The holiday season is upon us and with it comes a hail of award season Hollywood hold-offs that generally steal the thunder of non-fiction titles just making their way to theaters (here’s looking at you STAR WARS). Thus, it’s been a fairly quite week for docs, though one that deserves a bit of celebration with the Library of Congress announcing their 2015 National Film Registry titles which include eight works of non-fiction, as Daniel Walber noted at Nonfics. Shirley Clarke‘s PORTRAIT OF JASON, Thom Andersen’s EADWEARD MUYBRIDGE, ZOOPRAXOGRAPHER and Thomas Edison‘s EDISON KINETOSCOPE RECORD OF A SNEEZE (which can now be viewed here) are among this year’s additions deemed “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant”, reports Susan King for the Los Angeles Times.
There’s still a solid week and a half before the bell rings out 2015, but the best-of lists continue to roll in from all sides. The Playlist have named their Top 20 Docs of the Year, LA Weekly’s Amy Nicholson listed her Most Essential Docs of the Year, while at Nonfics, Landon Palmer gave an unpredictable rundown of her favorite music docs of 2015. Including a variety of non-fiction features in their general year end best-of lists, Sight & Sound and Film Comment, both of whom included THE LOOK OF SILENCE. Mixing things up a bit, Kevin B. Lee once again “attempted to account for the state of video essays” this year over at Fandor’s Keyframe, gathering a variety of best of lists from key video essayists and theorists, most of which link to the video pieces mentioned.
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While this past week we saw the Dubai International Film Festival kick off with Basil Tsiokos writing a preview of the doc offerings screening both in competition and out at his What (not) To Doc blog and Porto/Post/Doc wrap up and award their top prize to Zhao Liang’s BEHEMOTH, the Sundance Film Festival continues to hog headlines with its latest wave of title announcements. Included in the festival’s newly announced 2016 Documentary Premieres program is a slew of exciting new works by the likes of Werner Herzog, Spike Lee, Heidi Ewing, Rachel Grady, Stephanie Soechtig, Liz Garbus, Chris Hegedus, and D.A. Pennebaker, according to reports by Kate Erbland at indieWIRE and Justin Chang at Variety. Additionally, the make up of the festival’s doc shorts program, including new work from Jason Reitman and AJ Schnack, was also released this week. In related festival news, the 66th annual Berlin International Film Festival also announced their first five competition titles and amongst them is the ever prolific Alex Gibney with his new film ZERO DAYS.
Looking back at 2015, the awards continue to stack up. At the 28th European Film Awards, Asif Kapadia won Best Documentary for AMY, while the Online Film Critics Association (whom I am admittedly a proud member of) has named Joshua Oppenheimer’s THE LOOK OF SILENCE the Best Doc of 2015. Though it’s been decades since the Golden Globes acknowledged non-fiction features, at Nonfics, Christopher Campbell imagined what this week’s nominations might have looked like had they decided to reinstate the Best Documentary category, noting that under seen crowd-pleasers like Ethan Hawke’s SEYMOUR: AN INTRODUCTION would most likely make the cut. This week Cara Buckley debated the potential final five Oscar nominations in The New York Times, while at indieWIRE, Anthony Kaufman pulled back the curtain on the ugly wheeling, dealing and dining that makes up the Oscar race. And while not specifically dealing with a 2015 release, the Cinema Eye Honors announced that their 2016 Legacy Award would “be presented to Chris Smith’s beloved 1999 documentary, AMERICAN MOVIE, the unforgettable story of a filmmaker pursuing his passion project.”
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