Showcasing new and unexpected forms of digital documentary storytelling
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Past events
Exhibition: Expanding Documentary 2011 25 Nov 2011 at 10:00
Interactive installations, immersive performances and other unexpected representations of reality, presented by IDFA DocLab, Paradocs and Brakke Grond.
Live Cinema Event: Stories We Love to Forget 23 Nov 2011 at 22:00
An evening packed with embarrassing, true stories told live on stage. With Micha Wertheim, Paulien Cornelisse, Kevin Allison (The Risk Show) and someone reading an excerpt from their adolescent diary.
Live Cinema Event: Reality vs Technology 22 Nov 2011 at 20:00
Live presentations of three of the most innovative projects at IDFA 2011: the webdoc and installation Barcode.tv, the interactive installation What Is It Like to Be a Bird? and the immersive iPad app Condition One. The authors will showcase their
Driftless: Stories from Iowa
Affectionate but unpitying black-and-white images capture the tough existence of people still living in declining rural areas of Iowa.
As Tumara Gosnell bluntly puts it, “There’s only three things you can do in Iowa: drink, do drugs, or have sex.” She is a former barfly who swapped life in the Iowan countryside for the big city — and she is not the only one, not by a long shot.
Rural America is emptying out and a way of life is disappearing. This web documentary by photographer Danny Wilcox Frazier, who comes from Iowa City, is a portrait in six vignettes of “those who were left in the wake of outmigration,” as Frazier himself describes them in the accompanying interview.
Frazier has been working on a series of photographs entitled Driftless: Stories from Iowa for several years. This film of the same name tells the backstories, shows the making process, and is itself part of the series.
Sometimes expressly diffuse, sometimes mercilessly sharp, Frazier’s tightly framed black-and-white photos and static shots capture the harsh realities of existence in an area that is losing its lifeblood; nostalgia for a faded glory is permeated with the knowledge that there is nothing left to stay for.
Butcher Joe Kuba understands all too well why his children don’t want his life: “It makes an old man out of you fast.”
Tags DocLab 2009, Interactive, Photography, Shorts / Series, Social Issue, Video, Watch Online
Project details
Year of development :2009Created by:Danny Wilcox Frazier
With:MediaStorm
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