Documentary Field Notes and Flashpoints: category

A few weeks ago, I was invited to present a film at an event called Talkies in Toronto. It was one event in a series of screenings and discussions, organized by York University humanities professor Mark Cauchi and his co-conspirator filmmaker Azed Majeed. I thought about the choice of film for a while. In the [...]

Last week I went to see a terrific documentary play called SEXY BÉTON, or “sexy concrete”. It was created by Annabel Soutar of the Porte Parole theatre company in Montreal – only the last in a series of documentary theatre performances. And this truly is a documentary ‘démarche’ – to use this excellent French word [...]

These days, most documentaries are shot in HD, high definition. Seems to make sense, doesn’t it, since you can buy a high definition camera for just a thousand dollars! But does this mean that all HD is one and the same thing, and that you get as good an image with a thousand-dollar camera as [...]

Last week I wrote about the terrific Inside Disaster series. And here, as promised, is my colleague Tobi Elliott’s assessment of the interactive game on the Inside Disaster web site, where you can choose to be a survivor, a relief worker, or a journalist. (Tobi, as you may have noticed, regularly helps with this blog.) [...]

I find it interesting that I sometimes get very positive response to blog items which are more personal. A while back I wrote about the visual artists in my family as a source of inspiration: my father Arne, who died a few months ago, my uncle Torsten, my sister Eva. But another big influence was [...]

I just wrote a very serious blog post, but I decided to save it til after the holiday season. I can see that people are in a party mood, which is a good thing. Even though Christmas and New Year’s come in well after Halloween and Valentine’s in my own Holiday ratings, it is a [...]

This week I went to a sensational Cinema Politica screening at Concordia University here in Montreal. Cinema Politica is now, according to programmer Ezra Winton, the biggest community- and campus-based documentary screening network in the world! And Concordia, its home base and launching pad, continues to be the scene of weekly screenings often attended by [...]

Film students sometimes ask theoretical questions which, while not uninteresting, are not particularly important to a practitioner. But Tom Eden from the documentary program in Rivière du Loup asked me this: is it a good idea to direct and to do camera and sound at the same time? This is a big question, and I [...]

Last week, at the Rencontres Internationales du Documentaire de Montréal, I had a chance to see the latest film by one of the world’s best documentarians, Kim Longinotto. In Pink Saris, she tells the story of the ‘Pink Gang’ of women in Uttar Pradesh, one of India’s poorest states. Led by a tough lady named [...]

It’s film festival season in Montreal, and I have seen quite a few films. I am often struck by how much it takes to make a really excellent doc. A good subject or a worthy cause are only the most basic starting points. A good story is one step better, but far from a guarantee [...]