POV's daily list of essential reading for the documentary and independent filmmaking community.

Tom Roston remembers veteran documentarian and mentor Albert Maysles.

"[It] was, by turns, quirky and smart, comic and thematically serious, very personal yet highly entertaining, with an auteur's voice stamped indelibly on every frame. It was pure revelation."

POV is counting down the top documentary stories of 2011 on New Year's Eve 2012.

Who is the director? Albert Maysles and Werner Herzog take two positions after DOC NYC's opening night premiere of Herzog's doc Into the Abyss.

The director of the self-distributed documentary (opening in New York City on Friday, September 23, 2011), talks about the film and his vérité influences.

Movie posters have always been a hip form of art; the unique images designed for movies such as Anatomy of a Murder, Vertigo and Last Temptation of Christ are as much works of art themselves as they are stunning sales pitches for the movies they were made for. (Mea culpa; throughout my teen years, I […]

So, how about those Golden Globes! What, who cares? That’s right — all of you doc lovers know that the real big night in documentary film wasn’t in L.A. on Sunday (the Hollywood Foreign Press doesn’t even have a nonfiction filmmaking category) — it was last Friday, when the third annual Cinema Eye Honors took […]

As promised, it’s time for my “Best Documentary Characters of All Time” list. You may be wondering: How does one go about compiling a list of best characters from nonfiction films? These “characters” aren’t the products of imagination and craft, after all; they are real people. But, wait, don’t we have the expression, “He/she is […]

Finally — the post that you’ve all been waiting for: my top 5 greatest doc moments. You’ll note that POV’s Ruiyan wins an honorable mention for beating me to the punch in the comments section from last week, with her admiration for Harlan County, USA. What a moment, eh? I agree, and had ranked it […]

Every Monday, independent journalist Tom Roston checks in and writes about the world of documentaries in his column, Doc Soup. This week, POV is airing 1969’s Johnny Cash: The Man, His World, His Music, a real time capsule of a documentary about the legendary country musician. I am particularly struck by how director Robert Elstrom […]

Last week, at the premiere for Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden? director Morgan Spurlock asked everyone who had worked on the film to stand up. I’d say a good 20% of the audience rose from their seats. “Wow, that is a lot of people. We should have had a test screening with […]

One of my favorite bands in the 1980s, Depeche Mode, used to sing: “get the balance right.” I might be the first person to quote David Gahan in defense of the mission of the nonfiction writer (what a way to hack at my own credibility), but that’s the state I’m in. I have always tried […]

The International Documentary Association (IDA) is celebrating their 25th anniversary this year, and last week they announced their list of the top 25 documentary films of all time. The list was tabulated from a poll of IDA members, which number over 3,000 and include filmmakers, executives and academics. Hoop Dreams snagged the top spot from […]