Documentary Field Notes and Flashpoints: category

Former judge Andrée Ruffo speaks out for docs. A recent Vancouver Sun article sums up the crisis of the long-form documentary in Canada. Cutbacks everywhere, shrinking budgets and most of all diminishing broadcast windows. Outside of the National Film Board and the arts councils, the whole Canadian funding system is based on acquiring a broadcast [...]

The Rencontres Internationales du documentaire de Montréal just ended. It was an opportunity to see many truly excellent films. Sad to think that most of them will not be available to audiences here now that the festival is over. Judging from what I heard from friends and colleagues, I missed many of the best ones. [...]

The Rencontres Internationales du Documentaire de Montréal opened last Wednesday night. This is an event which allows you to see great documentaries from around the world, films which you rarely see on TV. This year’s program is great. But the choice of opening film has created a huge controversy in the documentary community here. Veteran [...]

J’ai toujours été fasciné par la peinture et la musique de la République de Weimar, la période d’entre les deux guerres mondiales en Allemagne.  Mon amie Jennifer Alleyn a un film sur un des artistes le plus représentatifs de cette période, Otto Dix, et le film prend l’affiche cette semaine à Montréal et à Québec. [...]

The other night I went to see The Interrupters at another full-house Cinema Politica screening at Concordia University in Montreal, with the filmmaker in attendance. Cinema Politica regularly gets hundreds of people out to see socially and politically relevant documentaries – in this case 650 people on a Monday night! Kudos to organizers Ezra Winton [...]

Going to the Montreal World Film Festival is a hit-and miss kind of affair. One easily has the impression there is no serious programming effort, it seems like anything goes, and screening some of the films gives you a strong impression nothing would ever be turned down. But there are also some excellent films. At [...]

One of my films, Uranium, 1990 (in Canada you can watch it on the NFB website here) was selected to participate in the first international Uranium Film Festival in Brazil, which just ended. (Read a wrapup article here from Environment News Service.) As Brazil is not known for its uranium or nuclear industry, I found [...]

I wasn’t at the Hot Docs festival in Toronto this year, because I’m in production. But my colleague Tobi Elliott, the writer and filmmaker who helps me with this blog was there, and picked this film to write about. Over to Tobi: You won’t find a stronger documentary that so beautifully brings out Indonesia’s churning [...]

Montreal’s International Festival of Films on Art has a huge following. Most screening are full, great to see. The festival mostly programs films for the subject matter as opposed to the filmic qualities, but every year there are some really excellent films. Of the films I saw this year I liked The Owl in Daylight [...]

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 [...]