Abby Sun

Secure in its June slot, and without the gravitational balance of the Tribeca Film Institute’s artist support and funding programs, Tribeca Festival’s traditional coziness with corporate sponsors has proliferated in recent years (and surely must also be pandemic-related). The film selections mostly reflect this unfortunate industry-wide trend. But between the celebrity- and music-driven biodocs that stuff Tribeca’s lineup, the festival also boasts stateside premieres of hotly anticipated creative documentaries, exciting debuts from independent filmmakers, and one of the best-curated film festival immersive sections in the world. For this recommendations list, we pulled together a mix of nonfiction projects that we’re anticipating will become the festival’s discoveries.

Sheffield DocFest has survived operating as a carousel, rotating through festival directors and programmers every couple of years for the last decade. (Through the tumult, a mostly-local operations and industry programming staff remained relatively constant.) One sign of the festival’s continued relevance to UK nonfiction film production is that Brits simply refer to the festival as “DocFest,” as if no other documentary festival in the festival could be confused for this one. Sheffield also maintains global aspirations to be a major launch pad for festival creative documentaries.

The two-night event, “Documentary Presents Claire Simon in Conversation,” relaunches IDA’s longstanding Conversation Series with the most acclaimed documentary filmmakers of our times. On August 1, 2023, French filmmaker Claire Simon sat down with me in a free-wheeling discussion of her extensive body of work, its formal fluidity between documentary and fiction, and her belief in the capacity of every person to be the center of the story. 

Dear Readers,

Sundance’s hold on worldwide documentary market trends remains in full force, even if its status is now based more on historical precedence than actual sales of films with available rights. For the upcoming 2024 edition (January 18–28), the programmers—headed again by Kim Yutani—seem to have steered clear of anything that might be as controversial as Jihad Rehab (2022; also known as The UnRedacted) or as ethically questionable as Beyond Utopia (2023).

Dear Readers,

To counter the decentralization of local film production, BAVC Media (Bay Area Video Coalition) has just released the Bay Area Film Production Memo. The memo summarizes the tax incentives, institutions, collaborations, and filmmaker pipeline infrastructure of the San Francisco-Bay Area and, crucially, compares them to structures that exist in other U.S. regions.

With a flurry of announcements in the last six months, the Doris Duke Foundation’s Building Bridges program has stepped squarely into the film funding space in a concerted effort to broaden the pipeline of Muslim-American filmmakers in media and entertainment. The program is partnering with a handful of film institutions, most notably the Islamic Scholarship Fund, the Center for Asian American Media, Sundance Institute, and the Muslim Public Affairs Council’s Hollywood Bureau, on a series of public activations, funds, and fellowships. The programs have taken place in a variety of spaces, from Sundance festival to IDA’s own Getting Real. The activities caught our attention.

Dear Readers,