Documentary Landscapes

The National Film Board chairman’s digital strategy helped bring a fading institution into the 21st century

One thing is clear. For independent cinema to grow and thrive, it needs to find a more sustainable business model. And while there’s been a lot of hype around new forms of “alternative” (or “direct”) distribution, few people have an answer to the sixty-four thousand dollar question: “How does this new approach to distribution make me more money than the older more “traditional” approach?”

Akin to the old catch-phrase “Where’s the beef?”, today smart filmmakers are asking “Where’s the business model?”

Maybe there’s a debate going on about whether we are, in fact, in the midst of a “documentary renaissance,” but the answer seemed self-evident at the 20th annual Hot Docs, that sprawling all-nonfiction festival that serves as a deliberately inclusive snapshot of current documentary culture. Among the many, many (perhaps too many?) titles, viewers could find social issue examinations, subculture portraits, character studies, or whatever style of documentary that excited them. It was all there. Quantity doesn’t equal a renaissance, of course, but for those looking for bold, formally inventive cinema, Hot Docs had plenty of that, too.

How do you balance the demands of aesthetics and documentary truth? DW Akadamie has published a feature examining the challenges faced by photojournalists and picture editors in creating attractive and atmospheric images, without compromising their authenticity. 

The mood at the San Francisco International Film Festival's inaugural A2E: Artist to Entrepreneur direct distribution labs this past weekend might have been described as buoyantly apocalyptic.

Doc Soup Man Tom Roston reveals his favorite aspects of the 2013 Hot Docs Documentary Festival in Toronto, Canada.

Documentary production in Canada has dropped 21 per cent in five years, spurred in large part by dwindling interest from broadcasters

PBS has long been a political target of conservatives, who have accused it of having a liberal bias.

The National Film Board of Canada is one of world's the leading producers of immersive and cross-media documentaries. Loc Dao and Hugues Sweeney give an in-depth look into the process behind their award-winning projects A Journal of Insomnia and Bear 71 and discuss the past and future of the NFB as well as its role in the global media ecosystem.

Can photography impact the way that we view our environment? Part art and part document, does this medium have the capacity to really change our minds? This question, which has a semi-permanent place in the back of my mind, rose to the surface most recently at Landmark: the Fields of Photography, an exhibition that brings together a diverse range of photographers to show the brazen, and sometimes beautiful, reality of our impact on the environment.