All these wonderful things

Thoughts on This Year's Cinema Eye Honors

Well, that was fun. 

We wrapped the fourth annual Cinema Eye Honors 6 days ago at the newly re-opened Museum of the Moving Image (where we were still inaugurating some of their equipment and where not everything, including the thermostats, were fully operational) and now things are slowly but surely getting back into regular gear, at least around these parts.

I'm beginning to think that I should just hang a sign on the blog come the top of January that reads "Gone Fishin'" or something...

For the rest of the doc world, Cinema Eye was but one event (or series of events), a stop en route to Sundance or to tomorrow's Oscar nominations or to whatever the next festival or party or envelope opening comes to call.

But for those of us who've been working behind the scenes on this year's ceremony, this year was something really quite special.

While I always love the event/ceremony, and it's great to see so many friends, colleagues and people I admire, this year was particularly important to us as it marked the first time that we produced the event entirely by ourselves.  We obviously had a lot of help - people who gave of their time and talents, sponsors who contributed cash and bottles of gin and spaces in which we could hand out very heavy, seemingly-dangerous trophies.

But this year was a truly hand-made event and it resonated personally because I knew how much work we all had put into it.

I so fortunate to have a great team, particularly my partners Nathan Truesdell and Esther Robinson.  The three of us have been meeting and talking and conspiring over ways to pull off Cinema Eye 2011 pretty much since the day after Cinema Eye 2010.  And I'd be lying if I said that we weren't already talking about Cinema Eye 2012.

For us, Cinema Eye is about celebrating collaborations and recognizing the work of the entire team that makes these movies that we love.  So, it's kind of essential that the three of us know how to riff off of each other, to know when to push and pull, and to trust in the others' core belief about the thing that we are doing (which, in our minds at least, is more than about handing out trophies).  Because Esther and I get to stand on the stage and crack-wise, it's important to emphasize that this is truly a 3-headed monster and that Nate's contributions to Cinema Eye throughout the year have been intrinsic to its success.

Beyond my two co-conspirators, we have a great crew of extended family, led by our nominations chair Sean Farnel and our advisory board chair Andrea Meditch.  The two of them, as well as our numerous advisors (special shout outs to Matt Dentler, Thom Powers, Rachel Rosen, Debra Zimmerman and Ryan Harrington), keep steering us down the right path.

This year, we had special assists from Brian Geldin, Lainey Hughes, Jennifer Razor, Ingrid Kopp, Natalie Difford, Maxyne Franklin, Robert Greene, James Benson, Bernardo Britto and Michael Forstein.  We had our amazing design team - our art director Ryan Nelson and our lead illustrator Ben Chlapek who created all the amazing graphics for this years films.  Plus we had the onstage talents of The Quavers (T. Griffin, Catherine McRae and Dennis Cronin) who kicked off the show with an excerpt from Sam Green and Dave Cerf's UTOPIA IN FOUR MOVEMENTS, narrated by Mr. Green himself.

Finally, I can't forget our sponsors, without whom there would have been no Cinema Eye this year - particularly our partners at the Museum of the Moving Image (David Schwartz and Rachael Rakes) who dealt with us even as they were still opening their doors, but also everyone at the Documentary Channel, the Economist, HBO Documentary Films, A&E IndieFilms, SnagFilms, POV, Abel Cine Tech, Sheffield Doc/Fest, Hot Docs, Camden International Film Festival, Hudson Hotel, Danish Film Institute, Maine Distilleries and the Film Sales Company.

You'll get to see the fruits of this labor - in slightly abbreviated form - when the ceremony airs on the Documentary Channel (available on DirectTV, Dish and some cable systems) this Sunday night at 8 PM eastern and pacific.

I don't think it matters if the winners are known; the on-camera reactions and the speeches - particularly the one you may have read about from Banksy - are more fun to watch than just reading the recaps, as good as many of them were.

But if you're interested in other's thoughts/recaps about this year's event, you can find them from Brian Brooks at indieWIRE, Matt Singer at IFC, Steve Pond at The Wrap, Scott Macauley at Filmmaker Magazine, Jennifer Merin at about.com and Melena Ryzik at The New York Times' The Carpetbagger blog.

One last, personal, note:  As I said before we announced the final award of the evening, I want to congratulate all of this year's nominees.  We talk a lot about what an extraordinary year it was, but I don't talk as often - here on the blog, at least - about how inspiring, how personally rejuvinating, the artistic achievements of this year have been.  So while Cinema Eye is centered around this idea of voting and winning and being nominated, I want to send my personal thanks to the filmmakers of 2010 and thank them for the numerous ways in which they call on me to be a better filmmaker.

Oscar Goes Bigger for 2011: EXIT & 4 Other Million Dollar Grossers Lead Shortlist Pack

Yesterday afternoon, the Academy announced its documentary shortlist.  As we mentioned at the time, the headline was that EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP had defied most of the odds to hurdle what we thought would be the most difficult barrier stopping it from winning the Oscar - making the shortlist at all - while the most shocking snub was the failure to advance Laura Poitras' THE OATH, a film that we had pegged as a frontrunner and which had already been nominated for the top award at Cinema Eye, the IDA and the Gothams.

But more about those in a minute.

So, first off, it's not a terrible list.  I've seen a few folks contend that it's off-the-charts bad, and trust me, I've seen off-the-charts bad, and this isn't that.

It's curious, that's certain, but mostly because it's actually the kind of list that I think the Academy has been hoping for for years - a slick, brassy list of 15 that's chockablock full of big films and big directors: there's 5 million-dollar grossers in the bunch (the first time that has ever happened) and that doesn't include the headline-grabbing films about Pat Tillman and Eliot Spitzer and natural gas fracking, nor a just-opening, crowd-pleasing film about Brazilian garbage workers.

That makes at least 9 high-profile titles out of 15, which explains why a number of Oscar prognosticators felt pretty good about this year's list (and their pre-announcement predictions, which had centered on films that had a big theatrical launch and therefore that they'd actually heard of - not usually a good barometer).

A lot of these are big productions, too (which makes sense when you consider that Best Picture at the Oscars goes to the producers, not the directors), and for the first time in several years, many if not most of the big players seem to have a horse in the race - Sony Pictures Classics, Weinstein Co., HBO, NatGeo, Magnolia, Paramount, Cinetic, Oscilloscope (those that don't, like Roadside, either weren't really in the doc game this year or, like Zeitgeist and IFC, missed out with their own high profile titles).

And there are big name directors - two Oscar winners (Gibney and Guggenheim) and another nominee (Charles Ferguson), not to mention perhaps the world's most famous anonymous street artist.

This is the kind of shiny list that a lot of people can be (and likely are) pretty happy with, both inside and outside the Academy.

There are always going to be "snubs".  It's getting so that I dislike even using the word, because a "snub" almost implies that there's something unusual going on.  But if there are 3-5 or more "snubs" every year, it hardly seems novel.  Feels like we need a different word.

Gotham Awards 2010 Nominees Include Oscar Hopefuls and Scorsese's PUBLIC SPEAKING

The Gotham Awards have just announced their nominees for 2010 and the five films nominated in the Best Documentary category are:

12TH AND DELAWARE
Directed by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady

INSIDE JOB
Directed by Charles Ferguson

THE OATH
Directed by Laura Poitras

PUBLIC SPEAKING
Directed by Martin Scorsese

SWEETGRASS
Directed by Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor

INSIDE JOB is one of the frontrunners for next year's Academy Awards and is just now rolling out in theaters in North America.  Both THE OATH and 12TH AND DELAWARE had lower-key theatrical releases earlier this year preceding their television broadcasts (THE OATH on POV and DELAWARE on HBO).  The directors of all three films - Ferguson, Poitras, Ewing & Grady - are previous Oscar nominees and favorites to make this year's Academy shortlist.

SWEETGRASS premiered at last year's New York Film Festival while Scorsese's PUBLIC SPEAKING - a profile of quintissential New York writer Fran Lebowitz - is set to premiere on HBO next month.

Meanwhile, in the Gotham's Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You category - which has, at least recently, featured a single nonfiction film mixed with four fiction features - three documentaries are nominated - Robert Greene's KATI WITH AN I (set to screen in the Viewfinders Competition at next month's inaugural DOC NYC), Francine Cavanaugh and Adams Woods' ON COAL RIVER (which premiered at Silverdocs and recently screened in Camden and at NYC's Stranger Than Fiction) and Lynn True and Nelson George's SUMMER PASTURE (which screened as part of the IDA's DocuWeeks Academy qualifying series this summer).  Those films will mix it up with Laurel Nakadate's THE WOLF KNIFE and LITTLEROCK by filmmaker Mike Ott.

indieWIRE has all the nominees, led by the SW Missouri-shot narrative feature WINTER'S BONE.  The awards will be handed out on November 29.

Will the Liberal "Establishment" Kill the Documentary Resurgence?

A blog post by Tom Roston, aka POV Blog's Doc Soup Man, has been making the rounds this morning (h/t Basil Tsiokos) - it's a recap of a discussion at last week's Independent Film Week entitled "Cage Match: Filmmaking or Social Activism".  Moderated by POV's Yance Ford and peopled with opinionated industry leaders (including the BBC's Nick Fraser and Women Make Movies' Debra Zimmerman), the panel kicked off - as Roston summarizes - with the question "is the medium at an identity crisis?". 

What followed harkened back to a debate at last year's Sheffield Doc/Fest between Fraser and BritDoc leader Jess Search that had doc folks chattering for months.  The fierce (yet friendly) back-and-forth seemed to lay bare some of the things that documentary filmmakers talk about often but which rarely get played out on such a large canvas - can documentary filmmaking break free of the socially-important strangelehold imposed by a predominantly liberal financial-and-critical-support structure.

Guardian's David Cox wrote about that exchange in an article headed "Is this the end of the line for the impartial documentary?":

"This year, the normally clubby atmosphere of Sheffield's documentarists' convention has been shaken by a genuine row. The intensity of the debate at the Campaigning Documentaries: The Thin Line Between Passion and Propaganda session reflects the seriousness of what's at stake. It's not just the future of the genre that hangs in the balance, but its very identity.

One side maintains that documentary-making must be open-minded, impartial and journalistic. Its purpose should be to help people understand, not to encourage them to emote. The other side insists that the whole point of documentary-making is to effect desirable change. Campaigning is to be relished, not shunned...

The appearance of independence makes documentaries ideal vehicles for promoting corporate interests. Nowadays, NGOs, charities, single-issue lobby groups and the like sometimes have lots of money. Co-opting documentarists can prove an effective way of spending it. Plenty of film-makers are only too willing to play ball. After all, they want to make films. As Nick Fraser, the editor of the BBC's Storyville strand, said at the heated Doc/Fest session: "If Dr Goebbels appeared with a huge sack of money, there would be documentary film-makers queueing around the block to take it."

One of Fraser's key points in Sheffield was that the search for money - and the availabilty of funding by agenda-driven companies and organizations - meant that lots of films were being made with no (or little) aesthetic or cinematic ambitions.  In short - topic was trumping craft.

It's a debate that we've been talking about here on the blog (sometimes with more frequency than others) for years.  Our general frustration (and sometimes righteous anger) on the topic led to the launch of the Cinema Eye Honors, which will celebrate its fourth event this January. 

As we wrote in the summer of 2008:

"The debate is not that so-called "important" films can't be well made but that one shouldn't have knee-jerk approval of shoddily made films just because the subject matter has external value."

We delved further into this topic (and stirred up a real hornet's nest of anger against us) by writing about the knee jerk liberal/leftist reaction to the controversy surrounding the film BANANAS!*:

"In the documentary community, we are, it becomes increasingly apparent, occasionally enslaved by some who have pledged an unquestioning loyalty to a certain kind of social justice perspective."

Even Errol Morris, whose early, character-driven films were both celebrated and shunned (for their creative innovations) within the documentary community, asked a similar question via Twitter (which he reportedly later deleted, but which we had retweeted):

"Are all documentaries about worthy causes worthy documentaries? (Can't there be a bad movie about something good?)"

WAR DANCE, WHICH WAY HOME, ANVIL, ENGLISH SURGEON Among 2010 N&D Emmy Winners

WAR DANCE, nominated for an Oscar in 2008, took two News and Documentary Emmys last night at ceremonies in New York, including Best Documentary and Outstanding Cinematography.  The film, by Sean and Andrea Nix Fine was aired on the Sundance Channel after a theatrical release by the departed THINKFilm.  HBO's WHICH WAY HOME, which garnered Oscar and Spirit Award nominations earlier this year for director Rebecca Cammisa, received the Emmy for Outstanding Informational Programming - Long Form.

Cammisa's film had led all documentary nominees going into the night with four nominations.

As we noted when we posted about the nominees in July, the News and Documentary Emmys often seem like a golden oldies round-up, as films that burst on the festival scene in 2007 (the aforementioned War Dance) compete with more recent films - and with longer, journalistic pieces from venerable PBS programs like Frontline, Nova and Bill Moyers Journal.

Among the other feature/cinematic documentaries honored last night - Sascha Gervasi's ANVIL! THE STORY OF ANVIL, which took the Arts and Culture prize, Geoffrey Smith's THE ENGLISH SURGEON, which won the Emmy for Science and Technology program and Jeremy Simmons' THE LAST BEEKEEPER, the winner for Nature Programming.

A full list of winners can be found here.  Winners in categories where feature documentaries were competitive are after the break.

Rebecca Cammisa's WHICH WAY HOME Leads 2010 News & Doc Emmys as HBO Dominates

HBO Documentary Films' WHICH WAY HOME, which netted its director, Rebecca Cammisa, both an Oscar and an Indie Spirit Award nomination earlier this year, leads the 2010 News & Documentary Emmy nods this morning, with 4 nominations, the most for any individual program.  Irene Taylor Brodsky's THE FINAL INCH, also Oscar nommed (last year in the Documentary Short category) and delivered via HBO, scored three nominations.  No other individual program netted more than two nominations.

HBO dominated the nominations, announced this morning, netting 19 for its HBO Documentary Films unit, the most for any program or strand.  PBS received the most nominations overall, with 37, although no program/strand scored more than 4 nods.  CBS finished in 2nd place by network, with CBS' venerable news magazine 60 Minutes nominated for 16 awards.

If last week's Primetime Emmy nominations are a bit strange, what with feature nonfiction sharing nominations with reality television, the News & Docs Emmys have their own peculiarities, including the shelf life of some of the nominees.  Films announced today include last year's OUTRAGE, FIXER and the aforementioned WHICH WAY HOME as well as a golden oldie like 2007's WAR DANCE, nominated in two categories.

Bold-faced names include Barbara Kopple (nommed for her WOODSTOCK: NOW AND THEN), Stacy Peralta (CRIPS & BLOODS: MADE IN AMERICA), Tia Lessin & Carl Deam (twice-nominated for TROUBLE THE WATER) and Fenton Bailey & Randy Barbato (nominated for their producing work on THE LAST BEEKEEPER).

A full list of nominees can be found at the NATAS website.  We've got the major documentary categories after the jump.