Ruby in Paradise is a 1993 film written and directed by Victor Nunez, starring Ashley Judd, Todd Field, Bentley Mitchum, Allison Dean, and Dorothy Lyman. An homage to Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen, the film is a character study about a young woman who escapes her small town in Tennessee for a new life in coastal Florida. The film marks Judd’s first starring role.
Lauren Greenfield is an American artist, documentary photographer, and documentary filmmaker. She has published four photographic monographs, directed four documentary features, produced four traveling exhibitions, and published in magazines throughout the world.
Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision is a 1994 American documentary film made by Freida Lee Mock. It explores the life of American artist Maya Lin, whose best-known work is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. The film won the 1994 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. While a number of movie critics objected to it receiving this award, Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision met with mostly positive reviews, garnering praise for its look at the controversy surrounding the Vietnam Veterans Memorial design and Lin's growth as an artist.
Color Adjustment is a 1992 documentary film that traces 40 years of race relations and the representation of African Americans through the lens of prime-time television entertainment, scrutinizing television's racial myths. Narrated by Ruby Dee, it is a sequel to Riggs’s Ethnic Notions, this time examining racial stereotypes in the broadcast age.
Patrick Creadon is an American filmmaker primarily known for his work in documentaries. His first film, Wordplay, profiled New York Times crossword editor Will Shortz and premiered at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. The film screened in over 500 theatres nationwide and became the second-highest grossing documentary of that year. His second film, I.O.U.S.A., is a non-partisan examination of America's national debt problem and forecast the global financial crisis of 2007-2008. I.O.U.S.A. premiered at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival and was later named one of the Top 5 Documentaries of the Year by film critic Roger Ebert.
The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers is a 2009 documentary film directed by Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith. The film follows Daniel Ellsberg and explores the events leading up to the 1971 publication of the Pentagon Papers, which exposed the top-secret military history of the United States' involvement in Vietnam.
If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front is a 2011 American documentary film by filmmaker Marshall Curry. It tells the story of activist Daniel G. McGowan of the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), from his first arson attacks in 1996 to his 2005 arrest by the Department of Justice. The film also examines the ethics of the ELF at large and how terrorism is to be defined.
Heidi Ewing is an American documentary filmmaker and the co-director of Jesus Camp, The Boys of Baraka, 12th & Delaware, DETROPIA, Norman Lear: Just Another Version of YouOne of Us, Love Fraud (series), I Carry You With Me (narrative) and Endangered.
Life Itself is a 2014 American biographical documentary film about Chicago film critic Roger Ebert, directed by Steve James and produced by Zak Piper, James and Garrett Basch. The film is based on Ebert's 2011 memoir of the same name. It premiered at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival and was an official selection at the 67th Cannes Film Festival. The 41st Telluride Film Festival hosted a special screening of the film on August 28, 2014. Magnolia Pictures released the film theatrically in the United States and simultaneously via video on demand platforms on July 4, 2014.
Motto Pictures is a documentary production company based in Brooklyn, New York specializing in producing and executive producing documentary features. Motto secures financing, builds distribution strategies, and creatively develops films, and has produced over 25 feature documentaries and won numerous awards.
Isidore Bethel is a French-American filmmaker whom Filmmaker named one of the "25 New Faces of Independent Film" in 2020. The films he edits, directs, and produces use filmmaking to make sense of overwhelming experiences and touch on recurrent themes of displacement, grief, therapy, aging, trauma, and sexuality. His first feature film as director, Liam, premiered at the Boston LGBT Film Festival in 2018 and received the Jury Prize in the Documentary section of the Paris LGBTQ+ Film Festival. His second film, Acts of Love, co-directed by French actor Francis Leplay, premiered at Hot Docs and received the Tacoma Film Festival's Best Feature Award in 2021.
Jason DaSilva is a director, producer, writer and disability rights activist best known for the Emmy Award-winning documentary, When I Walk. The Emmy award-winning film follows his diagnosis of primary progressive multiple sclerosis for seven years as he progresses from cane, to walker, to wheelchair. He is also the founder of the non-profit organization AXS Lab and of AXS Map, a crowd sourced Google map based platform which rates the accessibility of businesses.
Icarus is a 2017 American documentary film by Bryan Fogel. It chronicles Fogel's exploration of the option of doping to win an amateur cycling race and happening upon a major international doping scandal when he asks for the help of Grigory Rodchenkov, the head of the Russian anti-doping laboratory. It premiered at Sundance Film Festival on January 20, 2017, and was awarded the U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award. Netflix acquired the distribution rights and released Icarus globally on August 4, 2017. At the 90th Academy Awards, the film won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
Alysa Nahmias is an American filmmaker and the founder of Ajna Films.
Dick Johnson Is Dead is a 2020 American documentary film directed by Kirsten Johnson and co-written by Johnson and Nels Bangerter. The story focuses on Johnson's father Richard, who suffers from dementia, portraying different ways—some of them violent "accidents"—in which he could ultimately die. In each scenario, the elderly Johnson plays along with his daughter's black humor and imaginative fantasies. The film premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Special Jury Award for Innovation in Non-fiction Storytelling. It was released on Netflix on October 2, 2020.
Homeroom is a 2021 American documentary film directed and produced by Peter Nicks. The film, which is the final chapter of Nicks' Oakland trilogy, follows the lives of the Oakland High School class of 2020 as they try to make the most of their final year in high school amidst district budget cuts and ultimately the COVID-19 pandemic and the George Floyd protests. Ryan Coogler and Davis Guggenheim, the latter of whom made a similar film, Waiting for "Superman", were executive producers on this film.
The 2022 Sundance Film Festival took place from January 20 to 30, 2022. Due to COVID-19 pandemic protocol, it was initially intended to be an in-person/virtual hybrid festival, but on January 5, 2022, it was announced that the in-person components would be scrapped in favor of a wholly virtual festival due to the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant. The first lineup of competition films was announced on December 9, 2021.
The PBS Short Film Festival, previously known as the PBS Online Film Festival, is an annual film festival focused on independent short films, hosted by American public broadcaster PBS. The festival began in 2012. In 2020, the name changed from the PBS Online Film Festival to the PBS Short Film Festival. In 2021, the festival replaced online voting and popularity awards with a jury prize, selected by a jury composed of filmmakers, producers and PBS executives.
The UnRedacted, first released as Jihad Rehab, is a 2022 documentary film which follows a group of former jihadists who have been released from Guantanamo Bay detention camp to the Prince Mohammed Bin Nayef Center for Advice and Care, a rehabilitation center for Islamist jihadis in Saudi Arabia. The film was conceived and directed by Meg Smaker. It premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival in the U.S. Documentary Competition on 22 January 2022 and earned generally "strong" reviews, described as "humanizing" and powerful.
Meg Smaker is an American documentary filmmaker, editor, and producer known for the documentary shorts Boxeadora (2015) and Methel Island (2014) and especially for her feature documentary Jihad Rehab (2022),, and the controversy surrounding it. Her films have won several awards.
