Media Impact

Former CMSI Graduate Fellow Kelsey Marsh recently won the Jury Award at the Diversity in Cannes Short Film Showcase for her film Noncritical.

The 20-minute short film follows the journey of Valencia Harris, a mother struggling to bring media and police attention to her daughter's disappearance. Unique Harris, a mother of two from southeastern DC, went missing from her home on October 10, 2010. Her disappearance was initially classified as "non-critical".  Read more...

Is documentary a genre? The Tribeca Film Festival this April, which Indiewire just rated among the top three for documentary, gave a chance to survey the scene of docs and look for trends. “Too many people think documentary is a genre,” said programmer Cara Cusumano. “But documentary can have every genre a narrative film can be.”

You can slice the genre question a lot of ways, but you can’t deny that the marketplace for real-life entertainment has never been hotter, and even on the indie doc circuit makers are working within formats that sell. And you can’t deny Tribeca Film Festival is positioning itself as not only a showcase but a market. At the documentary smorgasbord of Tribeca, you could see documentaries working within formats designed for great promo and quick sale. But you could also find the improbable, the quirky, and the shocking. Read more...

Guest post by Andrew Lih

The insights of CMSI's Dangerous Documentaries project connected with a number of news projects at the International Symposium on Online Journalism at the University of Texas this year, showing the risks visual storytellers are taking in reporting important societal issues and the emerging challenges in the new genre of immersive documentary making. Read more...

The Center is proud to announce that founder and longtime director, Pat Aufderheide, is the recipient of the 2015 "George C. Stoney Award for Outstanding Documentary Work" from the University Film and Video Association (UFVA). From UFVA: The award is "given annually by the UFVA's Documentary Working Group caucus to an individual (or production team) who demonstrate(s) the values that George Stoney promoted throughout his career--stories that represent the poor, the lesser known, the working class, and as a hallmark, engage social injustice themes." Read more...

At Tribeca Film Festival this year, four exceptional documentaries built their success on exploring personalities, situations and ideologies alien to the typically liberal documentary audience. For anyone who wants to make media that matters, these films provide models for exploring difference. Read more...