Happy New Year, folks! We are still slowly ramping back up from the rejuvenating lethargy of the holiday season. With only one new theatrical release and absolutely no movement on the festival circuit this past week, it seems everyone is still just trying to get used to living in the year 2020. Unfortunately, the biggest news of the week is the fact that Syrian-born filmmaker Feras Fayyad, the director behind LAST MEN IN ALEPPO and THE CAVE, has been denied an American visa. Industry supporters have composed an open letter to the US Secretary of State. Meanwhile, thought provoking pieces on the state of documentary cinema turned up in Film Quarterly, The Guardian, Documentary Magazine, Deadline, and Filmmaker Magazine, and the annual Cinema Eye Honors weekend is currently in progress. It's a few days late and you're probably at work at this moment, but maybe make a mimosa and cheers to another new year of nonfiction cinema!
-Jordan M. Smith
HEADLINES
Letter in Support of Filmmaker Feras Fayyad and THE CAVE Simon Kilmurry of the International Documentary Association, as well as a host of others, wrote an open letter to Mike Pompeo, United States Secretary of State, after the Syrian-born filmmaker Feras Fayyad was denied a visa to enter the United States: “Feras Fayyad is a respected and accomplished documentary filmmaker, but because he is Syrian he has been denied a visa to visit the United States in support of his latest film, THE CAVE, distributed by National Geographic Documentary Films. Feras’ work speaks for itself. His last film, LAST MEN IN ALEPPO, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary, broadcast nationally on PBS’ POV strand and won an Emmy. THE CAVE premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival where it won the Audience Choice Award and has been shortlisted for an Academy Award. The film tells an urgent story of doctors saving lives while under constant bombardment in Syria. In December, Feras was blocked from attending the IDA Documentary Awards in Los Angeles, where THE CAVE won an award for Best Writing. Feras himself is a survivor of torture at the hands of the Syrian regime. He is being denied entry to the US purely because of where he was born. He is being denied a voice to speak to us out of fear. Likewise, Americans are being denied the opportunity to hear from a vital voice in documentary filmmaking. The documentary community calls on the US Government and the US Department of State to reverse this arbitrary decision and immediately grant Feras Fayyad a visa to visit the US.” Sign-on to add your voice and support here.
Seeing a Kingdom: A Decade of British Non-Fiction Cinema Luke Moody looks back at the last decade of British Documentaries in Documentary Magazine: “This last decade of nonfiction British cinema has not been illuminated by a singular manifesto, movement or aesthetic tendency, much more by archetypes of subject matter. The most commercially dominant subject of national introspection has focused upon the nation’s cultural output through musical biopics: Asif Kapadia's AMY, Steve Loveridge's MATANGI/MAYA/M.I.A., Jane Pollard and Iain Forsyth's 20,000 DAYS ON EARTH, Sophie Fiennes' GRACE JONES: BLOODLIGHT AND BAMI. The afterimage of ten years of British documentary is a psychogeographical tour of archival hinterlands to the sound of a cult musical icon whose candle burned too brightly. What factors determined the principal themes or formal approaches within long-form documentary over the last decade? Who told those stories? Where they were shown? How did these factors determine how we are seen, how we see ourselves and future possibilities to do so?”
Streaming Platforms Dominate Oscar Shortlists, Continuing Major Power Shift Matthew Carey reported for Deadline on the continuing shift in doc distribution: “Netflix and fellow streaming platforms Amazon Prime and Hulu have produced a seismic impact on Hollywood, but they’re also disruptors of the decade in the nonfiction space—turning an admired if relatively tranquil arena into a hotbed of programming. ‘[We saw] a hungry audience and an opportunity and that’s why we got into [documentaries],’ Netflix Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos told Documentary magazine as the platform released its acclaimed 2015 true crime docuseries MAKING A MURDERER. ‘I do think that we’ve been able to make documentary films accessible in a way that has brought real mainstream audiences to documentary films that otherwise couldn’t have happened.’”
Can Documentary Make Space? Posing important questions in Film Quarterly, Jason Fox inquires: “What does it mean, then, to throw a party—to make or show a documentary—according to the Myles ethos? It means to be committed to social and economic justice and to racial equity, for to commit to insisting that the world can be arranged differently requires an investment in staging, creating, and sustaining collective imagination and institution building. It means that makers, audiences, and critics are co-collaborators in the act of producing a shared space of documentary. Approaching documentary in this way pushes beyond the theory of cultural production that says cultural expressions and their engagement are ends in and of themselves. Moreover, it offers a stronger position from which to tell someone who has historically dominated a space that they are not the guests of honor this time, maybe they aren’t even invited.”
DOC BOOKS
DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKING IN CONTEMPORARY BRAZIL: CINEMATIC ARCHIVES OF THE PRESENT
Written by Gustavo Procopio Furtado
"This book examines the vibrant field of documentary filmmaking in Brazil from the transition to democracy in 1985 to the present. Marked by significant efforts toward the democratization of Brazil's highly unequal society, this period also witnessed the documentary's rise to unprecedented vitality in quantity, quality, and diversity of production-which includes polished auteur films as well as rough-hewn collaborative works, films made in major metropolitan regions as well as in indigenous villages and in remote parts of the Amazon, intimate first-person documentaries as well as films that dive headfirst into struggles for social justice."
There is just a single new theatrical release this week in Rachel Leah Jones and Philippe Bellaïche's profile of Lea Tsemel, the Jewish-Israeli lawyer at the heart of ADVOCATE - now playing at the Quad Cinema. The film is a 2019 DOC NYC alumnus (played in Winner's Circle section) and has been shortlisted for this year's Academy Awards.
The Best Yet-to-be-Distributed Docs 2019 Lauren Wissot put together a list of her favorite domestically undistributed docs of 2019 for Filmmaker Magazine: “Bouncing around the doc fest circuit this past year, I saw more nonfiction films than could possibly be considered mentally advisable, from sneak-out-of-the-theater duds to unheralded gems I couldn’t wait to rave about. And counterintuitively, it’s those in the latter category, the vast majority international cinematic nonfiction, that always leave me most frustrated. While I can talk (and write) about those films, I can’t bring them to a US theater (or streaming service) near you. What I can do is compile a list of the few films that managed to stick in my brain all the way through to the end of the year, the ones that I’m most humbly hoping will make it to our shores nationwide in 2020. From the mind-bendingly bizarre to the utterly sublime, all of the following (capsule takes I’ve previously penned for Filmmaker and other outlets) made me reflect on ‘life itself,’ as Roger Ebert would have it, in invigoratingly new and unexpected ways.”
Documentary Films Need More Funding In The Guardian, filmmaker Christopher Hird argues that there is a shortage of money to make good, feature-length documentaries: “As the founder of one of the very few UK companies that specialise in making and distributing independent cinema documentaries, I read with interest that Peter Bradshaw (Opinion, theguardian.com, 27 December) is unhappy about the state of documentaries at the end of the decade. Saying that he was now seeing documentaries that ‘feel lightweight, sometimes almost negligible’, he lamented the failure of documentaries to reflect the austerity of the last 10 years, suggesting that the reason may be ‘too many documentarians chasing too few genuinely strong subjects’. From where I sit, I see no shortage of strong subjects, with committed film-makers wanting to make films that address them, and over the last 10 years, Dartmouth has been able to bring some of these films to the British public, many of which have been generously reviewed by Bradshaw – one of the few critics to treat independent British film seriously. What I do see is a shortage of money to make these films so film-makers have a chance of making a reasonable living.”
APOLLO 11 Voted Best Doc of 2019 in 7th Annual Nonfics Year-End Poll With help from a variety of contributors (myself included) Christopher Campbell compiled Nonfics’ list of the best docs of 2019: “For the seventh year, Nonfics polled critics, filmmakers, and patrons for a glimpse at the best documentaries released in the past 12 months. Admittedly, we received fewer submissions this time around and the compiled results only amount to 100 titles, including features, shorts, and series. That’s surprising given how exciting documentary was in 2019, with numerous box office successes and an Oscar shortlist lacking in duds. There was an expected number one, but many of these 100 films could have fit the top spot and I’d be happy and unsurprised. In most years, I’m disappointed with my others’ favorite docs. Not this time. Almost all of the docs on this list (maybe excluding the few dramatic biopics that one participant put on his list) are works that I appreciate if not love. And the top 10 is an awesome and excitingly varied bunch.” See here for each individual contributor's lists.
How MTV Got Into The Oscars Race Writing for Forbes, Madeline Berg looks at how ST. LOUIS SUPERMAN got MTV into this year’s Oscar race: “MTV isn’t the network that comes to mind when Hollywood’s prestigious award season rolls around. JERSEY SHORE was, at its peak, the network’s most-watched show but never took home an Emmy. TEEN MOM never scored a table at the Golden Globes. But that was all before Sheila Nevins arrived. The 80-year-old veteran of HBO’s acclaimed documentary division who signed on to MTV Documentary Films in May, winning the network a spot in the Oscar race for the first time since 2006. ST. LOUIS SUPERMAN, a short film about Bruce Franks Jr., was short-listed in the documentary category in December, meaning it is is one step closer to cinching a nomination. The film chronicles Franks’s journey from rapper to Ferguson activist to member of the Missouri House of Representatives. If it ultimately wins the trophy will mark MTV’s second Academy Award in the network’s 38-year history, and the first for a TV or film project.”
The Incredible Story Behind the Making of Feras Fayyad’s THE CAVE Variety’s Brent Lang reported on the making of Feras Fayyad’s multiple award winning new film: “Feras Fayyad risked his own life to bring THE CAVE, his harrowing look at a team of female doctors tending to the wounded in the midst of the Syrian War, to the screen...Capturing the story required Fayyad to improvise ways to smuggle himself and encrypted flash drives containing his footage across the border. It was a process made all the more complicated by the fact that the area was completely under siege. All roads and civilian centers — especially hospitals — were the main targets of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s regime and of his Russian allies, who were providing fighter planes and missiles to help keep the strongman in power.”
DOC NYC ALUMNI
Luke Dick and Casey Pinkston's RED DOG 2019 DOC NYC American Perspectives
Will be released on VOD tomorrow, January 7th.
Ofra Bloch's AFTERWARD 2018 DOC NYC International Perspectives
Will have have its theatrical debut on January 10th & VOD release on January 28th.
Denali Tiller's TRE MAISON DASAN 2018 DOC NYC Modern Family
Will be released on DVD via Passion River on January 20th.
Eddie Rosenstein's THE FREEDOM TO MARRY 2016 DOC NYC Fight The Power
Will be released on DVD via Dreamscape on January 21st.
Shamira Raphaëla & Clarice Gargard's DADDY AND THE WARLORD 2019 DOC NYC Modern Family
Will have its primetime premiere on AfroPoP on February 3rd.
FEATURED STREAMING DOC SHORT
HOW DOES LIFE LIVE?
Directed by Kelly O’Brien
Kelly O’Brien’s new short a beautiful reminder for us to stay curious. Captured on a 16mm Bolex camera, we see O’Brien’s two daughters play as they ponder why things are the way they are. Their questions are surprising, funny and poignant.
FUND THIS PROJECT
Crowdfunding has become an integral means of raising capital for documentary filmmakers around the globe. Each week we feature a promising new project that needs your help to cross that critical crowdfunding finish line.
