Emad Burnat and Guy Davidi’s 5 BROKEN CAMERAS won the Oustanding Feature award at the Cinema Eye Honors this year.
This week the Cinema Eye Honors were held at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, with Emad Burnat and Guy Davidi’s 5 BROKEN CAMERAS taking home top honors with the Outstanding Feature award. DETROPIA by Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing took home two awards, one for outstanding direction and another for original score. Jason Tippet and Elizabeth Mims snagged the outstanding debut award for their festival darling ONLY THE YOUNG. Adam Benzine had the wrap-up of all the awards for Realscreen, while Christopher Campbell did the same at the Documentary Channel blog. Peter Knegt covered the awards for Indiewire, while Wendy Mitchell on the beat for ScreenDaily.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) released its list of Oscar nominees this week, with the honors going to 5 BROKEN CAMERAS; SEARCHING FOR SUGAR MAN by Malik Bendjelloul; HOW TO SURVIVE A PLAGUE by David France; THE GATEKEEPERS by Dror Moreh; and THE INViSIBLE WAR by Kirby Dick. Nods for short-form docs went to INOCENTE by Sean Fine and Andrea Nix Fine; KINGS POINT by Sari Gilman and Jedd Wider; MONDAYS AT RACINE by Cynthia Wade and Robin Honan; OPEN HEART by Kief Davidson and Cori Shepherd Stern; and REDEMPTION by Jon Alpert and Matthew O’Neill.
Mark Olsen of the Los Angeles Times had a rundown of the Oscar nominees, while Laura J. Nelson had a piece on how the nominated shorts directors got the news. Alexandra Zeevalkink of DocGeeks rounded up trailers for the nominated films. Writing for Slate, Eric Hynes noted that the Academy had continued a tradition of nominating “newsy” docs in the face of recent rules changes regarding the Oscars. Christopher Campbell noted that an original song from the doc CHASING ICE and a remake of the film KON-TIKI had also received nods from the Academy. And Eric Kohn had a piece at Indiewire on how Kathryn Bigelow’s supposed snub had masked a greater one–the failure of Jafar Panahi to get a nomination for his film THIS IS NOT A FILM.
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Director Roman Paska with actor John Turturro present Rehearsal for a Sicilian Tragedy
STF’s Winter 2013 season kicked off last Tuesday with a sold-out screening of Rehearsal for a Sicilian Tragedy. Director Roman Paska follows actor John Turturro throughout Western Sicily as they research a future film project about traditional Sicilian puppeteering. In addition to his conversations with professional puppeteers, local historians, and young actresses, Turturro traces his maternal roots in the region, exploring the neighborhood where his grandmother lived before immigrating to the United States. Paska and Turturro’s trip coincides with preparations for the Day of the Dead, an annual celebration that, in the context of the film, provides Turturro with the opportunity to remember his recently-deceased mother and the ways in which he still feels their relationship when he visits Italy. Rehearsal for a Sicilian Tragedy explores the connections between death, tradition, and memory, and the ways in which these themes inform one’s relationship to one’s familial and cultural identities. After the screening, Paska and Turturro joined STF’s Artistic Director Thom Powers for a Q&A.
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Michael Apted's new film 56 UP performed well at the box office in limited release.
Michael Apted’s UP series has crossed the half-century mark with it’s latest installment, 56 UP, which had its theatrical release in NYC this week. Manohla Dargis of the New York Times handed the film an NYT Critics’ Pick. Writing for Film School Rejects, Christopher Campbell named the UP series “as significant and necessary as any film series,” partly due to longevity of the series. Leah Rozen at The Wrap concurred, calling the films “an amazing achievement.” Early box office reports indicated that the film had done very well, earning $20,500 despite being released in only one theater.
In a piece penned for Hammer to Nail, director Robert Greene bemoaned the dearth of thoughtful criticism regarding “cinematic nonfiction film,” and went on to name his favorite top 25 nonfiction films of 2012. Via Twitter, Greene later pointed to a post he had written back in 2010 that presented some ideas similar to those in his Hammer to Nail piece.
Filmmaker Magazine this week documented a great dialogue between directors Pamela Yates (GRANITO: HOW TO NAIL A DICTATOR) and Bernardo Ruiz, whose film REPORTERO, about the threat of violence faced by Mexican journalists, is set to screen on POV tonight.
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Programmers occupy a unique space in the film landscape, serving as a force that both curates and supports films, while often remaining unknown to all but the most impassioned cinephiles. Given that STF Artistic Director Thom Powers has made programming documentary film his life’s work, I thought it would be interesting to get his views on the state of documentary in the year 2012. What follows is a conversation we had on December 30, 2012.
[This Q&A was edited for clarity]
Rahul Chadha: I guess the first question is, if you had to sum up the year in documentary, how would you do it?
Thom Powers: One of the things that impressed me about 2012 was the sizable output of really intellectually meaty films. And a lot of these films had to do with the Middle East—and I’m thinking of THE LAW IN THESE PARTS, or THE GATEKEEPERS. And outside of the Middle East I would point to THE CENTRAL PARK FIVE—films that had a really strong engagement with history and showed a depth of reporting and probing interviews that really added to our understanding of these different issues.
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3D films, such as TO THE ARCTIC, had a great year in 2012, according to box office tracker The Numbers.
It was a super slow week for doc news, with most people seeming to take some time off to enjoy the holidays. Maybe they were all headed to the movies–despite ongoing disruption from digital channels, documentaries had a decent year at the box office, according to Dec. 30 figures from box office data tracking site The Numbers. The doc 2016: OBAMA’S AMERICA by conservative writer Dinesh D’Souza and John Sullivan tallied a $33.3 million take at the box office as of Dec. 30, making it the highest grossing doc of the year. 3D films also made their mark at the box office, with four of the top 10 grossing docs of the year relying on the technology. Also, 15 films crossed the $1 million threshold, and The Numbers reported that 14.9 million tickets were sold for documentary films over the course of the year. (h/t to Tom Isler)
The year-end top doc lists continued to trickle out this week, with the POV blog publishing one from Tom Roston, who named SEARCHING FOR SUGAR MAN as his top pick for the year. Writing for Movies.com, Christopher Campbell took a different approach, eschewing the list format in favor of one that broke his favorite films down by categories (e.g. best observational/verite doc). At the New Orleans Times-Picayune, Mike Scott placed the Eugene Jarecki drug war film THE HOUSE I LIVE IN at the top of his best docs list.
This time writing for the Documentary Channel blog, Christopher Campbell interviewed WEST OF MEMPHIS director Amy Berg about how she came to be involved in documenting the story of the West Memphis Three, and the potential complications that came with interviewing director Peter Jackson, one of the film’s producers.
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