ACMI Stories & Ideas Folgen

COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE Meet the producer and creative director at the heart of one of the world's most enduring and celebrated documentary collectives. For over 50 years, Gordon Quinn and Kartemquin Films have been at the forefront of documentary making in the US, not only embracing but also epitomising collaborative practices, championing new voices, and leading the way in the fight for independent media. All of these resonate with current discussions, both locally and globally around democracy and social justice, as well as AIDC 2020’s theme of collective intelligence. Join Gordon in conversation as he discusses the essential role of documentary in a fair and just society through some of his key works from Inquiring Nuns and Last Pullman Car to Hoop Dreams, The Trials of Muhammad Ali, Minding the Gap and 63Boycott. Talking through his 50-plus years of experience, Gordon will expand on how to sustain documentary making amidst constant assaults on truth, and finding new ways to regenerate the form and industry. He’ll also discuss the expanding role of the producer in nurturing new talent and promoting and enabling diverse voices to tap into hyper-local stories that also reverberate with global audiences. This session promises to be both thought-provoking and inspiring.

CRAFT Emmy-Award nominated Director S. Leo Chiang takes a deep dive into finding and developing complex documentary characters. In this craft session, Emmy-Award nominated Director S. Leo Chiang discusses the art of finding and unravelling multifaceted characters who share a common sense of idealism against the odds. Films such as Our Time Machine and A Village Called Versailles often focus on character development over obvious plot twists in order to highlight the powerful transformations the characters go through rather than the devastating losses they face. Join Leo in conversation with Jeanie Davison (Development and Investment Manager of Documentary at Screen Australia) to unpack how he gains trust and develops relationships often in diasporic and marginal communities to tell heartbreaking stories of love, loss and standing up for what you believe in. Through personal anecdotes, Leo will give insight on a few of the major lessons he’s learned along the way.

CRAFT John Smithson discusses the creative challenges in crafting story in his new true-crime series I, Sniper. High-end crime serials have become the pinnacle of factual, and the rise of streaming services offer an enticing opportunity with the budgets and the time to enable some serious creativity. For four years Arrow Pictures, the new label of Creative Director John Smithson, has been working on I, Sniper. This 6 x 1hr serial tells the story of the DC Snipers, the two men who terrorised Washington DC in a city still traumatised by 9/11 one year earlier, killing people at random over 23 days of terror. This is the definitive account of an iconic American crime, told with law enforcement, survivors and victims’ families and, uniquely, in the words of the surviving shooter, in a series of calls from his supermax cell. In conversation with Rachael Brown, John Smithson talks for the first time about the creative challenges of the genre, ahead of I, Sniper’s release.