The 2020 Naples International Film Festival announced the filmmaker award winners with the top Jury Prizes going to David Gutnik’s Materna for Best Narrative Feature, and Brian Morrison’s Bastards’ Road for Best Documentary Feature. Audience Awards went to Lanie Zipoy’s The Subject (Best Narrative Film) and Lynn Montgomery’s Amazing Grace (Best Documentary Film).
Festival-goers of the 56th Chicago International Film Festival voted Nomadland the third feature film from director Chloé Zhao, the winner of the Audience Choice Award for Feature Film. The film stars Frances McDormand as Fern who, after the economic collapse of a company town in rural Nevada, packs her van and sets off on the road exploring a life outside of conventional society as a modern-day nomad. Nomadland features real nomads Linda May, Swankie, and Bob Wells as Fern’s mentors and comrades in her exploration through the vast landscape of the American West.
Showtime will air Macho: The Hector Camacho Story, an unflinching look at the remarkable life, storied career and unsolved murder of one of boxing’s greatest showmen. Premiering Friday, December 4 at 9 p.m. ET/PT on Showtime, the documentary directed by two-time Emmy Award winner Eric Drath (Assault in the Ring and No Más, 30 for 30) debuts just two weeks after the eighth anniversary of Camacho’s fatal shooting in Bayamon, Puerto Rico.
International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) 2020 will open with the world premiere of Nothing but the Sun by Paraguayan-Swiss director Arami Ullón. A quietly earth-shattering film, Nothing but the Sun lucidly contrasts the hot, arid atmosphere of Paraguay’s Chaco region with the devastating stories of the Ayoreo people, an Indigenous community violently uprooted from their ancestral territory by white missionaries. Between past and present, forest and desert, folk songs and church hymns, Ullón’s poetic feature lays bare the raw emotions of the human condition, seen through a culture on the brink of disappearing, but not without a voice.
The 23rd annual Revelation Perth International Film Festival returns December 9 – 13, showcasing a curated program of international and local content.
Film at Lincoln Center announced the lineup of 16 features and 11 shorts for the seventh edition of Art of the Real, an essential showcase for the most vital and innovative voices in nonfiction and hybrid filmmaking. Original set to take place in April, Art of the Real will now take place over the course of two weeks from November 13-26, exclusively in the FLC Virtual Cinema.
A new feature-length documentary titled The Day Sports Stood Still that tells the story of the unprecedented sports shutdown in March of 2020 and the remarkable turn of events that followed is in the works at HBO Sports.
Psychiatrist Dr. Dorothy Otnow Lewis has dedicated her career to the study of murderers, seeking answers to the question of why we kill. Crazy, Not Insane, directed and produced by Academy Award-winner Alex Gibney (HBO’s “Agents of Chaos” and “The Inventor: Out For Blood in Silicon Valley”) debuts Wednesday, November 18 (9:00-11:00 p.m. ET/PT). This provocative documentary explores, like a scientific detective story, Dr. Lewis’s lifelong attempts to look beyond the grisly details of homicides into the hearts and minds of the killers themselves.
Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution, Gunda, and Mr. SOUL! lead the nominations for the fifth annual Critics Choice Documentary Awards (CCDA) with five each. The winners will be revealed in a Special Announcement on Monday, November 16, 2020.
There Is No Evil, directed by Mohammad Rasoulof, was awarded the top Fiction Feature Prize at 2020 Montclair Film Festival. Winner of the 2020 Berlin Film Festival’s Golden Bear for Best Feature, Mohammad Rasoulof’s There Is No Evil is a series of four interrelated short stories set against the backdrop of contemporary Iran.
For this hybrid Covid-19 edition, the 33rd edition of exground filmfest, which runs from November 13 to 22, will present a total of 121 independent short and feature-length films from 45 countries in various Wiesbaden, Germany venues. The festival will share large portions of the film program via on-demand streaming, and for the first time, the festival opening and awards ceremony will be broadcast live, and panels and film talks will be recorded for presentation on the festival’s YouTube channel.
