Oscars Documentary Race: It’s All About Blurred Lines
Italian director Gianfranco Rosi, whose “Fire at Sea” is competing for Oscars in both the documentary and foreign-language categories, shook his head when talking with TheWrap recently about the state of nonfiction filmmaking.
“I think nonfiction filmmakers are excited to throw off convention and traditional expectation of length and form and style and to push themselves to challenge previously held notions of what makes a documentary,” filmmaker A.J. Schnack told TheWrap.
The other straight docs are “Ukrainian Sheriffs,” Roman Bondarchuk’s look at two small-town law-enforcement officers in a region changing from Ukrainian to Russian control; and Pietra Brettkelly’s “A Flickering Truth,” which documents the revival of the Afghan film archives.
Luxembourg’s entry, “Voices From Chernobyl,” is a less straightforward doc; it’s a powerful viewing experience in which actors read eyewitness accounts of the nuclear disaster drawn from Svetlana Alexievich’s nonfiction book, while Pol Crutchen’s camera roams the deserted landscape of Pripyat, and the director also stages sometimes surreal tableau amidst the abandoned cityscapes.
The film chronicles indie actress Kate Lyn Sheil’s preparation to play newscaster Christine Chubbuck, who killed herself on camera in 1974 — except that the film about Chubbuck for which Sheil is preparing doesn’t actually exist (unlike Antonio Campos’ “Christine,” in which Rebecca Hall plays the role).
Sheil is simply “preparing” for a “role” in a fake movie whose clips are never intended to be anything other than scenes in “Kate Plays Christine”; this “documentary” is documenting a fiction.
[...] eligible in those races (though not for the Oscars) is “All These Sleepless Nights,” a coming-of-age “doc” about two teens in Warsaw who often appear to be performing for the cameras.
Director Michal Marczak developed scenes through improvisation, brought in a former girlfriend to begin a relationship with one of his subjects and says, “it’s up to other people if they want to call this a documentary.”
Three of the five Best Documentary Feature Oscar nominees earlier this year–“Cartel Land,” “Winter on Fire” and “What Happened, Miss Simone?” were subsequently nominated for Emmys, as was “The Hunting Ground,” which followed its Oscar song nomination by winning in that category at the Emmys.
A few years ago, the Academy’s Documentary Branch passed new rules designed to keep TV entities like HBO from sneaking their films into theaters for a quiet one-week qualifying run before rolling them out for splashy television premieres.
[...] in a field in which TV money has often been more easily accessible than film-studio money, the Academy rules can’t keep out docs that were financed by and made for television networks as long as it’s possible to qualify those films via theatrical runs.
Before its TV airing, director Ezra Edelman edited it into a single seven-and-a-half hour theatrical version that premiered at Sundance and had qualifying runs in Los Angeles and New York; it got around the rule requiring four screenings a day, an impossibility given its length, by booking multiple screens in the same venues.
“More and more, support for new thinking [in nonfiction filmmaking] is coming from people who have traditionally been thought of as part of a television landscape: HBO, Netflix, ESPN, Showtime, etc.,” said Schnack.