by Jason Osder

In January, I had the opportunity to attend my first Sundance Film Festival as a fellow of The Sundance Institute’s Documentary Film Program. Along with William Youmans, a colleague at The George Washington University School of Media and Public Affairs and co-director with me of a new documentary, we were invited to workshop and pitch our film in development. GW and Docs In Progress asked me to reflect on this experience. I’m glad that they asked, because I’ve been thinking a lot about the role that arts institutions and education institution play in the lives of artists.

by Matthew Radcliff, Co-Organizer, WIFV/Docs In Progress Documentary Roundtable

Every other month, the WIFV/Docs In Progress Documentary Roundtable welcomes filmmakers and industry experts to discuss topics of interest to the documentary filmmaking community. On February 9, 2015, we welcomed three speakers to talk about how documentary filmmakers can navigate the world of public television. The speakers were Kathryn Washington (CPB), Robyn DeShields (DeShields Associates), and Ramona Diaz (independent filmmaker). The following are notes I made from the presentation.

K

by Guest Contributor Josh Glick, Yale University

The 10-part Showtime documentary series, The Untold History of the United States (2012), and the theatrically released documentary feature, Citizenfour (2014), are interesting for the ways they give shape to recent and more distant events and for how they push conventional boundaries of collaboration.

By Guest Contributor Josh Glick, Assistant Professor of English and Film at Hendrix College, Mellon Postdoctoral Associate at Yale University in the Integrated Humanities

Watching Life Itself  (2014) in Washington D.C.’s E Street Cinema, I felt director Steve James’s recent portrait of the late Roger Ebert strike a personal chord. As a wide-eyed teenager attending a summer program at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism in 2001, I was fortunate to be exposed to the writing of Roger Ebert, Pauline Kael, and Manny Farber as part of a broader menu of cultural criticism. Reading film reviews helped me to cultivate an appetite for all kinds of movies. Now, as it’s my job to teach others a critical awareness of how moving images shape and are shaped by the world around us, I have come to appreciate how it is often the written word that coaxes even the most reluctant spectators to become eager viewers.

by Erica Ginsberg

AFI DOCS is back for its second year under its new moniker (I give it one more year before we stop saying "The festival formerly known as Silverdocs.") While the namechange isn't the only thing which changed, this year's festival (taking place from June 18-22) looks like it is bringing back some of what we loved about the Washington DC area's one and only documentary film festival. Call it AFI DOCS 2.0.