News & Updates
"The best documentaries of 2017 will only become more vital as we leave this year behind, gaining perspective the further we drag ourselves from the past 12 months. It’s no small gesture to call a documentary film “essential,” but in a year in which so many of our lives have needed something essential, something urgent, to push us forward, ranking these films feels futile..."
Paste Magazine, The 15 Best Documentaries of 2017
Raising Bertie will open theatrically June 9th. Stay tuned for more details and sign up for the Raising Bertie newsletter here.
Raising Bertie, a coming-of-age tale of three young black men in rural Bertie County, North Carolina, will hold its world premiere at the 19th Annual Full Frame Documentary Festival in Durham North Carolina on April 9, 2016. The feature-length documentary is a co-production between Beti Films and documentary collective Kartemquin Films. The premiere is also the debut of first-time feature-length director Margaret Byrne.
Filmed over the course of six-years, the film focuses on Reginald "Junior" Askew, Davonte "Dada" Harrell and David "Bud" Perry as they navigate unemployment, grief, violence, first love, fatherhood and estrangement from family members and mentors, all while trying to define their identities as adults. The film's three subjects will be present at the screening along with Byrne, producer Ian Kibbe, cinematographer Jon Stuyvesant and editor Leslie Simmer.
Tickets for the Sarasota Film Festival can be purchased now. Follow the link below.
Tickets for Full Frame Documentary Festival go on sale April 1. Follow the link below.
For more information, please view our press release.
Nominations for the 36th Annual News and Documentary Emmy® Awards were announced on July 22, 2015 by the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (NATAS). American Promise received three Emmy Nominations for Best Documentary, Outstanding Coverage of a Current News Story-Long Form, and Outstanding Editing: Documentary and Long Form. Of all the nominees in this year's Outstanding Editing category, American Promise has the largest number of editors nominated; over the course of thirteen years (the length of time covered by the documentary), seven editors were hired to work on the project. As part of the editing team for American Promise, Margaret Byrne, director of the upcoming Raising Bertie, received a nomination for her work on the project. Byrne is also credited as a cinematographer on the film, as is fellow Raising Bertie collaborator Jon Stuyvesant.
The News & Documentary Emmy® Awards will be presented on Monday, September 28th, 2015, at a ceremony at Lincoln Center’s David Geffen Hall (formerly Avery Fisher Hall, home of the New York Philharmonic), located at Lincoln Center on Broadway on the West Side of Manhattan in New York City. The event will be attended by more than 1,400 television and news media industry executives, news and documentary producers and journalists. Emmy® Awards will be presented in 45 categories.
You can find more on the upcoming 36th Annual News & Documentary Emmy Awards and the full list of nominees here.
