Documentary Educational Resources: A Brief Oral History

These interviews tell the story of one of modern independent cinema's most successful distributors. Documentary Educational Resources (DER) was founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1971 by ethnographic filmmakers John Marshall and Timothy Asch in order to distribute their own films, but through the work of DER directors Sue Cabezas and Cynthia Close, DER expanded and now distributes hundreds of films by nearly three hundred filmmakers from around the world. Cabezas and Close discuss their struggles to come to grips with the expansion of the field of ethnographic film and to maintain DER's relevance within continually changing technologies.