Making Your Media Matter

Co-Authored by Andrea Olson and Laine Kaplan-Levenson

How do we tell stories? We tell them on porches, around fires, over drinks, on the phone, via text (or as ‘dem kids call it, ‘sext’), and now on the Internet. We have no choice but to adjust to the online environment for storytelling, and sometimes it feels like the medium has drowned the message in a sea of slick mash-ups, verbose cats and (insert current viral meme sensation here). In our quest to tell the story of the complex and unprecedented reconstruction of New Orleans from many points of view, the Land of Opportunity project has always demanded an eventual reach beyond the boundaries of a traditional feature film.   Read more...

SILVERDOCS International Documentary Film Festival is the United States’ largest showcase of the years most provocative, compelling and transforming documentaries.    Because of the festival’s reputation and scale, it attracts some of the most prominent names in the documentary film world; both well seasoned veterans and up and coming stars.Read more...

When Turkish filmmaker Nefin Dinc was a graduate student in Great Britain, she noticed that while her Greek friends and Turkish friends "liked each other a lot," they also repeated similar ideas about the other that favored their own country: "the Turkish side would say that the Greeks had 'Megali Idea', which means they want to expand and get Turkish lands still, and the Greeks would say that Turkey would attack Greece if she had the chance." Dinc realized that the basis for many Read more...

George Stoney, the extraordinary documentarian, teacher, and godfather—some say father, but I wonder if he'd be comfortable with that--of the cable access movement, has passed on peacefully at 96.Read more...

Silverdocs, the largest documentary film festival in the U.S., showcased a striking range of documentaries this year, and of course far more of them than I could ever hope to see.  The styles ranged from highly personal to big-picture essay, from meditative to thriller-paced, from celebrity-focused to featuring the people you usually pay no attention to.  The commonality?  All the ones I saw richly rewarded my attention. Read more...