Bright and early Thursday morning Deadline’s Anthony D’Alessandro, Variety’s Gordon Cox and The Hollywood Reporter’s Hilary Lewis each broke the news that the Gotham Independent Film Awards had named their 2015 nominees, including APPROACHING THE ELEPHANT, CARTEL LAND, HEART OF A DOG, LISTEN TO ME MARLON and THE LOOK OF SILENCE. The following day, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced the full list of 124 contenders in the Oscar race for Best Documentary Feature, as reported by Steve Pond at The Wrap, indieWIRE’s Zack Sharf and Dave McNary for Variety. And while we’re still quite a ways away from the event scheduled on June 9th, Realscreen reports that submissions for the 2016 Realscreen Awards are now open.

With the 13th edition of DocLisboa having begun late last week, Cineuropa’s Vitor Pinto previewed the Portuguese productions on offer, as Basil Tsiokos wrote up an overview of the fest at What (not) To Doc. Tsiokos also previewed the docs on offer at The American Museum of Natural History’s Margaret Mead Film Festival and NYC’s NewFest. At MUBI’s Notebook, Boris Nelepo reflected on the career of the Serbian filmmaker Želimir Žilnik, who is receiving first complete international retrospective as part of DocLisboa. As IDFA draws near, indieWIRE’s Tambay A. Obenson took the time to highlight a trio of films of African diaspora, while Jorn Rossing Jensen reported on the many Norwegian productions that will be making their way to Amsterdam for Cineuropa.

The Montreal International Documentary Festival revealed the programming schedule for their annual industry conference, Doc Circuit Montréal (DCM) reports Daniele Alcinii of Realscreen. Likewise, Cineuropa’s Vladan Petkovic covered the Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival’s announcement of the program for its Inspiration Forum, “a platform intended to facilitate the search for new themes and their interpretations.” Scheduled speakers include Julian Assange (via Skype) and Maria Alyokhina (Masha) of Pussy Riot.

This week Stranger Than Fiction continues with a special screening of AN OMAR BROADWAY FILM, showing prison life through the eyes of the prisoners – the violence, the boredom, what everyone inside the prison, both inmates and guards, do to survive. The film’s director, Douglas Tirola, will be in attendance for a post-screening Q&A. Tickets are still available here.

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With both the New York Film Festival and the BFI London Film Festival having just recently concluded on either side of the Atlantic, it seemed only fitting that DOC NYC and the Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival announce their complete line-ups this week to help keep our fall festival sugar rush going. Closing out the BFI London Film Festival, Jennifer Peedom took home the Grierson Award for Best Documentary for her mountain climbing doc SHERPA, while Daniel Walber wrote a rundown of the best docs at this year’s NYFF at Nonfics.

A few weeks back DOC NYC announced that Kim Longinotto would be among this year’s Visionaries Tribute honorees, receiving the Robert and Anne Drew Award for observational filmmaking. This week Realscreen’s Kevin Ritchie reported that Longinotto would also be the recipient of this year’s BBC Grierson Trustees’ Award. The International Documentary Association also released the names of the honorees for the 31st Annual IDA Documentary Awards, including Career Achievement Award winner Gordon Quinn, Founder and Artistic Director of Kartemquin Films, Pioneer Award honoree Ted Sarandos, the Chief Content Officer at Netflix, Amicus Award winners Tony Tabatznik and the Bertha Foundation, and the much deserving Emerging Documentary Filmmaker Award winners Lyric R. Cabral and David Felix Sutcliffe for their work on (T)ERROR.

In other festival news, DOC NYC’s Director of Programming, Basil Tsiokos previewed the non-fiction fare on offer at the upcoming New Orleans Film Festival, DocsDF: The International Documentary Film Festival of Mexico City, and the Chicago International Film Festival at What (not) To Doc.

This week Stranger Than Fiction continues with the New York premiere of THE WANTED 18, Palestine’s official entry for the Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award! Director Amer Shomali in attendance for a post-screening Q&A. Tickets are still available here.

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From 1976 to 1989, a strange tapping noise emitting from a Soviet channel was broadcast over a remote shortwave frequency, fueling Cold War paranoia and conspiracies around the world. Was the Russian Woodpecker, as the relentless ticking sound would come to be known, an attempt at subliminal mind-control, orchestrated by the Russians? Was it some kind of KGB morse code broadcast? For decades, the only thing that the could be clearly proven was that the sound originated from a massive antenna two miles away from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.

In director Chad Gracia’s debut film THE RUSSIAN WOODPECKER, he follows eccentric artist Fedor Alexandrovich on a journey to find a connection between the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and the mystery of the Duga antenna. Alexandrovich was a child when the Chernobyl meltdown happened in 1986, and has nursed a growing fascination with it ever since, going to great lengths in the film to expose what he sees as a Soviet conspiracy of massive proportions.

Gracia met Alexandrovich while the two were working on a theater production together, and said that he initially thought the Duga film would only be about 5 minutes long. But as Alexandrovich became more obsessed with his theory, interviewing nuclear engineers and former Soviet bureaucrats, and digging into the history of Chernobyl and the Duga antenna, Gracia realized that the story warranted far more than a short film.

“I started this skeptically. I thought Chernobyl was an open and shut case,” Gracia said during the Q&A following Tuesday’s world premiere screening at the IFC Center. “But we talked to people – high ranking, knowledgeable people – and they all told us that something was being hidden.”

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It’s been a week since the groundbreaking Belgian born feminist filmmaker Chantal Akerman took her own life at the age of 65. In the wake of the news there has been an outpouring of love from the film community coming in from everywhere. Just two days after the news broke, Sight & Sound published an emotional memorial by filmmaker Robert Greene who wrote, “Akerman was an expressive, fearless filmmaker and this first exposure changed my life. Virtually every thought I’ve had about movies since has been influenced in some way by my first encounter with Akerman’s way of seeing.” The outlet also posted an introduction to her film LÀ-BAS by Nick James from back in 2006, as well as Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin‘s primer on her films which was originally published earlier this year.

Writing in The Guardian, director Joanna Hogg and journalist Adam Roberts, who have been curating a full retrospective of her work, reflected on Akerman’s singular talent, writing, “She ought not need an introduction – she is a film-maker who changed what cinema is or could be or ought to be. She strode effortlessly into the roll-call of great auteurs, her work into the lists of best films ever made.” David Jenkins also wrote a piece celebrating the work of the deceased filmmaker for The Guardian. The American premiere of her latest film, NO HOME MOVIE, was last week at the New York Film Festival where Kent Jones and Amy Taubin introduced the film, indieWIRE’s Tarek Shoukri reported on the devastating event, while Jones himself reflected on Akerman’s passing at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s website, “The tributes have begun, as they should. And time will pass, and the shock will come to an end, and we’ll look at her movies again, and… then what? We’ll be shocked again. Chantal’s films do not comfort. They jolt and they re-orient, they put you and me face to face with accumulating time, in whose shadow we live whether we know it or not. That’s the source of their terror and their great beauty—one in the same.”

More tributes were published in The New York Times by the likes of J. Hoberman, Moira Weigel, and Rachel Donadio and Cara Buckley. Richard Brody, writing his salute to Akerman in The New Yorker wrote, “If there’s one thing that Akerman achieved in her films, it’s the elevation of private life, of what’s extraordinary about what’s seemingly ordinary, into the apt matter of art. Her work is recklessly, freely personal, and she came before the audience that day in order to have a personal discussion in public. In a few harsh phrases, Akerman changed forever the way I think of—and approach—events onstage. She made me think about what I say and, with her emphasis on the intimate, the sincere, and the spontaneous, made me not overthink what I say.” Curve Magazine’s Victoria A. Brownworth also published a memorial piece, as did Glenn Kenny in his blog, Some Came Running, and Mark Harris at Grantland who heartbreakingly ruminated on seeing her last film, “I wonder, now, what moviegoers will make of one of its final moments — a twist, in a way, in which suddenly it is Chantal Akerman who we see, far from her mother, in her own space. It’s a room of her own but also a room that seems not to belong to her, and that will eventually be defined by her absence. She draws a curtain, and we are left, now permanently, looking for an answer in the emptiness of where she used to be.”

Most humbly, Stranger Than Fiction continues this week with Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner THE RUSSIAN WOODPECKER, which The Guardian’s Charlie Phillips called “a rollicking ride of masterly narrative construction.” Director Chad Gracia will be on hand for a post-screening Q&A. Tickets are still available here.

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“If I could give anyone advice, do not make impetuous decisions—don’t rush into the future.”
–Tomas Young

In April 2004, five days into his service in Iraq, Tomas Young was shot in his spine and paralyzed from the chest down. Directed by Ellen Spiro and Phil Donahue, BODY OF WAR chronicles Tomas’s journey as he contends with the agony of his transformation, reconciling his nature as his voice emerges and stabilizes against the far reaching effects of the Iraq War.

The film deliberately juxtaposes the aftermath of Tomas’s injury with the debate of the Iraq War resolution in both houses of Congress. A staunch opponent against the war, Senator Robert Byrd urged the country not to rush into a decision, “I plead with the American people to let your voice be heard, your questions answered.” Senator John McCain and other supporters of the war, all identified in the film, decided that “the longer we wait, the more dangerous he [Saddam Hussein] becomes.” In portraying this bureaucratic juggernaut, BODY OF WAR raises many questions about how action is defined, and how choices to exercise an option are framed. It challenges the audience to investigate what informs those choices, and examine who bears the brunt of war.

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