Documentary filmmakers produce and shoot in a wide variety of locations under many different practical, financial, technical and legal constraints. What kind of equipment do you need? Who do you need on your production team? How do you deal with emergencies during shooting and how do you pick out a camera and DP? Should I be thinking of archival material in advance? This session will take place at series partner AbelCine in Manhattan (609 Greenwhich Street).

Featured Presenters:

Ross Kauffman is the director, producer, cinematographer, and coeditor of Born into Brothels, winner of the 2005 Academy Award for best documentary and more than 40 other awards, including one for best documentary from the National Board of Review and the Sundance Film Festival 2004 documentary Audience Award. He also executive-produced In a Dream, shortlisted for the 2009 Academy Award for best documentary feature. Kaufmann’s latest feature E-Team (co-directed by Kate Chevigny) had it’s World Premiere at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival to much acclaim where it won the Cinematography Award in the U.S. Documentary category.

MALIKA ZOUHALI-WORRALL is a filmmaker of British/Moroccan origin. She is the co-director and producer of CALL ME KUCHU (2012), a documentary that depicts the last year in the life of the first closedly gay man in Uganda, David Kato. The film premiered at the Berlin Film Festival, where it won the Teddy Award for Best Documentary and the Cinema Fairbindet Prize. It has since won 18 more awards—including Best International Feature at Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival—and has been theatrically distributed in Canada, Germany, the UK and the US. Malika is a Chaz & Roger Ebert Directing Fellow and an alumnus of the Film Independent Documentary Lab and the Garrett Scott Documentary Development Grant at Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. In 2012, Filmmaker Magazine named Malika one of 25 New Faces of Independent Film. Most recently she co-directed a series of short documentaries for Human Rights Watch. Her journalism work has been published in The Financial Times, and she has reported for CNN.com from India, Uganda, China, and the U.S. Malika holds an M.A. in International Affairs from the Paris Institute of Political Studies (Sciences Po), and she is a graduate of Cambridge University. She lives in Brooklyn, NY with her husband, journalist Andy Greenberg.

ZACHARY HEINZERLING is a film director based in Brooklyn, New York. His debut feature, Cutie and the Boxer is currently nominated for a 2014 Academy Award for Best Documentary Film. The critically acclaimed film won prizes at top film festivals around the world and was featured on many best film lists of 2013, including that of A.O. Scott from the New York Times and Joe Morgenstern of the Wall Street Journal. The film received a field leading three 2014 Cinema Eye Honors, for Outstanding Debut Feature, Outstanding Original Score, and Outstanding Visual Effects. Zachary was the winner of the 2013 Sundance Film Festival Directing Award for US Documentary. He was awarded the Charles Guggenheim Emerging Artist award at the 2013 Full Frame Film Festival. He was the recipient of the 2013 International Documentary Association’s Emerging Documentary Filmmaker Award, which recognizes the achievements of a filmmaker who has made a significant impact at the beginning of his or her career in documentary film. He was nominated for a 2014 DGA award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in a Documentary. He began his career at HBO, where he worked on four consecutive Emmy Award-winning documentaries as a Field Producer and Cinematographer. Most recently he directed a five-part web series with Beyoncé Knowles-Carter entitled “Self-Titled” for her latest album “Beyoncé”.

CUTIE AND THE BOXER

A reflection on love, sacrifice, and the creative spirit, this candid New York documentary explores the chaotic 40-year marriage of renowned “boxing” painter Ushio Shinohara and his artist wife Noriko. As a rowdy, confrontational young artist in Tokyo, Ushio seemed destined for fame, but he is met with little commercial success after he moves to New York City in 1969, seeking international recognition. When 19-year-old Noriko moved to New York to study art, she fell in love with Ushio—abandoning her education to become the unruly artist’s wife and assistant. Over the course of their marriage, their roles shifted. Now 80, Ushio still struggles to establish his artistic legacy, while Noriko is at last being recognized for her own art—a series of drawings entitled “Cutie,” depicting her challenging past with Ushio. Spanning four decades, the film is a moving portrait of a couple wrestling with the eternal themes of sacrifice, disappointment and aging, against a background of lives dedicated to art.

A nuts-and-bolts professional development series designed for the beginning or intermediate documentary filmmaker, Documentary Fundamentals @ UnionDocs is six-week course culminating in a certificate of completion. Registrants can also attend individual sessions. This curriculum developed out of our experience hearing what fundamentals documentarians need to understand to plan, produce, and release an independent documentary today.