All these wonderful things

March Marks the Start of Festival Season with True/False, Miami and SXSW About to Unspool

Now that we've got award season out of the way (I tweeted on Monday that "Moving Cinema Eye to January was the best decision ever. I can't imagine planning an awards show right now."), we can dive full force into the films of 2011.  And nothing underlines that more than the impending launch of two major US film festivals - True/False and SXSW - and the documentary rebirth of the Miami Film Festival, courtesy of doc-master Thom Powers, that festival's new documentary programmer. 

Miami kicks off unofficially tonight with an outdoor screening of Sarah McCarthy's THE SOUND OF MUMBAI, a crowd-pleasing film that premiered in Powers' 2010 Toronto line-up and has been picked up by the folks at HBO.  During the week that follows, Miami will screen a potent round-up of the best of Sundance 2011, including James Marsh's PROJECT NIM, Morgan Spurlock's THE GREATEST MOVIE EVER SOLD, Marshall Curry's IF A TREE FALLS, Steve James' THE INTERRUPTERS, Liz Garbus' BOBBY FISCHER AGAINST THE WORLD, Andrew Rossi's PAGE ONE, David Weissman's WE WERE HERE, Daniele Anastasion and Eric Strauss' THE REDEMPTION OF GENERAL BUTT NAKED, Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood's MAGIC TRIP and Göran Hugo Olsson's THE BLACK POWER MIXTAPE.

[Full disclosure: I am on the documentary jury at the Miami Film Festival this year.]

Marsh, James, Garbus, Rossi, Ollson and Anastasion/Strauss will also be screening their films this weekend at True/False in Columbia, Missouri, where Marsh will be presented with the fest's True Vision Award (which has previously gone to Laura Poitras, Alex Gibney, Kim Longinotto and Kirby Dick) and the subjects of James' film THE INTERRUPTERS will be the beneficiaries of the fest's True Life Fund.

As Critics Prepare to Weigh in, THE OATH and MARWENCOL Still Lead Honor Roll

Think of it as a different kind of shortlist. 

The Academy weighed in their list of 15 films that will move forward in the Oscar race.  Some of those titles have done really well in awards and nominations leading up to the Granddaddy of them all while others haven't made a blip on the radar until now.

On our annual Nonfiction Feature Honor Roll, we usually find that things really begin to coallesce as the year ends.  Thus far we've heard from festival juries & audiences, and we've got nominees for each of the year's other big nonfiction awards (Spirits, Cinema Eye, IDA & Gothams).Starting today, with the National Board of Review weighing in on the year's best films, we'll start hearing from critics groups and then the various guilds.

But if we were to take the information we have to date - which 15 films would make the Honor Roll shortlist?  [We'll give you a hint - only 6 of the 15 are on the Academy's shortlist.]

The Shortlist is Coming! The Shortlist is Coming!

'Twas the week before Thanksgiving and all through the house, all the documentary filmmakers were waiting to hear whether they'd made the Academy's list of 15 features that would vie for the Best Documentary Oscar.  Word on the street is that the announcement could come as early as today and as late as Monday.  And no one is sure whether the Academy will give the shortlisted filmmaker a heads-up phone call, as was the practice for years, or whether the list will be sprung without warning, as happened in 2009.

We did a early-prediction piece back in September that tried to assess the state of the Oscar campaigns coming at the eligibility deadline.  And back then, we named INSIDE JOB and RESTREPO as the two frontrunners.

We're no longer so sure about that...

We still think that INSIDE JOB is toward the front of the pack - the Charles Ferguson film has built on its early critical huzzahs out of Cannes and has settled in nicely at the box office: 1.5M and counting. RESTREPO, meanwhile, seems to have stumbled a bit.  Its summer release is getting not the tiniest bit overshadowed by the soon-to-be-released, super-cinematic Danish film ARMADILLO (which, not for nothing, scored 6 Cinema Eye nominations a couple weeks ago).  ARMADILLO is also in the hunt for this year's Oscar.

I'd still be very surprised if RESTREPO isn't on the shortlist when it's unveiled, but the omission isn't out-of-the-question.

Also bumped up to front-runner status: Davis Guggenheim's zeitgeisty WAITING FOR 'SUPERMAN'.  Take away the fact that Guggenheim already has his Oscar (and his family has something like half a dozen), 'SUPERMAN' is certain to be the biggest "serious issue" doc of 2010 - at least at the box office - and that usually has meant something.  Plus, Guggenheim is known throughout the larger film community as a good guy who moves adeptly between nonfiction and narrative.

Still, when you go out into the documemtary community - and that's the path all these films must take to get a nomination - it's hard to find folks who LOVE either film.  You find a lot of respect for the solid way that the films were made, but nobody's really doing cartwheels.

It's a third film - the only one to score nominations from Cinema Eye, the IDA and the Gothams thus far - that people really seem to love: Laura Poitras' THE OATH.

We think it's a near-lock for a nomination.  And it may (crazy as it sounds) have a shot to win it all.  Here's why:

LAST TRAIN HOME, ARMADILLO, EXIT, MARWENCOL & THE OATH Lead 2011 Cinema Eye Nominations

Nominations were just announced at Sheffield Doc/Fest in the United Kingdom for the 4th Annual Cinema Eye Honors and the film with the most nominations is Lixin Fan's LAST TRAIN HOME, garnering 7 nominations, tying the record set previously by WALTZ WITH BASHIR and THE COVE.

Nominated with LAST TRAIN HOME for Outstanding Feature Film is Janus Metz' ARMADILLO, Banksy's EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP (both with six nominations), Jeff Malmberg's MARWENCOL and Laura Poitras' THE OATH (which each garnered four nods).

Fan, Malmberg, Metz and Poitras were nominated for Outstanding Direction with legendary documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman for LA DANSE: THE PARIS OPERA BALLET.  Wiseman is having a career resurgence with LA DANSE (which was nominated in three categories) and his new film BOXING GYM.

THE OATH has now been nominated for each of the major year end documentary prizes to date (Gothams and IDA previously).  EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP was also nominated for Best Documentary by the IDA.  MARWENCOL, which declined to pursue an Oscar nomination over the cost of fulfilling the Academy's requirements, was recently named the recipient of the IDA's Emerging Filmmaker Award.

It's the first year end awards recognition from ARMADILLO, which premiered at Cannes and has been a box office sensation in its native Denmark but is just having its US premiere tonight at DOC NYC, and LAST TRAIN HOME, which took top prize at IDFA last year and has seen steady theatrical business in the US and Canada.

Charles Ferguson's INSIDE JOB, considered by many to be the Oscar favorite, received three nominations, including a nod for Outstanding Production.  Ferguson was nominated previously for Cinema Eye for his debut film NO END IN SIGHT.

CATFISH, A FILM UNFINISHED, INTO ETERNITY, THE RED CHAPEL, RESTREPO, THE SOUND OF INSECTS - SECRET OF A MUMMY and SWEETGRASS all had two nominations.

From an international perspective, the nominations are dominated by Danish documentaries.  In addition to ARMADILLO, both INTO ETERNITY and THE RED CHAPEL are nominated for Outstanding International Feature (the other nominees are EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP and LAST TRAIN HOME).  

A full list of nominees is after the jump.

DOCNYC 2010: Thom Powers Previews the Inaugural Edition of the New Nonfiction Festival in New York

In just 9 days, New York will see the launch of DOCNYC, the new festival birthed from the folks behind NYC's Stranger Than Fiction series (Toronto International Film Festival Documentary Programmer Thom Powers, STF Executive Director Raphaela Neihausen, IFC Center head honcho John Vanco and IFC Center Director of Programs Harris Dew).  It's perhaps the biggest documentary festival launch in over five years and it's grabbing the prime real estate in early November that's soon to be vacated by primo UK Doc/Fest Sheffield.

The first edition is marked by tributes to doc superstars Werner Herzog and Errol Morris, a retrospective of work by one of this year's Honorary Oscar recipients, Kevin Brownlow, and two competition sections - Metropolis, which focuses on New York-set stories, and Viewfinders, which includes the US Premieres of Janus Metz' ARMADILLO, Kim Longinotto's PINK SARIS and Bjarte Mørner Tveit's DISCOVERIES OF A MARIONETTE and the World Premiere of Robert Greene's KATI WITH AN I (following a sneak preview earlier this year at True/False).

We talked to Thom Powers (who was, full disclosure, my co-chair for the first two editions of the Cinema Eye Honors and who serves on Cinema Eye's Advisory Board) about the inaugural festival, his broader ideas for a "nonfiction festival" and what's exciting and scaring him nine days out.

ATWT: I guess I want to start with the other stuff, the non-film elements, because that's one of the things I think is so exciting about DOCNYC and what you're doing, because it's not just films and it's not just panels about films.

Thom Powers: It's not.  Film I would say is an 80 or 90 percent core of what we're doing this year but the longterm goal of this festival is to enrich the other aspects over the years.  And the heart of this is the daylong symposia that we have called Doc Convergence.  That's kind of where I laid down an initial structure for ways in which I want to invigorate this festival with all kinds of different documentary voices, not just filmmakers.  At Doc Convergence we have photographers, including Pulitzer Prize winner David Turnley, we have cartoonists, such as Joe Sacco, Linda Barry, we have people from the world of performance and also writing, such as Lawrence Wright, who did "My Trip to Al Qaeda", which was turned into a film by Alex Gibney, and Moises Kaufman, who's done these documentary-based theatrical works, including The Laramie Project, that was turned into a film.