For Sama directed by Waad al-Kateab and Edward Watts is the winner of the top prize for Best Feature at the 35th IDA (International Documentary Association) Awards. Other notable documentary films winning awards include Leaving Neverland for Best Multi-Part Documentary and Homecoming: A Film by Beyoncé for Best Music Documentary.
The International Documentary Association (IDA) announced the 35th Annual IDA Documentary Awards Nominees along with the Courage Under Fire Award honoree Waad Al-Kataeb, director and producer of For Sama. For the first time, the IDA will present an award for Best Director and, notably, all of the nominated films have female directors.
Metrograph Pictures will release The Raft, the documentary about the 1970’s infamous social experiment known as “The Sex Raft.” The film directed by Marcus Lindeen (Regretters, Glorious Accidents); and winner of the Grand Jury Award at 2018 CPH: DOX and Silver Hugo Award at 2018 Chicago International Film Festival will open Friday, June 7 at Metrograph in NY with nationwide expansion to follow.
The 2019 RiverRun International Film Festival announced the Awards with the top prizes going to Alice directed by Josephine Mackerras which won the Jury Award for Best Narrative Feature, along with the Peter Brunette Award for Best Director for Mackerras. The film also snagged the Re Vision and Independent Feature Film Award. The Jury Award for Best Documentary Feature went to American Factory directed by Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert.
Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind[/caption]
One hundred sixty-six features have been submitted for consideration in the Documentary Feature category for the 91st Academy Awards®. Several of the films have not yet had their required Los Angeles and New York qualifying releases. Submitted features must fulfill the theatrical release requirements and comply with all of the category’s other qualifying rules in order to advance in the voting process. This year, for the first time, films that have won a qualifying award at a competitive film festival or have been submitted in the Foreign Language Film category as their country’s official selection, are also eligible in the category. A shortlist of 15 films will be announced on December 17.
Films submitted in the Documentary Feature category may also qualify for Academy Awards in other categories, including Best Picture.
Nominations for the 91st Academy Awards will be announced on Tuesday, January 22, 2019.
The 91st Oscars® will be held on Sunday, February 24, 2019, at the Dolby Theatre® at Hollywood & Highland Center® in Hollywood, and will be televised live on the ABC Television Network. The Oscars also will be televised live in more than 225 countries and territories worldwide.
The submitted features, listed in alphabetical order, are:
“Above and Beyond: NASA’S Journey to Tomorrow”
“Active Measures”
“Amazing Grace”
“American Chaos”
“Andy Irons: Kissed by God”
[caption id="attachment_25696" align="aligncenter" width="1200"]
Antonio Lopez 1970: Sex Fashion & Disco[/caption]
“Antonio Lopez 1970: Sex Fashion & Disco”
“Avicii: True Stories”
“Bali: Beats of Paradise”
“Bathtubs over Broadway”
“Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché”
“Believer”
“Better Angels”
“Bill Coors: The Will to Live”
“Bisbee ’17”
“The Bleeding Edge”
“Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat”
“Breaking Point: The War for Democracy in Ukraine”
“Call Her Ganda”
“Charm City”
“Chef Flynn”
“The China Hustle”
“Christian Audigier The Vif”
“The Cleaners”
“Communion”
“Crime + Punishment”
“Dark Money”
“Daughters of the Sexual Revolution: The Untold Story of the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders”
“The Dawn Wall”
“The Distant Barking of Dogs”
“Divide and Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes”
“Drug$”
“Eating Animals”
“Eldorado”
“Fahrenheit 11/9”
“Fail State”
“Family in Transition”
“Far from the Tree”
“Filmworker”
“The First Patient”
“Foreign Land”
“40 Years in the Making: The Magic Music Movie”
“Free Solo”
“Garry Winogrand: All Things Are Photographable”
“Generation Wealth”
“Ghost Hunting”
“Ghosthunter”
“The Gilligan Manifesto”
“The Gospel According to André”
“Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami”
“Graves without a Name”
“The Great Buster: A Celebration”
“Hal”
“Hale County This Morning, This Evening”
“Half the Picture”
“The Heart of Nuba”
“Hillbilly”
“The Homeless Chorus Speaks”
“Hondros”
“Howard”
“In Search of Greatness”
“In the Land of Pomegranates”
“Inventing Tomorrow”
“Invisible Hands”
“Itzhak”
“Jane Fonda in Five Acts”
“John McEnroe: In the Realm of Perfection”
“The Judge”
“Kangaroo: A Love Hate Story”
“Killer Bees”
“The King”
“King in the Wilderness”
“Kusama – Infinity”
“The Last Race”
“Leaning into the Wind: Andy Goldsworthy”
“Letter from Masanjia”
“Licu, a Romanian Story”
“Living in the Future’s Past”
“Liyana”
“Lots of Kids, a Monkey and a Castle”
“Love & Bananas: An Elephant Story”
“Love, Cecil”
“Love, Gilda”
“Love Is Tolerance – Tolerance Is Love – Make Tolerance Great Again!”
“Making The Five Heartbeats”
“Maria by Callas”
“Matangi / Maya / M.I.A.”
“McQueen”
“Minding the Gap”
“Monrovia, Indiana”
“The Most Unknown”
“New Moon”
“93Queen”
“Nossa Chape”
“Of Fathers and Sons”
“Of Love & Law”
“On Her Shoulders”
“Opera about Poland”
“The Opera House”
“The Oslo Diaries”
“The Other Side of Everything”
“The Panama Papers”
“Path of Blood”
“People’s Republic of Desire”
“Philosopher King – Lee Teng-hui’s Dialogue”
“Pick of the Litter”
“Piripkura”
“Police Killing”
“Pope Francis – A Man of His Word”
“The Price of Everything”
“The Price of Free”
“Qiu (Inmates)”
“Quincy”
“RBG”
“The Rachel Divide”
“The Raft”
“Recovery Boys”
“Restoring Tomorrow”
“Reversing Roe”
“The Road Movie”
“Robin Williams: Come inside My Mind”
“Ruben Blades Is Not My Name”
“Samouni Road”
“Saving Brinton”
“Say Her Name: The Life and Death of Sandra Bland”
“Science Fair”
“Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood”
“Searching for Ingmar Bergman”
“Seeing Allred”
“The Sentence”
“Shirkers”
“Shot in the Dark”
“The Silence of Others”
“Sisters of the Wilderness”
“A Son of Man”
“Songwriter”
“Stan”
“Studio 54”
“Summer in the Forest”
“Tea with the Dames”
“That Summer”
“That Way Madness Lies…”
“They Fight”
“They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead”
“This Is Congo”
“This Is Home: A Refugee Story”
“Three Identical Strangers”
“To Be Continued”
“Transformer”
“Travel Ban”
“The Trial”
“Triumph: The Untold Story of Perry Wallace”
“Trust Machine”
“Under the Wire”
“United Skates”
“Unknown Distance”
“Up Down and Sideways”
“The Waldheim Waltz”
“We Could Be Heroes”
“Weed the People”
“What Haunts Us”
“What Lies Upstream”
“Whitney”
“Wonderful Losers: A Different World”
“Won’t You Be My Neighbor?”
“Yellow Is Forbidden”
“Yellowing”
HAPPY AS LAZARRO[/caption]
The 54th Chicago International Film Festival hosted its Awards Ceremony and taking home the top prize, the Gold Hugo for Best Film, in the International Feature Film Competition, is director Alice Rohrwacher’s Happy as Lazzaro, a film the jury recognized for its poetic cinematic language and formal rigor. The Silver Hugo for Best Director was awarded to Jia Zhangke for Ash Is Purest White and the Silver Hugo Special Jury Prize was awarded to Joy, directed by Sudabeh Mortezai.
Director Ash Mayfair took home top honors in the New Directors Competition with a Gold Hugo for The Third Wife and the Silver Hugo was awarded to Joël Karekezi for The Mercy of the Jungle. The Roger Ebert Award, presented to an emerging filmmaker with a fresh and uncompromising vision, was awarded to directors Andréa Bescond and Eric Métayer for Little Tickles, and the Chicago Award was presented to Michael Paulucci for Hashtag Perfect Life. The Founder’s Award, given to one film across all categories that captures the spirit of the Chicago International Film Festival for its unique and innovative approach to the art of the moving image, was presented to Felix van Groeningen’s Beautiful Boy.
“Each year, the films presented in our competitions represent the excellence and diversity of filmmaking from around the world, and this year was no exception,” said Festival Artistic Director Mimi Plauché. “We are proud to honor these extraordinary films from around the world and here at home, saluting a diverse lineup of singular filmmakers and their work.”
Fuck Off 2 – Images from Finland[/caption]
The documentary program for this year’s 60th Nordische Filmtage Lübeck (Oct. 30 – Nov. 4, 2018) promises to deliver an exciting cross-section of films on ways of life in the Nordic and Baltic countries, as well as vivid histories in Europe over the last 100 years. Of the 28 documentaries in the section, 16 will be in the running for the Documentary Film Prize awarded by the Lübeck trade unions.The award, to be presented at the 60th Nordic Film Days Lübeck on November 3, 2018, is given to a “socially and politically committed film”.
Among this year’s documentarians is one of Finland’s most renowned directors and producers, Jörn Donner, who attempts in “Fuck Off 2 – Images from Finland” (FIN 2017) to capture the enormous changes that have occurred in the country since he made the classic documentary “Fuck Off – Images from Finland” in 1971. As he journeyed around the country and spoke with a wide diversity of people, he shed light on immense income disparity, rural depopulation, and attitudes towards migrants – subjects that are also addressed in some of the section’s other films. Jörn Donner, born in 1933, will be guest in Lübeck. Husband and wife team Janus Metz and Sine Plambech, who won the NFL Documentary prize in 2009, have also made a sequel of sorts with “Heartbound – a Different Kind of Love Story” (DEN/HOL/SWE 2018). The film shows an anthropological bent as it looks at marriages between Danes and Thais, providing deep insight into those special inter-cultural relationships in Denmark’s northern reaches.
The films in the documentary section also look at other topical issues, such as the de-population of isolated European regions in “Estonian Stories. Kerro 40” (EST 2017) and “690 Vopnafjörður” (ICE 2017). The ramifications of technological progress for residents is the subject of “The River, My Friend” (SWI 2018) and “The Illuminators”, while changes to the working world in traditional trades such as commercial fishing play a role in “The Ocean – Fishing with Love” (DEN/FAR 2018) and “The Last in a Line of Fishermen” (SWE 2018).
Lastly, the rise and fall of a modern high-tech company is examined in “Nokia Mobile – We Were Connecting People” (FIN/NOR/GER 2017).
The importance of a structured life, education, and school systems for children and young adults is the subject of the two films “14 Cases” (EST 2017) and “To Be Continued” (LAT 2018), while by contrast, “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” (NOR/SWE 2018) and “The Night” (NOR/BEL/SWE 2017) look at the effects of drug addiction on families.
Among the films that look back at history are “Bad Circumstances” (DEN 2018), about the conquest of Greenland, and “The Raven and the Seagull” (DEN/GL 2018) about the relationship between colony and colonial powers. Other films on historical subjects are “The Eyes of a War” (FIN 2018) by Jouko Aaltonen and Seppo Rustanius, about child soldiers in Finland’s civil war, as well as “Iceland Defense Force – Cold War Frontier” (ICE 2017), in which directors Guðbergur Davíðsson and Konráð Gylfason take a close look at a NATO base in Keflavik, Iceland.
The 100th anniversary of the founding of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, as well as Icelandic independence provides the perfect occasion for other films in the documentary section. For instance, directors Raimo Jõeran and Kiur Aarma look back at the first Estonian government, portraying it as a wild “Rodeo” (EST/FIN 2018). “Bridges of Time” (LAT/LIT/EST 2018) also brings back memories – in this case of the Baltic New Wave cinema that provided a counterpoint to the official Soviet film regime of the time. It’s a documentary about documentaries whose directors developed a poetic cinematic language in the 1960s. One of those filmmakers is Lette Ivars Seleckis, born in 1934, who is expected in Lübeck this year, where he will not only join director Kristine Briede to present “Bridges of Time”, but also screen his newest documentary “To Be Continued” (LAT 2018), which observes Latvian children as they go through their first school year.
A very special relationship is at the centre of this year’s Master Class on “Reality and Morality”, which focusses on the latest documentary by Norwegian director Erik Poppe, who recently created a bit of a sensation with “U – July 22” (NOR 2018, showing this year in the Specials section). In “Per Fugelli – I Die” (NOR 2018), Poppe accompanies his friend, the Norwegian physician and public health pioneer, through the final stages of Fugelli’s fatal cancer. The resulting film is both profound and absorbing. Erik Poppe himself will be at the Master Class to talk with young filmmakers about how to deal with highly sensitive subjects, and the filmmaker’s responsibility to his protagonists. He will also discuss the use of narrative filmmaking methods on documentary storytelling.
2018 CPH-DOX Awards. The winner of DOX:Award: The Raft[/caption]
‘The Raft’ by the Swedish director Marcus Lindeen, which tells the story of one of the strangest social experiments of all times ,and told by those who took part in it, took the top prize – the Dox:Award 2018 at the 15th edition of CPH:DOX – Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival. The film held its world premiere at as CPH:DOX.
In 1973, five men and six women sailed across the Atlantic on a raft. A social experiment and a scientific study of violence, aggression, sex and group behaviour, conducted by a radical Mexican anthropologist. Everything was filmed and documented in a diary. But theory is one thing, practice is another. And without wanting to reveal too much, the experiment didn’t exactly work out as planned. Over 40 years later, Swedish artist and filmmaker Marcus Lindeen brings the crew together again for the first time since the experiment, on a faithful copy of the raft in a film studio, to look back at the three intense months they spent together, isolated and without privacy, on ‘The Sex Raft’, as the press called it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-diO4_Y0i8
The jury gave a Special Mention to ‘América’, a charming, Mexican adventure about three mismatched brothers and their 93-year-old grandmother in a film about family ties.
‘Laila at the Bridge’ by Elizabeth Mirzaei and Gulistan Mirzaei, which had its world premiere at CPH:DOX won the F:ACT Award – dedicated to auteur filmmaking in the field between research-based, investigative journalism, activism and documentary cinema.
A powerful film about a woman who is willpower in its purest form. Day after day, the charismatic and strong-willed woman puts on her small ballerina shoes and colourful scarves and heads under the bridge to take them to her private rehab centre, where the aim is to get them out of their addiction with ice-cold baths, communal prayers and motherly reprimands. It is not a miracle factory. Many experience a relapse, and Laila has to struggle with constant financial problems. When the Taliban’s arrival in the city scares customers away from the restaurant she is running to finance her centres, things start looking bleak. But Laila threatens corrupt ministers in their marble offices, shoots mafia thugs in her bedroom with a shotgun and with equal measures of care and indignation has a serious word with the opium-addled men under the bridge.
The winner of the New:Vision Award is the film ‘Wild Relatives’ by Jumana Manna. Jumana Manna’s original and politically sensitive new work draws lines between three distant spots on the world map: Syria, Lebanon and Svalbard. The lines chart a route and a complex network of relationships. ‘Wild Relatives’ exposes the exchange of ecological currency between two of the world’s grain banks, which are the archives of the smallest basic ingredient of agriculture: Seeds. Biodiversity, conflicts and international politics are parts of a game with perspectives reaching far out into the most distant future, and form the the basis for a humorous and thought-provoking conversation between a priest and a scientist far out in the middle of nowhere.
The jury gave a Special Mention to ‘Translations’ by Tinne Zenner, a critical and graceful 16mm film in which the vistas of Greenland create a space for free thinking.
The winner of the Nordic:Dox Award – recognizing the best and brightest in cinema from the Nordic countries – is the film ‘Lykkelænder’ by the Danish director Lasse Lau. The film held its world premiere at the festival.
The relationship between Greenland and Denmark is full of fantasy and myths. And these are exactly what Danish artist Lasse Lau reflects upon – and in turn documents – in his first feature-length film. But how do you give a form to the Greenlandic experience when you are an outsider yourself? Lau has created a sensitive film about authenticity and recreation by letting both elements become a part of the work, together with his performers.
The jury gave a Special Mention to the Norwegian film ‘The Night’ by Steffan Strandberg, a beautifully animated and bittersweet film about two brothers and their upbringing with an alcoholic mother and musician father.
The winner of the Next:Wave Award given to emerging filmmakers, is the film ‘Beautiful Things’ by the Italian directors Giorgio Ferrero & Federico Biasin. If documentary science fiction was a genre – and it is now! – then ‘Beautiful Things’ is the film that locates the future in the midst of our present age. A machine engineer on a supertanker and a scientist specialising in mathematics and audio studies are two of the human cogs in a bulimic cycle of (over)production and (over)consumption of the material objects that surround us – a cycle we never even think about. A chain with many segments, which the filmmaker duo of Giorgio Ferrero and Federico Biasin brings together in an accomplished audiovisual study of our times, but with room for the human quirks that constitute the grit in the machinery.
The jury gave a Special Mention to Minding the Gap (Bing Liu, United States), where three young friends grow up, become young men and make life choices in front of rolling cameras, and Conventional Sins (Anat Yuta Zuria & Shira-Clara Winther, Israel), a Docu-noir about sexual abuse in the ultra-orthodox environment in Jerusalem.
The winner of the Politiken Audience Award is ‘False Confessions’ by the director Katrine Philp, a legal thriller about a pro-bono idealist’s work for justice in a cynical justice system. The film held its world premiere at the festival.
During an interrogation in the United States, it is both legal and commonplace to use special psychological techniques to make the suspect confess. In a closed room, coached interrogators can not only get anyone to confess to anything – they can also make innocent people believe that they have actually committed crimes such as murder and child assault. In New York, the Danish-born defence attorney Jane Fisher-Byrialsen is working to prevent false confessions, so that less people end up in prison for crimes they have not committed.
image via Facebook – The winner of DOX:Award: “The Raft” Photo by Inger Rønnenfelt