All these wonderful things

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.

Do You Know Grace Lee?

Last night I was able to check out the film The Grace Lee Project at the Los Angeles Film Festival. The director, Grace Lee (of course) goes out in search of other women who share her name to discover if they also share similar character traits and experiences. Specifically, she focuses on 5 or 6 Asian-American women named Grace Lee and finds that while they may have outward similarities, if you dig a little deeper you find some complex individuals (although they do all seem to be very nice, a common character trait of "Grace Lee's", says the film.)

Grace (the filmmaker) and I went to college together and had a number of friends and activities in common. I had this vague idea that she was a filmmaker but was never sure if the Grace Lee I kept hearing about was indeed the woman I knew back in Columbia, Missouri. I was excited to see the film and glad to enjoy it as much as I did. She acutely navigates the difficulties of a personal narrative documentary and manages to come across in a way that is both light-hearted and introspective.