Innholdsfortegnelse for Awards Special 1 November 2017 i The Hollywood Reporter

There is no rule mandating that a documentary must address breaking news. Indeed, many of the best docs of all time do not. But in 2017, a year in which a record 170 films are eligible for the best documentary feature Oscar, it just so happens that a significant number of outstanding docs do address current events head-on. And they can be very helpful in understanding this bizarre moment in time at the beginning of the Donald Trump era. How did we wind up with President Trump? Well, in a big-picture sense, one could argue that the Celebrity Apprentice host’s victory would not have been possible without the election, 36 years earlier, of the first president to emerge from the world of pop culture — Ronald Reagan, whose keen understanding…

As the mainstream media shuts down foreign bureaus and cuts back on investigative journalism, “documentary film is filling that void,” says Matthew Heineman, 34, as he and his fellow documentarians gathered at THR’s Documentary Roundtable. Heineman’s own film, City of Ghosts, focuses on the citizen journalists who risked their lives to get word out from Raqqa, Syria. His fellow filmmakers are no less engaged with real-world issues: Cries From Syria, from Evgeny Afineevsky, 45, recounts the country’s searing civil war; The Final Year, by Greg Barker, 54, offers an inside look at the Obama State Department; The Force, directed by Peter Nicks, 49, chronicles problems within the Oakland Police Department; and Step, from Amanda Lipitz, 37, tells how being part of a girls’ step dance team instilled confidence in a…

Filmmakers addressing world issues had a tragic wealth of material to draw on in 2017. Matthew Heineman, who was Oscar nominated in 2015 for his vigilante-themed Cartel Land, revisits similar territory with IFC’s City of Ghosts, which follows a group of citizen journalists fighting ISIS in Raqqa, Syria, before the recent liberation. New Century’s Nowhere to Hide is director Zaradasht Ahmed’s grim look at life in Central Iraq’s triangle of death. And internationally renowned artist-activist Ai Weiwei’s Human Flow, a Magnolia release, presents a close-up look at life in refugee camps spanning more than 20 countries. “The casualties number a few hundred thousand people, and it’s right in front of the world and modern media,” Ai says of the largest refugee population since World War II. “Daily we see images…

CHILE Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Chile’s A Fantastic Woman is that in a feature centered on a transgender woman struggling for identity, there’s not a single line of advocacy or political cant. Sebastian Lelio’s follow-up to his widely acclaimed Gloria has drawn comparisons to Kimberly Peirce’s groundbreaking Boys Don’t Cry as well as the work of queer cinema icons Pedro Almodovar and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. But A Fantastic Womaneasily stands on its own as a resonant and empathetic treatment of the transgender experience as one part of the human whole. The drama, which premiered in Berlin, where it won best screenplay honors for Lelio and co-writer Gonzalo Maza and the Teddy Award for best queer feature, is set in the Chilean capital of Santiago and follows Marina, a…

NEPAL The second feature from director Deepak Rauniyar, White Sun tells the story of Chandra, who, after being away for a decade, returns to his remote mountain village to bury his father. But Chandra is more than a prodigal son. He’s a Maoist, a former guerrilla who fought against the Nepali government during the country’s long and bloody civil war. As Chandra struggles to transport his father’s body for burial according to traditional customs, he finds that despite thousands of lives lost in the name of revolution and progress, the old societal and familial divisions remain. Nepal’s civil war began in 1996, when Rauniyar was 17, and continued until 2006. But even now, he explains, “two decades after, still the lives of citizens are impacted by the same war, and…

A CIAMBRA (Italy) This rich coming-of-age drama (executive produced by Martin Scorsese) centers on a 14-year-old living in a town where gypsy families, the Italians who regard them as inferiors and North Africans all reside in close proximity. With a stealthy emotional charge that further enhances director Jonas Carpignano’s reputation as a gifted practitioner of Italian neo-neorealism, the film’s greatest asset is nevertheless the specificity of its snapshot of a transitional period in life common to all cultures. — DAVID ROONEY BPM (BEATS PER MINUTE) (France) Drawing from the director’s own experience as a member of ACT UP, Robin Campillo’s film takes aim at the government response to the AIDS crisis in 1990s Paris. Campillo has a finely tuned ear for the volatile currents of group discussion, and BPM eventually…

In the past few years, documentaries about music have truly come of age. Where once there may have been a sense that these were stories for niche audiences, recently a number of music-focused films became box-office triumphs and Oscar winners (Searching for Sugar Man, 20 Feet From Stardom, Amy) or major contenders (What Happened, Miss Simone?). In 2017, with the explosion of such streaming services as Netflix and an increased focus on video for Apple Music, these documentaries have more opportunities than ever — reflected in a flood of releases chronicling pop icons of the past and present, famous (and infamous) music executives, misunderstood jazz legends and examinations of figures from Native American rockers to Japan’s most revered heavy metal band. Amir Bar-Lev’s two-part, four-hour look at the Grateful Dead’s…

America’s most pressing social issues — racial friction, unequal justice, abuses of power, pressures on free speech — may be newly contentious in today’s divided political landscape, but they have plagued the country for decades. “These stories are timely and timeless,” says John Ridley, who wrote and directed Let It Fall: Los Angeles 1982-1992, which saw an Oscar-qualifying theatrical release in April, one week ahead of airing on ABC. “These cycles of discord — of communities not being able to see themselves in other people, issues of citizenry and police — have not gone away.” Let It Fall examines the 1992 Los Angeles riots, sparked by the acquittal of police officers in the Rodney King beating but fueled by years of similar incidents. Ridley (who won a screenplay Oscar for…

To shoot the climactic eight-minute dinnerparty sequence in The Square — the scene everyone was talking about after the film won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in May — Swedish director Ruben Ostlund relied on a tried-and-true technique that great filmmakers have utilized since the dawn of cinema: He lied to his actors. The scene takes place at the Grand Hotel in Stockholm, Sweden, in the hall of mirrors — the room where the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony is held — on a set decorated with row upon row of dining tables draped in white linen and decked out with silver and crystal. Dozens of tuxedoed and evening-gowned extras — many played by real-life Swedish art-world aristos (local painters, gallery owners, wealthy collectors) — were instructed to…

EGYPT Director Amr Salama had a hunch that Sheikh Jacksonmight stoke a fire or two in his native Egypt. Not that it would ever stop him (his previous films have dealt with AIDS and sectarian strife), but in dealing with the somewhat sensitive subject of hard-line Islam, he managed to — at least initially — draw criticism from both sides in a country where two recent revolutions and the dramatic rise and fall of the Muslim Brotherhood have plowed deep divisions through society. “People are so polarized when it comes to Islamists in the Middle East,” says Salama. “Both sides just condemn and judge the other.” Sheikh Jackson, which bowed in Toronto and will see an early 2018 release in the U.S. (following an awards-qualifying run starting Nov. 4) via…

PALESTINE With Wajib, Annemarie Jacir has scored her third submission to the foreign-language Oscar category for her third feature, following When I Saw You (2012) and her debut, Salt of This Sea (2008). But this accomplishment isn’t the Bethlehem-born director’s most impressive feat in making the film, a comedy-drama following a father and son — Abu and Abu Shadi — as they drive around the streets of Nazareth hand-delivering wedding invitations to an assortment of friends and relatives. For Jacir, the secret of the film’s success is in its unusual casting. When it came to finding the right actor to portray the younger Shadi, Jacir made an obvious choice and called up someone she’d worked with on both previous films — Saleh Bakri, best known for his turn in Elia…

CHASING CORAL A companion piece by Jeff Orlowski to 2012’s Chasing Ice, which investigated glacier retreat, this oceanic counterpart mixes illuminating science with breathtaking footage of coral reefs both in all their splendor and withered into sad graveyards. The filmmakers spent three and a half years on the project, dipping into decades of research from experts, many of whom provide terrific interviews. The irrefutable visual evidence presented would be hard for even the most stubborn climate change skeptics to ignore, detailing devastating losses to a vital food and oxygen source and one of nature’s most stunning creations. — DAVID ROONEY FACES PLACES This is a lovely addition to the long line of personal documentaries about French life at ground level that Agnes Varda has been making throughout her career. On…

Artists trained their lenses on fellow artists in notable 2017 documentaries that explore the challenges of turning creativity into a career, the tightrope between art and commerce, and the squishy line between genius and crazy. For a few, that meant telling the story of their own relatives, as was the case with both Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold and Arthur Miller: Writer. “I felt like I should shoot him in his natural habitat, being himself, or no one ever would know what he was like,” says director Rebecca Miller, who pulled together interviews she did with her father decades ago. Actor Griffin Dunne says of Didion, his aunt: “I felt horrible for making her relive some of the worst moments of her life, but she’s a journalist, and…

It would have been easy for director Brett Morgen to make a romance out of his National Geographic documentary Jane, which centers on pioneering primate scholar Jane Goodall. Most of the footage is culled from 134 hours of film shot by Goodall’s ex-husband Hugo van Lawick in the 1960s — and discovered in a vault five decades later. Set to a soaring score by Philip Glass, the film shows the couple in their youth, when they met at Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania, fell in love and married (van Lawick died in 2002). But even more powerful than their romance was their dedication to their work. Goodall was 23 when she met with eminent paleontologist Louis Leakey and landed the job that would put her on the path to…

Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, who earned an Oscar nomination for their examination of an evangelical Christian community in 2006’s Jesus Camp, have trained their cameras on New York’s insular Hasidic Jewish community with One of Us. “We point out in the film that you can’t give an entire community a pass for specific behaviors, but we discovered over and over and over again that, within 15 minutes of conversation with them, there was a Holocaust reference,” says Ewing. The memories of that genocide loom large in the close-knit group, helping to foster a “no-outsiders” mentality — an ideology that puts strain on the three subjects that Ewing and Grady follow in their Netflix doc. The film focuses on a trio of individuals at different stages in their lives and…

AFGHANISTAN A Letter to the President DIRECTOR Roya Sadat This feature debut from Sadat, Afghanistan’s 12th submission to the Oscars, takes a look at the harsh realities facing women in the war-ravaged country today. Its story centers on a lowly female public official who intervenes to save a woman from tribal punishments, only to find herself arrested for her efforts. ALBANIA Daybreak DIRECTOR Gentian Koci Koci’s first feature follows an impoverished young mother who moves with her son to work as an in-home caretaker for an ailing, elderly woman. ALGERIA Road to Istanbul DIRECTOR Rachid Bouchareb Tackling a similar theme in his 2009 film London River, the director’s latest focuses on a Belgian single mom whose 18-year-old daughter runs off to take part in the fight against Bashar al-Assad in…

ISRAEL Ever since Samuel Maoz’s Foxtrotstarted receiving praise following festival screenings at Venice and Toronto — winning the grand jury prize at the former — Israel’s Minister of Culture & Sport Miri Regev has been denouncing Maoz and his film. Regev has called Foxtrota disgrace, declaring that “it stands to destroy the greatest celebration of the 20th century that is the state of Israel” and that its message “plays to the hands of our haters, on the backs of Israeli soldiers.” The only catch? Regev hasn’t actually seen Foxtrot. True, the film treads into controversial territory: Maoz’s drama chronicles the grief of a soldier’s parents (Lior Ashkenazi and Sarah Adler) as they learn their son has died while serving in the Israeli Defense Forces. Flashbacks reveal what actually happened to…

The idea behind 1978’s Scared Straight was to take teenage delinquents to New Jersey’s Rahway State Prison, where they’d be terrified into choosing the path of righteousness after hearing hardcore inmates scream at them about the horrors of incarceration. The convicts would get in a teen’s face with neck-bulging intensity and harangue him with details of penitentiary life — where, in one convict’s words, “the big eat the little.” For the boys, the threat of being forcibly sodomized was stressed. “If you were in my cell, I’d jump on you like a kangaroo,” one prisoner yelled at a quivering kid. The Hollywood Reporter said if the film “doesn’t scare the crime right out of juvenile delinquents, it’s unlikely anything will.” Whether the screaming actually had the intended effect is open…