The end of award season is on the horizon! This week the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences revealed their nominations for the 2018 Academy Awards, which will take place March 4th. The nominees for Best Documentary Feature are ABACUS: SMALL ENOUGH TO JAIL by Steve James, FACES PLACES by Agnès Varda and JR, ICARUS by Bryan Fogel, LAST MEN IN ALEPPO by Firas Fayyad, and STRONG ISLAND by Yance Ford, while the nominees for Best Documentary Short are EDITH+EDDIE by Laura Checkoway, HEAVEN IS A TRAFFIC JAM ON THE 405 by Frank Stiefel (currently streaming via Short of the Week), HEROIN(E) by Elaine Mcmillion, KNIFE SKILLS by Thomas Lennon, and TRAFFIC STOP by Kate Davis.
Meanwhile, the festival fervor in Park City has subsided, with the 2018 Sundance Awards ceremony having taken place Saturday evening. Derek Doneen’s KAILASH, which Daniel Fienberg of The Hollywood Reporter called “an exciting and inspirational look at the fight against child slavery,” was honored with the U.S. Documentary Grand Jury Prize, while Alexandria Bombach’s ON HER SHOULDERS, having received substantial praise from Bilge Ebiri in The Village Voice, Jay Weissberg of Variety, and David Ehrlich of IndieWire, received the Directing Award. Bing Liu, who received the Special Jury Award for Breakthrough Filmmaking, spoke with Tom White of the International Documentary Association about his debut MINDING THE GAP, which John Fink of The Film Stage writes is “a tour de force of documentary filmmaking…a lively, often beautifully shot film about a pit of hopelessness–from dead end jobs to drunken arguments to bad decisions. This is modern day John Cassavetes with tattoos and punk music.” Rudy Valdez’s THE SENTENCE, which was picked up by HBO for distribution later this year, received the Audience Award.
In the World Cinema Documentary competition, Talal Derki’s IDFA debuted feature OF FATHERS AND SONS, dubbed “a vital addition to the cultural picture of the Syrian conflict” by Daniel Schindel of The Film Stage, took home the Grand Jury Prize. The Directing Award went to Sandi Tan for her debut feature SHIRKERS, which Richard Brody called “gloriously, gleefully idiosyncratic, a blend of punk energy and local documentation” in The New Yorker (along with love for Robert Greene’s BISBEE ’17). Though Variety’s Guy Lodge called Stephen Loveridge’s MATANGI / MAYA / M.I.A. “pretty standard-issue on the aesthetic front,” the film received a Special Jury Award, while Alexandra Shiva’s THIS IS HOME was honored with the Audience Award.
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Sundance is upon us once again. The documentary films primed to make the most impact in the coming year are having their world premieres in Park City as the rest of us wait in anxious anticipation. In preparation for this year’s edition of the fest, our own Thom Powers interviewed Tabitha Jackson, the head of the Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program, for the latest edition of Pure Nonfiction, while Basil Tsiokos, the Documentary Programming Associate at Sundance, wrapped up his own preview of the festival’s new doc offerings at What (not) To Doc. At Variety, Addie Morfoot wrote at length about how the doc funding group Impact Partners are making an impact on this year’s Sundance.
Reviews for a handful of docs are already rolling in: Maxim Pozdorovkin’s found footage OUR NEW PRESIDENT is fielding a mixed response from folks like Matthew Panzarino at TechCrunch (“too long”)and April Wolfe at Film Comment (“his film tells a thrilling, scary, mind-bending, and often-hilarious story of Russian propaganda’s role in the 2016 U.S. presidential election”), while Sam Adams spoke with Pozdorovkin over at Slate about the film, noting its journey from Field of Vision short to full length feature. Daniel Fienberg was a bit lukewarm on Don Argott’s exploration of LGBTQ acceptance in the Mormon church within THE BELIEVER in The Hollywood Reporter (“The story is good and important enough that those things come through even if the movie around them is rarely memorable”), while at Collider, Adam Chitwood found Tim Wardle’s nature vs. nurture film THREE IDENTICAL STRANGERS to be “shocking, poignant, and surprisingly touching.” Similarly, Eric Kohn, writing for IndieWire, dubbed Morgan Neville’s “touching and insightful survey of Rogers’ decades-spanning career” in WON’T YOU BE MY NEIGHBOR a “a powerful reminder that he was either way ahead of his time, or too late.” Charlie Phillips of The Guardian found Marina Zenovich’s ROBIN WILLIAMS: COME INSIDE MY MIND to be “filled with genuine affection and remarkable archive footage, but there’s a frustrating hesitance to go deeper,” as Nicole Sperling reported on Betsy West and Julie Cohen’s crowd wowing doc RBG, on associate Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, for Vanity Fair.
Out in the greater world, Matt Zoller Seitz reviewed Greg Barker’s “engrossing documentary about the last year’s worth of foreign policy work during the Obama administration,” THE FINAL YEAR for RogerEbert.com as it finally reached theaters this week. Concluding at Nonfics, Brad Gullickson pins it down: “THE FINAL YEAR is a funeral of a film. Barker may not have set out to process our mourning, but in recording the slow revelation of Trump’s possible/inevitable presidency in the hearts and minds of Obama’s cronies, we are forced to grieve for what might have been.” Dmitrii Kalashnikov’s controversial Russian dash cam mish-mash THE ROAD MOVIE also found its release this past week, gleaning mixed takes from Richard Brody in The New Yorker, Vikram Murthi at RogerEbert.com, and Nick Schager of The Daily Beast.
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Director Yance Ford and his remarkable heart-wrenching debut STRONG ISLAND received a trio of major awards at the 11th annual Cinema Eye Honors in Queens on Thursday evening, including Outstanding Direction, Outstanding Debut and Outstanding Nonfiction Feature Film. Additionally, Brett Morgen’s JANE was honored with the Audience Choice Prize and the award for Outstanding Score, while Jonathan Olshefski’s QUEST won Outstanding Editing, Kareem Abeed, Stefan Kloos and Soren Steen Jespersen won Outstanding Production for LAST MEN IN ALEPPO, Andrew Ackerman and Jeff Orlowski won Outstanding Cinematography for CHASING CORAL, and Stefan Nadelman won Outstanding Graphic Design for LONG STRANGE TRIP.
Earlier in the week, the Directors Guild of America revealed its nominees for Best Documentary of 2017 – THE VIETNAM WAR, ICARUS, CITY OF GHOSTS, ABACUS: SMALL ENOUGH TO JAIL & WORMWOOD – as did the British Film Academy Awards (BATFAs) – CITY OF GHOSTS, I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO, ICARUS, AN INCONVENIENT SEQUEL & JANE. Leading the way in its support of women nonfiction filmmakers, Chicken & Egg Pictures, via Rachel Montpelier at Women and Hollywood, announced that the recipients of their annual Breakthrough Filmmaker Awards are Natalia Almada, Ramona Diaz, Laura Nix, Kimi Takesue, and Nanfu Wang. Each filmmaker is to recieve a $50,000 unrestricted grant and a year of professional mentorship.
As we wait for Sundance to kick off later this week, Akiva Gottlieb reported for IDA on UnionDocs‘ “weekend workshop called ‘Speculations in the Archive,’ a sold-out gathering that explored the archive’s potential to spur imagination and invention.” The verdict? “If there’s something that links the new practitioners of what might be called speculative archival filmmaking, it’s the conviction that documentary can be the product of solitude, and that communion with inanimate materials can generate the most thrilling, immediate forms of direct cinema.”
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After two weeks off for the holidays and a relative lack of doc news, we return in 2018 to a rather slow stream of reportage outside of the lead-up to Sundance and a few more award season announcements. With Sundance scheduled to kick off next Thursday, the festival has been rolling out its annual YouTube series, Meet The Artists, in which we get a taste of what’s to come at this year in Park City. Meanwhile, Basil Tsiokos, the Documentary Programming Associate at Sundance, has been writing up his own thorough previews of each of the docs to have debuts at the festival over at What (not) To Doc. And at IndieWire, Anthony Kaufman put forth his well researched forecast of this year’s doc market, writing, “The bulk of this year’s nonfiction releases had a rough time in theaters, but hope is not lost.”
While we wait for Sundance to commence, the Museum of the Moving Image is currently in the midst of First Look 2018, “the Museum’s acclaimed festival of innovative new international cinema” that runs through January 15th. In Artforum, Tony Pipolo writes that “the strongest entries in both nonfiction and the avant-garde at this year’s First Look series overshadow the few narrative films included,” noting Anna Zamecka’s COMMUNION, which Caroline Madden also covered for Reverse Shot, and Ziad Kalthoum’s TASTE OF CEMENT, which Eric Hynes, Associate Curator of Film at the museum singled out in his overview of his favorite screenings of 2017 for Film Comment.
Authorities in Singapore have officially banned Jesse Roberts’ documentary RADIANCE OF RESISTANCE, which was scheduled to screen at the Singapore Palestinian Film Festival last Thursday, reports Variety’s Patrick Frater. “The Info-communications Media Development Authority gave the film a Not Allowed for All Ratings classification, which means it cannot be shown in any circumstances in Singapore. The IMDA said that the film had a “skewed narrative” and could cause disharmony among races and religions in Singapore.”
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After a week off, I’ve returned to a short stack of doc news that packed quite a punch over the last few days. Most notably, Sheila Nevins, the 78-year-old president of HBO Documentary Films, has revealed that after 38 years of devout service she has decided to leave HBO, reflecting, “I have deprived my life of a life. All I did was work. I was, like, born at HBO and I don’t have to die there. If I stayed any longer, I probably would have died at my desk. I just regret that there’s so little time left.” In Maureen Dowd‘s revelatory feature in The New York Times, she notes, “With a storytelling style that grabs viewers by the throat, Ms. Nevins helped change the image of documentaries from stodgy to provocative. And she helped HBO amass such a pile of Emmys, Peabodys and Oscars that there’s a roomful of glittering laurels at headquarters that’s known as the Holy Shrine of Sheila. She received the first Emmy Lifetime Achievement Award given to a documentarian.” In a separate piece, Dowd played Confirm or Deny with Nevins.
Another sudden departure came as a surprise when filmmaker Morgan Spurlock published a confessional piece titled “I am Part of the Problem,” in which he reveals that in his past a women he had a one night stand with believed that she had been raped, and a former coworker was paid a settlement to keep silent about his history of verbal sexual harassment toward her. Christine Hauser reported the news in The New York Times, while at Realscreen, Daniele Alcinii followed the aftermath of the revelations, seeing Spurlock exit Warrior Poets, the New York-based studio he founded with producing partner Jeremy Chilnick, and NBA superstar LeBron James and Maverick Carter’s SpringHill Entertainment cutting ties with the filmmaker on a planned docuseries focusing on the opening of James’ “I Promise School” — a new public school dedicated to supporting at-risk children in his hometown of Akron, Ohio.
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