A beautiful, poetic collage of memory, history, poetry, and lived experience, in all its joys, sorrows, fears, hopes, triumphs, and tragedies … rendered in exquisite visual terms, creating an artful collective chronicle of history.
– Christopher Bourne, Screen Anarchy
An examination of one generation’s complex and diverse navigation between public and private experience.
– David Finkelstein, Film International Continue reading “Doc Talk: Lynne Sachs (Feb. 25, 2019)”
Congratulations to Lauren Ashley Belfer, Doc Studies 2010 alumna, whose first feature (and award winning!) documentary Wrestle got picked up by Oscilloscope for theatrical release!
The film is a verite portrait of four young men on a high school wrestling team at a failing school in Huntsville, Alabama. It opens at Cinema East Village next Friday, 2/22.
See link and don’t miss it!! https://www.citycinemas.com/villageeast/film/wrestle
“Nailed it! seeks to uncover the fascinating but little known history of Vietnamese immigrants in America’s hazardous beauty industry.”
– Jamilah King, Color Lines Continue reading “Doc Talk: Adele Free Pham (Feb. 4, 2019)”
An inspired and intimate portrait of a place and its people, HALE COUNTY THIS MORNING, THIS EVENING follows two young African American men from rural Hale County, Alabama, over the course of five years. The audience is invited to experience the mundane and monumental, birth and death, the quotidian and the sublime. Continue reading “Doc Talk: RaMell Ross (Dec. 3, 2018)”
THE PAIN OF OTHERS
Screening and Q&A with filmmaker PENNY LANE
The Pain of Others is a found footage film about a mysterious illness with symptoms which could be borrowed from a horror film, and the YouTube community formed by its sufferers, who may or may not be imagining the whole thing. Continue reading “Doc Talk: Penny Lane (Nov. 26, 2018)”
“Eye-opening, meticulous, and haunting movie.” – Owen Gleiberman, Variety
“The film begins to raise its subject back up to a towering state of wisdom and foresight.” – Hank Stuever, Washington Post
King in the Wilderness chronicles the final chapters of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s life, revealing a conflicted leader who faced an onslaught of criticism from both sides of the political spectrum. While the Black Power movement saw his nonviolence as weakness, and President Lyndon B. Johnson saw his anti-Vietnam War speeches as irresponsible, Dr. King’s unyielding belief in peaceful protest became a testing point for a nation on the brink of chaos.
Maya Mumma, ACE, was an editor on the Academy Award winning documentary O.J.: Made in America for which she was honored with the 2016 Best Editing award from the LA Film Critics Association, an ACE Eddie Award, and a Primetime Emmy.
Maya began her career in the edit room of the Academy Award nominated documentary Restrepo, which won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival. She has gone on to edit the Emmy nominated films Which Way Is the Front Line From Here: The Life and Time of Tim Hetherington (HBO) and Whoopi Goldberg Presents Moms Mabley (HBO), the Peabody Award winning Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown (HBO), A Journey of a Thousand Miles: Peacekeepers (TIFF 2015, PBS 2018), the Netflix original series Daughters of Destiny (Television Academy Honor), King in the Wilderness (HBO), which premiered at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival, and most recently John McCain: For Whom the Bell Tolls (HBO).
Originally from Oklahoma, Maya has a BA in Social Anthropology from Boston University, an MA in Media Studies from the New School, and is a graduate of the New School’s intensive Documentary Media Studies program. In addition to editing, she has taught filmmaking to New York City public school students and teachers, and served as a mentor for the Firelight Media Documentary Lab and the Karen Schmeer Film Editing Fellowship.
Doc Talk recorded November 5th at The New School
How do you fund a documentary film? Where do you go, and what do you need to know? And – provided you secure the funding – how do you get your film out into the world and make sure people hear about it?
Our guest, Jessica Edwards, has a broad background in the film industry as a director, producer and publicist. Her first feature-length documentary, Mavis!, about soul music legend Mavis Staples and her family group The Staple Singers, premiered on HBO in 2016 and was awarded a Peabody for distinguished achievement in documentary filmmaking.
Her award-winning debut short Seltzer Works premiered at SxSW and was broadcast on the PBS series POV in 2010. Her other documentaries including Tugs (2011), The Landfill (2012) and Slowerblack (2017) have screened at film festivals around the world including Sundance, SxSW, Hot Docs, Full Frame, IDFA and dozens of others.
Edwards is a Vice-President at the VR content studio Scenic, where she has collaborated with outlets like the Wall Street Journal on 360 video documentaries for Samsung Gear, Google Daydream and other VR platforms.
As an independent film publicist for over 10 years, Edwards worked with such filmmakers as Sofia Coppola, David Lynch, the Coen Brothers, Gus Van Sant and many others.
In 2015 she was named 10 Documakers to watch by Variety. Edwards holds a MA in Media Studies from The New School in New York City and a BA in Cinema Studies from Concordia University in her native Canada. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Doc Talk recorded October 15th at The New School
If you are in NYC, don’t miss the screenings of our Doc Studies alumni in DOC NYC Documentary Film Festival (Nov 8-15): Continue reading “Doc Studies alumni in the DOC NYC Documentary Film Festival”
The New School Doc Studies 