. 21 (parts 1 and 2) and Nov. 22 (parts 3 and 4). Both screenings will be in Phelps Stokes Auditorium beginning at 7 p.m., followed both evenings by a Talk Back with Ross and Spears. [via]
Part One: Time and Terrain
The series begins with Earth’s oldest mountains – the Appalachians. We see how continents over millions and millions of years collide in a slow dance which ultimately results in the formation of the mountains we now know as the Appalachians. We trace the evolution of the Great Forest which blankets the region in green, forming a home for a unique mosaic of plant and animal species
We watch as the first humans who arrived as early as 12,000 B.C. develop a complex and sophisticated relationship with the natural world. In Appalachia, we soon discover, geology is destiny. We see portraits of Appalachia’s Principal People at the time of European contact: the Cherokee, Shawnee, and Iroquois – vibrant, adaptive cultures with finely tuned relationships to their environment, a complex ecological community with amazing biological diversity. The arrival of the Europeans signals vast cultural and biological upheavals
Part Two: New Green World
Two cultures, Native American and European, collide in a struggle for control of the mountains. In the conquest of new land, first come the surveyors and mapmakers, including young George Washington, then come the road and cabin builders. From ecologists, anthropologists, and geographers, we hear of the vast differences between the Native American and the European perceptions of the land and its resources, all of which comes to a head when gold is discovered in 1828 in the mountains of Georgia. Once again, geology is destiny.
We see a new inhabitant, the pioneer, carving out a life on the Appalachia frontier, coming to terms with the wilderness, and creating a way of life unique to the mountains, one which will endure in different forms through the centuries.
Part Three: Mountain Revolutions
A rich agrarian society is torn asunder by the cataclysm of the Civil War. “The race for the prize is on,” wrote Harper’s Magazine in 1872 as railroads pushed ever further into the mountains. Speculators spread through every timber rich and mineral infused hollow, making deals. The third hour of the series will tell the story of the region as it confronts this strange new industrial age.
The story begins in the Great Forest, where virgin timber still abounded as late as 1880. Coal camps replace villages; mountain farms are abandoned; missionary schools spring up; the land, the people, the wildlife and the culture are endangered. Foresters, botanists, geologists, novelists, and historians all recount the changes in the land and its people as the coal is dug and the ancient trees are felled to fuel the nation‘s booming new industrial economy.
Part Four: Power and Place
The story of twentieth century Appalachia is the story of a rich but deeply troubled region forging its own distinct identity. From the union battles of the 1920s to the celebration of its rich cultural heritage in music, art and literature, to the enduring environmental and cultural dilemmas of our own time, Part IV will explore the heartbreak and hope of modern Appalachia.
Sociologists and ecologists point to Appalachia’s own inner eye, the ways in which trouble and pain, discovery and self-discovery fortify the region’s soul and backbone. We see new attitudes and new environmental challenges, old people coming back, new mountain lovers moving in – symbolized by an old tree with a new genetic make-up – the American Chestnut.
Posted by editor@vimooz.com on September 24, 2008 under Documentary, Television | Comments are off for this article
Three of Independent Television Service (ITVS)’s acclaimed films have won four Emmys at the 29th annual News and Documentary Emmy® Awards. The awards recognize outstanding achievement in broadcast journalism during the 2007 calendar year. Since 1997, ITVS-funded projects have garnered 13 wins at the News and Documentary Emmys.
The Emmy® Award–winning PBS series Independent Lens’s presentation of BILLY STRAYHORN: Lush Life took home the award for “Best Documentary,” building on the series’ past two Emmy wins in the News and Documentary category. Directed by Robert Levi, the film examines the life of the composer of “Take the ‘A’ Train” and other Duke Ellington hits, who struggled with obscurity and prejudice as a successful gay man in the tumultuous years of the mid–20th century. The series’ past two News and Documentary Emmy wins include A LION’S TRAIL (2006) for “Outstanding Cultural and Artistic Programming” and BE GOOD, SMILE PRETTY (2004) for “Best Documentary.” In 2007, Independent Lens received its first national primetime Emmy Award in the “Exceptional Merit in Nonfiction Filmmaking” category for its special presentation of A LION IN THE HOUSE, which follows six years in the lives of five families fighting childhood cancer.
“BILLY STRAYHORN: Lush Life is an exceptional film about an extraordinary man—an American musical genius. We are thrilled that the film has received such a prestigious honor,” said Independent Lens series producer Lois Vossen.
OPERATION HOMECOMING: Writing the Wartime Experience, a co-production of ITVS and a presentation of WETA, received two Emmys, for “Outstanding Informational Programming – Long Form” and “Outstanding Individual Achievement in a Craft: Music and Sound.” Directed by Richard Robbins, OPERATION HOMECOMING: Writing the Wartime Experience aired as part of America at a Crossroads, a series of documentaries developed by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting that explore the challenges confronting the post-9/11 world. Topics include the war on terrorism, the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, the experiences of American troops, the struggle for balance within the Islamic world and Muslim life in America, and perspectives on America’s role globally. A Documentary Group production, the film was also nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2008.
The ITVS co-production and P.O.V. presentation MADE IN L.A. was awarded an Emmy in the “Outstanding Continuing Coverage of a News Story – Long Form” category. Directed by Almudena Carracedo, the film documents the lives, struggles and personal transformations of three Latina immigrants working in garment factories and explores the complex impact of globalization on the U.S. apparel industry and its largely immigrant workforce.
“We are extremely proud of the amazing recognition these films have achieved. It is wonderful to see the hard work, determination and artistic vision of these outstanding independent filmmakers recognized with such esteemed awards,” said Sally Jo Fifer, ITVS president and CEO.
The following is a complete list of the winners:
BEST DOCUMENTARY
Independent Lens
BILLY STRAYHORN: Lush Life
Producer/Director: Robert Levi
Producers: Joshua Blum, George Seminara
Executive Producer: Sally Jo Fifer ( ITVS)
OUTSTANDING CONTINUING COVERAGE OF A NEWS STORY – LONG FORM
P.O.V.
Made in L.A.
Executive Producers: Sally Jo Fifer, Simon Kilmurry, Cara Mertes
Producer/Director: Almudena Carracedo
Producer: Robert Bahar
OUTSTANDING INFORMATIONAL PROGRAMMING – LONG FORM
America at a Crossroads
OPERATION HOMECOMING: Writing the Wartime Experience
Series Executive Producers: Jeff Bieber, Dalton Delan
Series Producer: Leo Eaton
Program Executive Producers: Tom Yellin, Sally Jo Fifer (ITVS)
Program Director/Producer: Richard Robbins
OUTSTANDING INDIVIDUAL ACHIEVEMENT IN A CRAFT: MUSIC AND SOUND
America at a Crossroads
OPERATION HOMECOMING: Writing the Wartime Experience
Sound Editor: Glen Frazier
Rerecording Mixer: Terrance Dwyer
Foley Artist: Monique Raymond
Sound Effects Editors: Sam Lionde, Matthew Slivinski
Dialog Editors: David Ball, Vince Tennent
Posted by editor@vimooz.com on July 17, 2008 under Documentary | Comments are off for this article
Retired AOL executive Ted Leonsis is turning his passion for documentaries into an Internet service meant to give independent filmmakers broader viewership.His new Web site, SnagFilms, will take professionally produced documentaries like “Super Size Me” and some from National Geographic and PBS and show them for free at the site – or embed them in profile pages at Facebook, MySpace and other social networking hangouts.
Fifteen-second ads will run every eight to 10 minutes, with revenue split between SnagFilms and the filmmakers.
Leonsis, who explored the Internet’s distribution potential as vice chairman at Time Warner Inc.’s AOL, said the idea for SnagFilms grew out of his work on “Nanking,” his entry into filmmaking.
“Nanking,” which won an editing award last year at the Sundance Film Festival and was released in theaters, chronicles the brutal Japanese occupation of the Chinese city in 1937.
Leonsis said the experience opened his eyes to the plight of filmmakers, particularly for documentaries.
“Every year, more and more of these films are being made, and less and less are getting distribution,” Leonsis said. “That is a problem for filmmakers and also a problem for the causes these filmmakers have been (championing) when they are telling their story.”
Leonsis said he plans to eventually make “Nanking” and his second movie, “Kicking It,” available on SnagFilms.
Leonsis is the new venture’s majority owner, but he turned to many of his former AOL colleagues, including co-founder Steve Case, for funding. AOL is providing technical and advertising help. Former National Geographic executive Rick Allen, who worked with Leonsis on “Kicking It,” will be its chief executive.
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Quentin C. Aanenson, a fighter pilot and a subject of Ken Burns’ documentary “The War” and the producer of his own film a decade earlier, Aanenson died Sunday of cancer at his home in Bethesda, his son, Jerry said. He was 87. He wrote, filmed and narrated the documentary, “A Fighter Pilot’s Story,” which related his wartime experiences and was shown on public television around the country starting in 1994. 
Maryland alum and Hall of Fame member Darryl Hill, a 1964 graduate of the University of Maryland, will be featured in an HBO documentary focusing on the integration of college football in the south. Hill was the first African-American athlete to play football in the Atlantic Coast Conference and at a Division I school south of the Mason-Dixon line.
