Barbara Kopple: Last News

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Documentary festival IDFA will host the international premieres of Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi’s music film “Personality Crisis: One Night Only” and Barbara Kopple’s “Gumbo Coalition” as part of its Masters program, as well as the world premiere of Coco Schrijber’s “Look What You Made Me Do.” The selection includes the work of several renowned directors who have reinvented their cinematic language. Patricio Guzmán breaks from his poetic approach to adopt a more direct, political form of filmmaking with “My Imaginary Country,” centering on the October 2019 protests in Santiago. Gianfranco Rosi directs his first archive-based film “In viaggio,” which sees Pope Francis’ journeys as a map of the human condition. Jørgen Leth and Andreas Koefoed co-direct a film together for the first time with “Music for Black Pigeons,” a reflection on aging through jazz music, and Ruth Beckermann’s “Mutzenbacher” takes a look at a controversial erotic novel through an elaborate casting call.

Miami Beach city commission meetings typically don’t generate national and international news, but that could happen Wednesday.

The blowback continues over the Miami Beach mayor’s threat to close a movie theater over its screening of the Oscar-winning documentary . More than 600 people including several Oscar winners have signed an open letter to the city decrying the potential shutdown of indie theater O Cinema as “an attack on freedom of expression, the right of artists to tell their stories, and a violation of the First Amendment.”

EXCLUSIVE: Hamptons Doc Fest announced the full slate of films today for the upcoming 17th edition of the event in Sag Habor, New York, and revealed a group of honorees that includes documentary titan Michael Moore.

ESPN has aired over 150 films in its sports doc strand 30 for 30 including The Two Escobars, Four Falls of Buffalo and Lance as well as Ezra Edelman’s O.J: Made In America.

Oscar-nominated director Matthew Heineman and late filmmaker Nancy Buirski will be honored at the Hamptons Doc Fest in New York next month.

EXCLUSIVE: Global sales agent Palisades Park Pictures has signed an agreement with VIP Medienfonds to represent all available media rights to its catalog, including the Media 8 film library. 

Addie Morfoot Contributor Madeleine Gavin’s Sundance award-winning documentary “Beyond Utopia” has garnered the best documentary and best doc editing honors at the 24th annual Woodstock Film Festival. The documentary, which was recently acquired by Roadside Attractions, is vying for Academy Award attention.

Michael Schneider Variety Editor at Large The 44th Annual News & Documentary Emmy Awards kicked off the first of two nights on Wednesday in New York, with CNN, Vice and the New York Times as among the big winners. CNN led the news portion of the Emmys, with ten wins — followed closely by Vice, with nine, and then the NYT with five.

Wolf Blitzer and director-producer Barbara Kopple will be this year’s Lifetime Achievement Honorees at the 44th annual News & Documentary Emmy Awards, the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences said Tuesday.

Michael Schneider Variety Editor at Large CNN news anchor Wolf Blitzer and Oscar-winning director/producer Barbara Kopple are this year’s recipients of the 44th annual News & Documentary Emmy Awards lifetime achievement honors, the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences was set to announce on Tuesday. The News & Doc Emmys take place over two days next month in New York: Blitzer will receive his honor at the news ceremony on Wednesday, Sept. 27, and Kopple’s Emmy will be presented at the documentary ceremony on Thursday, September 28.

Jazz Tangcay Artisans Editor Apple TV+ is bringing Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista and Christy Turlington back to the screen in a new four-part documentary “The Super Models.” The documentary from Imagine Documentaries and One Story Up is directed by Academy Award-winner Roger Ross Williams and Larissa Bills. The series follows the legends of the catwalk as they reveal how they began their careers and ended up dominating the modeling world. Archival footage and interviews provide unprecedented access. As the logline for the series reads, “‘The Supermodels’ travels back to the 1980s, when four women from different corners of the world united in New York. Already forces in their own right, the gravitas they achieved by coming together transcended the industry itself. Their prestige was so extraordinary that it enabled the four to supersede the brands they showcased, making the names Naomi, Cindy, Linda and Christy as prominent as the designers who styled them. Today, the four supermodels remain on the frontlines of culture through activism, philanthropy and business prowess. As the fashion industry continues to redefine itself – and women’s roles within it – this is the ultimate story of power and how four women came together to claim it, paving the way for those to follow.”

Clayton Davis The Critics Choice Documentary Awards announced its nominees where Sara Dosa’s lava-fueled love story “Fire of Love” led the field with seven nominations including best documentary feature and director. Co-distributed by National Geographic and Neon, the film’s Ryan White’s “Good Night Oppy,” the moving reflection on the Mars rovers, received a hearty six-nom tally including editing and score. “This year’s nominees prove that documentaries of all lengths and formats are advancing nonfiction media like never before,” said Christopher Campbell, Co-President of the Critics Choice Association Documentary Branch.

The International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) has teased 100 films that will be showcased in its 35th edition, running November 9–20

Michaela Zee editor DCTV’s new documentary-dedicated theater, “Firehouse: DCTV’s Cinema for Documentary Film,” will open its doors Sept. 23. Located in DCTV’s historic Chinatown firehouse building in New York, the nonprofit theater will begin its opening week with an exclusive screening of Abigail Disney and Kathleen Hughes’ “The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales.” “I’m so excited that my new documentary, ‘The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales,’ will kick off the opening of DCTV’s Firehouse Cinema,” Disney said in a statement. “I can’t wait to meet the first audiences who will be enjoying and shaping this vital new addition to New York City’s arthouse film scene.”

Variety and Rolling Stone Truth Seekers Summit presented by Showtime Documentary Films, journalists, filmmakers, comedians and producers took part in extensive conversations about pursuing the truth in different formats like documentaries, news programming and comedy. The summit took place on Thursday in New York, and was additionally streamed to coincide with the launch of the Truth Seekers journal, a special issue collaboration between Variety and Rolling Stone. With keynote conversations, interviews and roundtables from the likes of Barbara Kopple, Lesley Stahl, W. Kamau Bell, Ramin Bahrani and more, here are our top takeaways from the summit:

Addie Morfoot Contributor In Barbara Kopple’s 40-plus year career as one of America’s greatest documentary directors, she has won Academy Awards for the seminal 1976 documentary “Harlan County, U.S.A.” a portrait of a Kentucky coal mining town in crisis, and for “American Dream,” a 1990 examination of a meatpackers’ strike at a Hormel plant in Austin, Minn. A pioneer of cinema vérité that got her start with the Maysles brothers (directors of “Gimme Shelter” and “Grey Gardens”), she was most recently nominated for a News & Documentary Emmy award for “Desert One,” a doc about the 1979 Iran hostage crisis. Kopple will be a keynote speaker at Variety and Rolling Stone’s Truth Seekers Summit on Thursday.

Pat Saperstein Deputy EditorIrwin “Butch” Wallace Young, the chairman of DuArt Film Laboratories who supported New York filmmakers for decades, died Jan. 20 in Manhattan.

The series will be directed by the two-time Academy Award winning Barbara Kopple, while it will be executive produced by Brian Grazer and Ron Howard’s Imagine Documentaries.Naomi told her followers: ‘My sisters Christy, Linda, Cindy and I are extremely thrilled to share our story with the world and there could be no better partners than Brian Grazer and Ron Howard which is a dream come true to bring it to life, as we knew they would respect and honour our story.‘We hope our journey seen in the docuseries will encourage, motivate and inspire young people around the world.