Media That Matters

The Center for Media and Social Impact is proud to announce the Community Voice Project has now joined CMSI as a featured program. 

The Community Voice Project (CVP) is a community storytelling initiative led by American University Filmmaker-in-Residence Nina Shapiro-Perl that connects members of American University’s student population with communities in the Washington Metropolitan area to produce short documentary films and digital stories. The CVP partners with a local community organization to focus on a topic and tell the stories most important to that community.Read more...

Compilation film—film made entirely from other film—is one of film’s oldest genres. After all, Esfir Shub made The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty in 1927. And compilation film was on display at IDFA 2015, still showing its vitality.

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At IDFA 2015, the largest documentary film festival in the world, a good clutch of films, marked by their strong allegiance to observational-style cinéma vérité, demonstrated the power of the form to reveal insights hidden from the headlines. Read more...

IDFA’s DocLab conference and exhibit, the most well-established international showcase for interactive documentary, featured plenty of buzz (bacon ice cream made by growing meat in a petri dish! a coffin equipped with odors evoking famous deaths!), a lot of virtual reality, and some provocative insights. But we were still looking at experiments more than models.  After all, the theme of the event, “Seamless Reality,” was illustrated with a glitchy version of an Internet cat.

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For documentary filmmakers, strategists, funders, broadcasters, buyers – and of course, fans – November means the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), the premier international festival celebrating the best of the form from around the world. CMSI leaders hit the ground running in Amsterdam this year, playing key roles as speakers and participants.