Congratulations to the filmmakers of The Betrayal (Nerakhoon) for winning the 2010 Creative Arts Primetime Emmy Award for Exceptional Merit in Nonfiction Filmmaking! Filmmakers Ellen Kuras and Thavisouk Phrasavath along with producer Flora Fernandez-Marengo, co-producer Chiemi Karasawa and POV’s Executive Producer Simon Kilmurry were in Los Angeles this past Saturday night to accept the award […]

It was announced this morning that two POV films have received nominations for a primetime Emmy award in the Exceptional Merit In Nonfiction Filmmaking category. Congratulations to POV filmmakers Steven Sebring, Ellen Kuras and Thavisouk Phrasavath! Patti Smith: Dream of Life aired on POV on December 30, 2009. Shot over 11 years by renowned fashion […]

What if Robert Flaherty had given the Inuit named Allakariallak a credit as co-director of Nanook of the North? Or if Davis Guggenheim shared the bill with Al Gore on An Inconvenient Truth? Would those films be regarded in a different light? We know that the collaboration between documentary filmmakers and their subjects is what […]

Today is World Refugee Day, a time to think about the more than 42 million people around the world who have been uprooted and displaced from their homes.

POV series producer Yance Ford attended the Cinema Eye Awards on Sunday. The Cinema Eye Honors were held on Sunday at the stunning Times Center on West 41st Street in Manhattan. Believe it or not, you might have seen the Times Center, or at least the building that it’s situated in, before: last summer when […]

It’s been a while since I’ve done a list (see my 10 most lugubrious docs and the 10 sexiest) — and as an unabashed advocate of the genre, here’s another. What makes for a great moment in a documentary? That can sometimes be a complicated issue, because some of the “greatest” moments are also the […]

Academy Award forecasting is such fun. I wish I could put together a chart with the various factors that I see determining the film with the best odds of winning the doc Oscar this year. Without a graphics department on my side, I’ll just mention the main variables: quality of film (yes, that matters!), popularity […]

Academy Award nominations were announced this morning, and some of the most critically acclaimed documentaries of the year took their rightful place on the list of nominees: The Betrayal (Nerakhoon) by Ellen Kuras and Thavisouk Phrasavath (POV 2009) Encounters at the End of the World by Werner Herzog The Garden by Scott Hamilton Kennedy Man […]