Documentary Magazine

My relationship with cinema is, above all, the search for a voice and an image. Such a search involves finding, within facts, memory, and possible histories, mirrors in which to recognize oneself. Cinema is a way of tracing a map that allows you to situate yourself within a narrative—or, in my case, within a territory. Despite my having been born in Paraguay, my own country has always felt rather elusive; it has always felt like a territory to be unraveled.

KVIFF Industry Days. Photo credit: Film Service Festival Karlovy Vary. All images courtesy of KVIFF At the 60th edition of the Czech film festival, nonfiction storytellers called into question documentary’s ability to conjure proximity with its subjects Karlovy Vary’s 60th edition made nonfiction prominent without confining it to a dedicated section.

In 2023, after spending decades abroad, Chinese-Australian filmmaker Vee Shi returned home to Longtian, a rural area in China, hoping to persuade his parents to seek a divorce. He intended to do so by casting them in a film where they would play fictional versions of themselves, creating a space where his family could reckon with the physical abuse his father had inflicted on his mother over the years.

All photo credits: Zach Cady. All images courtesy of Art House Convergence This year’s Chicago-based independent film exhibition conference was buoyed by optimism and a clear-eyed look at the future of arthouse theaters It was halfway through the four-day Independent Film Exhibition Conference (IND/EX), when I underlined the word of the year in my notebook: eventize.

Alysa Nahmias is an Emmy-winning filmmaker and founder of the Los Angeles-based production company AJNA.

Amy Jenkins’ Adam’s Apple draws on approximately two decades of footage documenting the life of her son, Adam Sieswerda, from childhood through adolescence and transition, and later still into college. Told through their dual perspectives, the film is also a family collaboration: Sieswerda wrote it, contributed footage, and composed the score, while Jenkins drew on her practice as a visual artist to turn the family archive into an intimate, diaristic portrait.

Alfonso Cuarón’s Disclaimer. Courtesy of Apple TV Fictional depictions of nonfiction filmmakers present us as predatory narcissists who unwittingly become monstrous stand-ins for documentary practice In contemporary lore, documentarians are monstrous. They roam the streets looking for unsuspecting people to manipulate, exploit, objectify, and aestheticize—anything to get their film right.

Asghar Ahmadpour and Hamed Shakibaniya on the set of Nardeban.

The cotton-candy aesthetic that runs through much of Maite Alberdi’s latest documentary, A Child of My Own, is intentionally cloying. As we follow the real-life story of Alejandra, who successfully faked her own pregnancy for months on end and then got arrested for leaving a hospital with another woman’s baby, Alberdi washes Ale’s tale in a pink-hued aesthetic that lends it an air of fanciful fantasy. There is no commitment to gritty (or authentic) reality here, whatever that may mean.

Producer’s Diary is Documentary’s strand that offers a play-by-play of their successes and failures over the course of a specific project. These pieces, written diary-style by a producer (or a group of them), walk readers, date by date, through the arc of a production —from meeting filmmakers/subjects to shooting, post-production, festival runs, and distribution—revealing the specific ins and outs of a documentary production.