Hot-button issue documentaries have long been an academy favorite.
Social issue documentaries offer incalculable value towards generating real world impact.
Limited to 12. Explores the history and current state of social-issue documentary.
In this twist on the social-issue documentary, girls act out stories adapted from their own lives by writers from their own countries, including Edwidge Danticat, Aminatta Forna and Manjushree Thapa.
Later, with greater ease, she appeared as the subject of a German documentary, and as an articulate figure in social-issue documentaries (on feminism and on the imprisonment of Cuba's gay writers and artists).
Mr. Waletzky is an unusual figure among New York's film makers in that he was not only sound editor on such social-issue documentaries as Barbara Kopple's "Harlan County, U.S.A". and Lorraine Gray's "With Babies and Banners," but is also fluent in Yiddish and committed to Jewish culture.
Partnering again with executive producer/narrator Katie Couric after their eye-opening food polemic "Fed Up," Soechtig rolls out her figures – both statistical and human – like an issue-documentary maestro of sorts: The movie symphonically weaves through interviews with shattered parents who lost kids in massacres, a timeline of inaction on gun control, and footage of activists on both sides.
Even more unlikely, "Take Every Wave: The Life of Laird Hamilton" is directed by Oscar-nominated Rory Kennedy, best known for committed social-issue documentaries like "Last Days In Vietnam," "Shouting Fire" and the Emmy-winning "Ghosts of Abu Ghraib". "Honestly, initially I said no," Kennedy said in an interview when the film debuted at Sundance.
"The September Issue," a documentary about Vogue's September 2007 issue, is one example of the potential.
