The Documentary Life

We’re back! Season 2 of the TDL podcast has officially begun…

Pamela B. Green has made her first documentary feature, Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy Blache. And it is about one of the true …

It is the week of giving thanks, as we celebrate Thanksgiving here in the U.S. Coincidentally, it is episode #100, our last episode of Season One of the podcast. And I am joined by my better half, th…

Peter Mortimer has been climbing and making outdoor adventure films for the past twenty years through his company, Sender Films. His company has put out some of the most recognizable outdoor adventur…

Maureen Gosling is not only the editor of my favourite documentary film of all time, but quite possibly my favourite film of all time. Period. That film is Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams, starring Wern…

Doc Society (formerly BritDoc) is a non-profit that has been working directly with documentary filmmakers since its inception in 2005, to make the most impact in the world with their art. Whether wit…

Jon Kasbe may not be a name that you are familiar with… yet. Unless you are intricately connected to film festivals or an avid follower of short documentary films, you may not know of this filmmaker’…

Steve James is one of the most recognizable names in documentary. Many of us #doclifers have been inspired by his films and the way in which he makes them. He was on TDL back on the eve of the Academ…

No one knows documentary film distribution in quite the way that film distro wizard, Jon Reiss does. The founder of Hybrid Cinema and author of film distribution Bible, Think Outside the Box Office j…

Mat Hames is one of the few, fortunate ones in our doc world that makes his entire living doing his passion of documentary film. Whether it is through he and his wife’s company, Alpheus Media, or thr…

An often overlooked aspect of film funding is the individual donor. Which is kind of surprising, given that statistics tend to show that 50 percent (and sometimes more) make up the overall funding fo…

Getting Real is a biennial conference put on by International Documentary Association (IDA) to foster three days of documentary media discussion, with documentary filmmaker’s sustainability at the co…

If you are like so many of us doc filmmakers, there have been numerous times where you have questioned or doubted whether or not you should or perhaps even could make a documentary film. There are ev…

Every once in awhile a young filmmaker comes out of nowhere and takes the doc world by storm. And this year that name seems to be Bing Liu.

And his doc Minding the Gap seems to be all over the place …

Last week, #doclifer Josh Davidsburg took advantage of the TDL Hotline and left a message with us asking about advice for a film festival strategy. Not only did we answer his question and offer up so…

Alison Wright has been traveling and working in 150 countries and doing documentary photography for 35+ years. She is one of the single most impressive human beings that you may ever meet. She has li…

As a doc filmmaker, how many times have you been asked what your favorite documentary film is? If you’re anything like me, it’s a nearly impossible and futile question to answer. There are just too m…

One of the biggest documentary hits of the summer has been Tim Wardles’ Three Identical Strangers, a film that follows the incredible true story of triplets who learned of one another’s existence onl…

Last week we attended Podcast Movement 2018 in Philadelphia, USA. It was a great refresher for us – even an eye opener on some levels – in terms of what we are doing with the podcast as well as what …

There is something – many things, really – that can be said about having a conversation with Timothy George Kelly (dir., Brexitannia) on the current state of documentary film (or Brexit, for that mat…

Pedram Shojai has been embodying the doc life now for years. In fact, one might argue that he was doing so even before he was making documentaries, building his life to his passions of Taoism, Kung F…