Alan Berliner's new film FIRST COUSIN ONCE REMOVED is among those docs scheduled for Stranger Than Fiction's Winter Season.
Stranger Than Fiction this week announced the lineup for its Winter Season, which is scheduled to start Jan. 8 with a screening of director Roman Paska’s REHEARSAL FOR A SICILIAN TRAGEDY, a look at the artistic traditions of Sicily as guided by actor John Turturro. Both Paska and Turturro will be on hand for an audience Q&A following the screening; you can find more information about the screening and purchase a ticket here. Other films in the Winter Season include a number of festival darlings, among them Alan Berliner’s FIRST COUSIN ONCE REMOVED; Amy Nicholson’s ZIPPER: CONEY ISLAND’S LAST WILD RIDE; and Terence Nance’s AN OVERSIMPLIFICATION OF HER BEAUTY. You can see a nice overview of the Winter Season films here. Consider taking advantage of the STF Season Pass, which gets you a ticket to all eight screenings, along with free popcorn and a free DVD from Docurama.
Writers are taking advantage of the few remaining weeks left in the calendar year to turn out “best of” lists for 2012, along with pieces that take a look back at the year or at what 2013 has in store for us. The POV staff rounded up their choices for the top 12 documentary stories of the year, with an April tax court decision that deemed documentary filmmaker a business practice, and not a hobby, topping the list. At the Documentary Channel blog, writer Christopher Campbell tallied the best music docs of the year, while writers at alt-weekly The Chicago Reader listed the year’s best political docs.
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Anthony Kaufman put the odds that THIS IS NOT A FILM would win the Oscar for best doc at 50 to one.
With the release of the Oscar documentary shortlist last week, attention in the media this week turned to prognosticating who will be holding a little gold man come the awards ceremony in February. For those interested in betting on the outcome of the Oscar race, Anthony Kaufman spent his Docutopia column making the odds for the award, establishing THIS IS NOT A FILM as the long shot at 50 to one. At the Documentary Channel blog, Christopher Campbell identified David France’s HOW TO SURVIVE A PLAGUE as the dark horse candidate for the win, while the writers at the DocGeeks blog made their case for various picks.
Writing for Realscreen, Adam Benzine had a thorough round-up of doc winners of various other awards, including those of the Independent Documentary Association (IDA), the British Independent Film Awards, the Los Angeles Film Critics and the Boston Society of Film Critics. Writing for the IDA website, Katherine Relth also provided some coverage of the IDA awards. And Benzine was back in a few days to report on the documentary nominees for the Critics’ Choice Movie Awards.
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5 BROKEN CAMERAS by Emad Burnat and Guy Davidi was one of 15 films shortlisted for the Oscar doc award this week.
Doc news this week was dominated by the release of the names of the fifteen documentary features named to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) Oscar award shortlist. Peter Knegt of Indiewire tallied the list, and soon enough people from around the doc world were weighing on on who made the list, and who might have been left off. An added layer of interest was added as this was the first doc shortlist announced since the documentary branch of the Academy changed its rules, ostensibly to help films made with a theatrical release in mind.
At the What (Not) to Doc blog, Basil Tsiokos pointed to capsule reviews that he had done of most of the shortlisted films. Writing for the New York Times, Melena Ryzek weighed in on the list, as did Dan Schnidel at Screenpicks. At the Documentary Channel blog, Christopher Campbell assessed whether the doc rule changes had worked, while Tom Roston also reviewed the list. The DocGeeks blog did us the favor of rounding up available trailers for the films on the shortlist, while the team at Realscreen gathered interviews it had conducted with seven of the shortlisted filmmakers over the past year.
In other Oscar news, Kay Shackleton reported that documentary filmmaker pioneer D.A. Pennebaker was given an honorary Oscar award on Dec. 2 at the 2012 Governors Awards. Huffington Post writer Allan M. Jalon got a chance to speak with the living legend on his career and recent award. Thomas White also covered the awards for the International Documentary Association (IDA) website.
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The Sundance Institute this week announced the lineup for the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, actually taking two days to announce the full list of films that will be screening in Park City, Utah, early next year. At first blush, the doc that seems to be getting the most attention is PUSSY RIOT – A PUNK PRAYER, about the Russian dissident punk band. At Realscreen, coverage came courtesy of Kelly Anderson, who wrote a piece about docs in competition and another about a few spotlight films heading to the festival. At Indiewire, Jay Fernandez’s coverage was split into two pieces as well, one on the U.S. docs in competition and another on the world docs. The DocGeeks blog also had a piece on the out-of-competition films at Sundance, as well as the projects being shown as part of the New Frontier program.
The doc awards machine continued to trundle on, with Realscreen’s Kevin Ritchie reporting that David France’s HOW TO SURVIVE A PLAGUE won best docmentary at the Gotham Awards, while the Jared Leto-helmed film ARTIFACT took home the audience award. Writing at the Documentary Channel blog, Christopher Campbell said ARTIFACT’s win propelled the film to his must-see docs list for the year.
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The International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) ended on Nov. 25, but the festival announced its award winners a few days earlier, with director Alan Berliner winning the award for best feature-length documentary for his latest film FIRST COUSIN ONCE REMOVED. Adam Benzine of Realscreen wrote a piece on all of the winners, as did Rosemarie Hugill of the DocGeeks blog.
Programmer Basil Tsiokos was also at IDFA, turning out copy for Indiewire over the course of the festival. You can read his post highlighting ten films on his must-see list here, and take a look at seven projects at IDFA Forum worth keeping an eye on here, which includes POV series producer Yance Ford’s project STRONG ISLAND. Rose Vincelli of Filmmaker Magazine also had a write up on the IDFA Forum, as did Realscreen’s Adam Benzine. And STF Artistic Director Thom Powersdug up an article about the Forum that he penned for the Boston Globe almost 10 years ago for those interested in seeing how things have changed since then. The True/False Festival blog took a look at Victork Kossakovsky’s Top Ten films that screened at IDFA. Also, Nienke Huitenga reported on the Interactive Doc Conference at IDFA for the festival’s website, while Mandy Rose also had a comprehensive rundown of the Interactive Conference events for the i-Docs blog.
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