Documentary Field Notes and Flashpoints: category

My young colleague Tobi Elliott who helps me with this blog has this to say: I recently spent a morning browsing the NFB’s excellent resource of film playlists. The playlists have been a feature of the new www.nfb.ca website since it launched in January 2009. Invited guests and their own staff have grouped together films [...]

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 [...]

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.) [...]

It is a year since the devastating earthquake in Haiti, and just about every generalist television network has been broadcasting special programming. I found most of it to be competently done and well-meaning, but extremely predictable and pretty superficial. This is the curse of television. Just wait till the 10th anniversary of September 11th later [...]

You are probably familiar with the series 7 and Up by British filmmaker Michael Apted, who has been following fourteen individuals since 1964, filming them every seven years. Well, my colleagues Robbie Hart and Luc Côté have done a variation on that idea, with their film Turning 32. Sixteen years ago they released a series [...]

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, [...]