St. Clair Bourne was a photographer, journalist, publisher of the newsletter Chamba Notes, founder of Black Documentary Collective and BADWest, mentor, teacher, cameraman, producer and pioneering documentary director. Bourne’s filmmaking career includes work for public television, beginning at Black Journal in 1968 through 1999’s Paul Robeson: Here I Stand, as well as films made through Chamba Mediaworks, his production company, focusing on people and subjects from all aspects of Black social and political life, including Langston Hughes, Amiri Baraka, John Henrik Clarke, Chicago blues music, Northern Ireland, education and religion, among hundreds of topics. MoMA’s restoration of his 1983 film The Black and the Green, which […]

The hyper-industrialization of the independent film space and the shift away from in-person screening to the vertically integrated streaming-sphere means that content curation is increasingly more general (massified), with fewer people participating in the process of sharing films with the public. In general, the U.S. A-list film festival circuit, where independent voices used to be able to thrive in more ragtag and aesthetically diverse ways, is now mostly a self-reflexive bourgeois echo chamber of sanctimonious gatekeepers serving corporate interests and neoliberal logics. Something has to change. Perhaps it’s time to turn away from the independent film industrial complex and toward […]

The restructuring of media conglomerates in the wake of streaming’s stagnating growth has left documentarians on shaky ground. Industry efforts to impress stockholders with cost-cutting measures and broad appeal entertainment have led to some high-profile layoffs in the nonfiction field and the sense among independents that there are few financing and distribution deals for formally experimental projects that challenge viewers’ political assumptions.  So, what films are being made right now? What do alternative paths to exhibition look like? And how might thinking through the relationship between commercial and public media present possibilities for a more inclusive documentary culture on and […]

The following essay appeared in Filmmaker‘s Spring, 1999 print issue and is being reprinted in remembrance of Noah Cowan. Cowan, a festival programmer, non-profit executive director and critic, was also Filmmaker‘s Contributing Editor and chief festival correspondent, and he passed away January, 25, 2023 in Los Angeles. “Festival strategy” has become one of the more annoying buzz terms of the American independent film “industry.” However, the presence of three major festivals, all distinctive and legendary, clustered together in the winter months demands, in fact, that any serious American independent filmmaker finishing a film in the fall recognize the need for […]

If your favorite films don’t show idiosyncratic tastes, you’re not alive. It means you’re just in a bubble of the culture and your own anxieties about what you think is real and not real. Whereas if you were to be honest about what’s important to you, it would have to be the things that actually make your heart sing, which is why I’m always suspicious of people who do a 10-best list that doesn’t have at least two titles from childhood. Was it really that bad? Isn’t wonder the whole point of the fucking thing? Why haven’t those films gone […]

Noah Cowan, who died in January at the age of 55 of glioblastoma multiforme (a form of brain cancer), was a passionate and erudite multihyphenate in the world of international cinema. A programmer at the Toronto International Film Festival who went on to become its co-director, as well as inaugural artistic director for the festival organization’s year-round theatre, the Bell Lightbox, he was also a distributor (Cowboy Pictures), nonprofit leader (the Global Film Initiative and SFFILM) and a business consultant and strategist. He was also a writer and critic. For much of this magazine’s first decade, Noah was a contributing […]