Addie Morfoot: Last News

William Earl Variety and Rolling Stone announced on Friday the final lineup for their Truth Seekers Summit, presented by Showtime Documentary Films, on Aug. 25 in New York.  The summit coincides with the Truth Seekers journal, a collaboration between Variety and Rolling Stone.

Addie Morfoot Contributor In our current tumultuous political climate, with the concept of truth seemingly tested daily, the future of democracy feels like it’s hanging in the balance. Variety and Rolling Stone will explore some of the ways the media industry is navigating the disinformation age during the fourth annual Truth Seekers Summit. CNN anchor and senior political correspondent Abby Phillip, Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney and Susan Zirinsky, president of CBS News’ See It Now Studios, are among the luminaries who will attend the Aug.

Addie Morfoot Contributor Documentaries about the rise and fall of media company Vice, former Republican U.S. Rep. Adam Kinzinger and disability rights activist Patrice Jetter are heading to the Toronto Film Festival.

Addie Morfoot Contributor Celebrity documentaries are a dime a dozen these days. But celebrity docus that don’t serve as an infomercial for a star are rare. Laurent Bouzereau‘s HBO documentary “Faye,” about Faye Dunaway, is one of those rare celebrity docus.

Addie Morfoot Contributor Ken Burns attended the 29th annual Nantucket Film Festival, which concludes Sunday, to give audiences a glimpse of his latest PBS documentary “Leonardo da Vinci.” The two-part, four-hour doc — directed by Burns, his daughter Sarah Burns and his son-in-law David McMahon — explores the life and work of the 15th-century polymath. “Leonardo da Vinci,” which begins airing in November, marks the first project Burns has directed that unfolds entirely outside the continental United States.

Addie Morfoot Contributor In “Take Me Out Feet First,” a new docuseries now streaming on Amazon Prime Video, director Serene Meshel-Dillman chronicles people’s right to choose medical aid in dying.The six-part docuseries, made in partnership with the nonprofit advocacy organization Compassion & Choices, profiles 25 terminally ill people, their families, and friends, as well as experts in the medical field who advocate for MAID. The series chronicles people who have taken control of how their final days will play out.

Addie Morfoot Contributor Producer Ina Fichman, Oscar nominated for “Fire of Love,” was at the 25th edition of Hot Docs Forum on Tuesday to pitch her latest project “Ba’s Book.” Directed by Canadian filmmaker Ashley Da-Le Duong, the hybrid docu focuses on Duong’s father and his experiences living through both the Vietnam War and the Iranian Revolution. “Let me take you somewhere for a moment,” Duong told the Forum audience and participating distributors including Arte, A24 and Al Jazeera. “It’s 1968 and a young man stands in the middle of a rice paddy field and looks up and sees a helicopter.

Addie Morfoot Contributor MipDoc keynote speaker Dawn Porter is coming to Cannes to discuss not only the challenging doc marketplace, but also how to work and prosper within it. In the last few years the doc industry has favored a handful of big-name filmmakers, like Porter, who are commissioned to make one-off films or docuseries. Over the last 12 months two of Porter’s docus were released: “Deadlocked: How America Shaped the Supreme Court” which was financed and distributed by Showtime and “The Lady Bird Diaries,” which was financed and distributed by Hulu/ABC News.

Addie Morfoot Contributor Documentary filmmaking has never been a profession one enters into to get rich — though for a brief period it seemed possible. Cable expanded documentary’s reach to wider audiences in the 1980’s and 1990’s, and films like “Fahrenheit 9/11,” “March of the Penguins,” and “An Inconvenient Truth” became legitimate box-office breakthroughs, but nonfiction features on the whole remained something of a stepchild within the larger Hollywood ecosystem until 2017, when Netflix acquired Brian Fogel’s “Icarus” for $5 million.

Many documentary filmmakers want their work on the big screen and not small. So, what gives? Why isn’t that happening?

Addie Morfoot Contributor Stormy Daniels cried and laughed during the SXSW world premiere of “Stormy,” a Peacock documentary about the porn star who made national headlines when it was revealed that Donald Trump‘s lawyer Michael Cohen paid her $130,000 to keep quiet about her alleged affair with the former president. “Fuck Trump,” Daniels said onstage following the March 8 screening.

Addie Morfoot Contributor In 2013, Angela Patton gave a TEDWomen talk that described a father-daughter dance for incarcerated dads and their daughters. That talk was viewed over a million times and inspired the documentary “Daughters,” which has its world premiere Monday at the Sundance Film Festival. In the film, Patton, who in the past decade has helped arrange approximately 15 Daddy Daughter Dances across the nation, and co-director Natalie Rae follow four young girls preparing for the event with their fathers in a prison in Washington, D.C.

Addie Morfoot Contributor Carla Gutierrez is known in the documentary community for her work as a film editor. She was behind Oscar nominated docs “RBG” and “La Corona” as well as Emmy winner “Julia.” But in 2022, after two decades of editing, Gutierrez decided to direct “Frida,” a docu about iconic Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, which has its world premiere at Sundance Film Festival this week. “A few months before we started working on ‘Frida,’ I would say, ‘I’m really content with editing.’ I had no thoughts of directing, but her story really pulled me in and I realized I have to direct this (film).

Addie Morfoot Contributor Ben Fowlie, executive and artistic director of the Points North Institute and founder of Camden Intl. Film Festival, is stepping down from his position after 20 years with the organization. Longtime board member Rick Rector will serve as interim executive director until a search for a permanent replacement is completed.

Addie Morfoot Contributor In “Sly,” director Thom Zimny (“Springsteen on Broadway,” “Elvis Presley: The Searcher”) captures a side of Sylvester Stallone seldom seen. The 95-minute docu exposes a relatable, vulnerable man who is often thought to be the movie characters he made iconic — Rocky Balboa or John Rambo.Born in 1946, Stallone grew up in New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen with little money and a father who might have hated him. Zimny’s docu reveals that the fraught upbringing turned out to work in Stallone’s favor when it came to Hollywood.

Addie Morfoot Contributor Writer, actor, filmmaker, studio head and media mogul Tyler Perry is the latest celebrity to be the subject of a documentary, “Maxine’s Baby: The Tyler Perry Story.” The title nods to Perry’s late mother, Willie Maxine Perry, who died in 2009. Directed by Armani Ortiz, the documentary is a revealing look at the entertainment behemoth’s abusive childhood, his time as a homeless playwright and his rise to media superstar. Ortiz began filming Perry in 2016, just a year after moving to Atlanta from New York to work at Tyler Perry Studios.

Addie Morfoot Contributor Documentary veterans Natalie Bullock Brown, Kirsten Johnson, Mary Lampson and Jacqueline Olive are the inaugural documentary film fellows for the documentary film in the public interest research initiative by Harvard’s Shorenstein Center.As the first cohort of doc film fellows, the foursome will join the center for the fall 2023 semester. There, each fellow will conduct research and do public education activities about questions facing the documentary film field and civic information.Led by Shorenstein Center’s director Nancy Gibbs and doc filmmaker Sara Archambault, the initiative, which was established in March, will work to examine the challenges facing the documentary field and their impacts on civic life and information.“In this challenging moment for media and our information ecosystem, we are excited that the Shorenstein Center can provide the support and infrastructure to drive renewed and creative thinking about complex issues in the documentary film space,” says Gibbs.Archambault adds: “As the initiative considers the vital role of documentary film in our civic life, this group of fellows will advance research in documentary ethics, practices, pathways to audiences, and new directions for the field.

Addie Morfoot Contributor Writers and actors aren’t the only people in Hollywood grappling with the impact generative artificial intelligence will have on the entertainment industry. Documentarians are also concerned about AI and what it means for the ethical standards and practices of nonfiction filmmaking.

Addie Morfoot Contributor Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia is the latest high-net-worth individual to get involved in the documentary business. As a producer on Waad Al-Kateab’s “We Dare to Dream,” about the refugee Olympic team at the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo, Gebbia not only helped fund the project, he also played an active role in the film’s pre-production, production, and edit. “We Dare to Dream” is Al-Kateab’s second feature docu. In her first film, “For Sama,” which was nominated for an Academy Award, the Syrian director used her camera to capture her daily life during the siege of Aleppo.Gebbia produced “We Dare to Dream” alongside Violet Films’ Joanna Natasegara (“Virunga”) and Abigail Anketell-Jones (“The Edge of Democracy”) and XTR’s Bryn Mooser and Kathryn Everett. Angelina Jolie recently signed on as an executive producer on the project. Gebbia joins fellow philanthropists Laurene Powell Jobs (Concordia Studio), Jeff Skoll (Participant Media) and Jim Swartz (Impact Partners) in the docu investment business.

Addie Morfoot Contributor Documentaries about celebrities are a dime a dozen these days. But docus about celebrities that don’t feel like infomercials and instead are raw, informative, and honest about their star subjects are few and far between. HBO Sport’s two-part docuseries “Golden Boy,” about Oscar De La Hoya, fits into the jaw-droppingly candid, no-holds-bar category.In the first three minutes of the doc, directed by Fernando Villena, the Olympic boxing gold medalist and multi-world title-winning professional boxer, who is now 50 years old, says, “Everyone thought they knew me.

Addie Morfoot Contributor With 109 narrative and documentary features, as well as a bevy of shorts, TV series, podcasts, games and live music events, the Tribeca Festival offers a wide range of media in its 22nd year.“It’s all about creating an entire festival program that harmonizes together,” says Tribeca Festival Director and VP of programming, Cara Cusuamno. “The idea of discovery is a touchpoint that we come back to quite a lot.

Addie Morfoot Contributor Corporate consolidation, along with shrinking publicity budgets and streaming services’ willingness to bury their own content, have made film festivals and series increasingly desirable to documentary filmmakers who are not only seeking distribution, but also to those nonfiction helmers who have found a platform for their work. The rocky landscape has made the competition fierce for a slot at not only top-tier festivals, but also regional film events like New York’s Rooftop Films’ Summer Series. Over the course of the last year, Rooftop Films president Dan Nuxoll received 3,500 film submissions for the nonprofit organization’s 27th annual Summer Series, which kicks off on May 25. Only 23 feature films and seven shorts were accepted. (Not all films have been announced.)