Documentary Field Notes and Flashpoints: category

Barry Greenwald’s terrific documentary The Experimental Eskimos reveals an extraordinary attempt at social engineering. The film follows three Inuit, Peter Ittinuar, Zebedee Nungak and Eric Tagoona, who, as 12-year-old boys, were shipped South in the early 1960s from their homes in the Canadian Arctic to attend white public schools in Ottawa. The consequences for their [...]

I have just spent two weeks teaching at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington State. More on my course another day, but I also had the opportunity to speak to the students and faculty about Documentary in the Context of Globalization. I talked about how the new digital technologies have democratized access to audio-visual production [...]

French would be the logical language for this post, but I’d like to share this content with people outside Quebec. This past week was Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette week. This extremely talented, 31-year-old Montreal director launched a novel, held a vernissage for a photo exhibition, and signed a terrific documentary broadcast on Radio-Canada Sunday night at 10.30. [...]

This blog post was written by my young colleague Tobi Elliott, who is helping me with several projects right now. One of Canada’s recent successes in the interactive documentary universe is waterlife.nfb.ca, a site based on director Kevin McMahon’s documentary film of the same name. Waterlife the film (Special Jury Prize for a Canadian Feature [...]

This week: following my previous post on the NFB‘s multi-platform project GDP: Measuring the Human Side of the Canadian Economic Crisis, here is an interview with Hélène Choquette, the project’s director and coordinator. The above image is pulled from the excellent photo essay, Poetic Justice – one of Hélène’s own compositions – featuring the young [...]

An English version of this blog post will follow shortly, with thanks to Tobi Elliott. Cette semaine: suite à mon petit texte sur le projet multi-plateforme PIB: L’indice humain de la crise économique canadienne de l’ONF, voici une entrevue avec Hélène Choquette, la réalisatrice-coordinatrice du projet. L’image ci-dessus est tiré de l’excellent photo-essai “Une chance [...]

This week at Sunny Side of the Doc at La Rochelle, the NFB and Arte.tv France announced a collaboration for the production of webdocumentaries. They will produce one documentary per year, with a budget of $100,000 CDN. The two companies already have considerable experience with webdocs. For almost a year, the NFB has hosted a [...]

Cette semaine à Sunny Side of the Doc à La Rochelle, l’ONF et ARTE France ont annoncé une collaboration pour la production de documentaires pour le web. Ils produiront un documentaire par année, avec un budget de 100.000 $ Can. Les deux ont déjà une expérience considérable avec les webdocs. Depuis presque un an déjà, [...]

Last Friday night, Ole Gjerstad‘s and Joelie Sanguya‘s film Qimmit: A Clash of Two Truths premiered at the Cinéma Parallèle as part of the Présence autochtone aboriginal film festival. Co-produced by Piksuk Media Inc. and the National Film Board of Canada, the film won the Rigoberta Menchu Second Prize at the 20th First Peoples’ Festival [...]

I have heard many people say that multi-platform production is ‘just another way to tell a story.’ It sounds simple, clear-cut, reassuring. But is that it? I think not. There is a huge difference in the way you can communicate content with a multi-platform project. When you tell a linear story, you are grappling with [...]