Innholdsfortegnelse for Award Special 1 36A November 2018 i The Hollywood Reporter

When RGB, the documentary about Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, premiered in January at the Sundance Film Festival, its crew made up “an entire row full of women. It was pretty special,” recalls editor Carla Gutierrez. “The main crew were women,” she says of Magnolia Pictures and Participant Media’s hit doc, which earned $14.3 million at the domestic box office before airing on CNN. In addition to director-producers Betsy West and Julie Cohen, the core team included, among others, director of photography Claudia Raschke, composer Miriam Cutler and Gutierrez. The film also features an original song, “I’ll Fight,” written by Diane Warren and performed by Jennifer Hudson. It’s a fitting salute to the film’s subject, the feminist icon who argued landmark gender discrimination cases before taking her place on…

Hundreds of documentary features have come out in the past year, and while they explore an incredibly wide range of topics and subjects, many of the top awards contenders seem to have something in common: They touch on the current political climate and much of the unrest that surrounds Donald Trump’s administration. Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 11/9 attempts to analyze the root causes of the vitriol of the moment, including the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, that impacted 100,000 people — 57 percent of whom are black. Also targeting people of color are NYPD arrest quotas, which come under scrutiny in Stephen Maing’s Crime + Punishment. Fail State, executive produced by Dan Rather, provides a look at for-profit colleges that victimize communities of color, a practice of Trump University, which settled…

WE BECAME FRAGMENTS Luisa Conlon, Hanna Miller and Lacy Roberts, three journalism grad school best friends turned directors of We Became Fragments, first discovered Ibraheem Sarhan’s story in 2016 when they were in Jordan making a different doc about mental health access for Syrian refugees. After the death of his mother and four siblings in Syria, Ibraheem was living at a center in Jordan that aided children injured in the Syrian civil war, and was soon moving to Canada. “We felt like we were seeing a lot of films that focus on migrants’ journeys from their countries to their new host countries, but not a lot of follow-up on what happened once they got there,” says Conlon. Fifteen-year-old Ibraheem narrates the story (which follows him as he moves to Winnipeg,…

When Pawel Pawlikowski’s last movie, Ida, won the foreign-language Oscar in 2015, the Polish director waged an epic battle with the Academy orchestra, which kept trying to play him off the podium before he finished his thank-you’s. Pawlikowski name-checked his producers, his crew, his late wife, his children, his distributors, his “Polish friends who are totally drunk now,” until he finally got to the true creative inspiration for much of his film work: his parents. “They’re not among the living,” he said, as the band played on, “but they’re totally inside this film.” They are even more inside his latest movie, Cold War, a love story based on his mother and father’s tempestuous relationship, conducted on both sides of the Iron Curtain, through the political turmoil of the 1950s and…

INDONESIA Jakarta-based filmmaker Mouly Surya began work on Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts long before the downfall of Harvey Weinstein brought a reckoning to the film business, but her film would turn out to be perfectly calibrated for the times. Call it Indonesia’s feminist Western for the #MeToo moment. Marlina stars Marsha Timothy as the titular heroine, a widow whose rural home is set upon by bandits, with the leader of the gang perfunctorily announcing their plans to rape and rob her. Exhibiting enough grit and steely survival instinct to rival any hero — male or female — of a classic Hollywood Western, Marlina snatches the lives of her aggressors instead, then heads to the regional police headquarters to explain that she acted in self-defense. But in Indonesia’s deeply…

In Lee Chang-dong’s Burning, Steven Yeun plays Ben, a mysterious man of leisure whose fixed, sphinxlike smile belies an unsettling nature. It’s the first fully Korean-language role for the Walking Dead alum, 34, who emigrated from Seoul to North America as a child and returned to South Korea for more than four months to film the tensely quiet thriller, which won the critics’ prize at Cannes and has a strong shot at scoring its country’s first foreign-language film Oscar nom. Based on a 1983 short story by Haruki Murakami, it follows frustrated novelist Jongsu (Yoo Ah-in), who becomes obsessed with both a childhood friend (Jeon Jong-seo) and Ben. Burning is a meditation on loneliness and longing among youth in a stratified modern society, and Yeun explains how he exploited his…

Mr. Rogers once had a beautiful day in the Capitol Hill neighborhood, testifying before Congress in May 1969. Fred McFeely Rogers, the host of PBS’ Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, was there to protect public television from budget cuts proposed by the Nixon administration. “His show had only been on the air for a year, and he was the closest thing PBS had to a big star,” says Morgan Neville, director of the hit doc Won’t You Be My Neighbor? “Big Bird hadn’t been hatched yet.” Rogers was dealing with Sen. John Pastore, a Rhode Island Democrat who had never seen his show and seemed testy about having to listen to a TV personality. “OK, Rogers, you got the floor,” was the way the senator introduced the testimony. Using a delivery that…

In 1992, Singapore native Sandi Tan shot what would have been one of the island’s first indie films, Shirkers, about a teen assassin, with the help of pals Jasmine Ng and Sophie Siddique. The trio recruited their charismatic film teacher, Georges Cardona, to direct. After they wrapped, they left the cans of 16mm film with him — that was the last they’d see of him or the film for more than two decades. In 2011, Tan received a message from Cardona’s wife saying he had died, and that he had kept all the film (but not the audio). Tan, 46, used the footage — plus art and photos from the time period and interviews with Ng, Siddique and others — to create the doc Shirkers. How did you decide to…

If Roger Ailes, the late chairman and CEO of Fox News, were still alive as President Donald Trump’s divisive campaign on behalf of the midterm election congressional candidates came to a thundering close, would he have doubled down on all the unsupported charges Trump made? Alexis Bloom, who directed the new documentary Divide and Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes, which Magnolia will release Dec. 7 and which will eventually air on A&E, considers the question a moment before responding. “I don’t know. Only Roger could answer that,” she says. “But the one thing we do know about Roger is that he was obsessed with maintaining his audience. How do you do that? In the current climate you do double down, and Fox hasn’t lost its audience. Would he, in…

Television personality Sandra Lee beat breast cancer in 2015, but she’s still fighting to save other women from the disease. The Daytime Emmy-winning lifestyle guru already has helped to make it easier for women in New York to get breast cancer screenings thanks to a new law (signed in June 2016 by Lee’s longtime boyfriend, Empire State Gov. Andrew Cuomo), and she’s pushing for similar legislation to be passed in other states and at the federal level. To raise awareness of her quest, she’s shared her own journey in the documentary short Rx: Early Detection, A Cancer Journey With Sandra Lee, which aired on HBO in October and chronicles her diagnosis and treatment, including a double mastectomy. Lee, 52, and her team, including director Cathy Chermol Schrijver, began filming shortly…

Afghanistan RONA AZIM’S MOTHER Director Jamshid Mahmoudi The second Afghan Oscar entry in three years from the Iranbased Mahmoudi brothers (Navid Mahmoudi produces), this drama follows an Afghan refugee working as a janitor in Tehran who is trying to help smuggle his mother into Germany. Algeria UNTIL THE END OF TIME Director Yasmine Chouikh Fifty years and 20 submissions after Costa-Gavras won the Oscar for Z, Algeria selected Chouikh’s unlikely romance about a woman mourning the loss of her husband who sparks a new friendship — and possibly more — with a gravedigger. Argentina THE ANGEL Director Luis Ortega The Angel centers on Argentina’s infamous serial killer, Carlos Robledo Puch, who in the 1970s committed 11 murders before the age of 20. In August, the drama earned the country’s largest…

ISRAEL Everyone wants Ofir Raul Graizer to make up his mind. The Cakemaker, Graizer’s debut feature, is a study in dualities: male and female, religious and secular, gay and straight. But at a time when societies around the world seem intent on choosing sides, Graizer refuses to put his characters in a box. The Cakemaker follows Thomas (Tim Kalkhof), a young German baker living in Berlin, as he falls in love with a customer, Oren, a married (and closeted) Israeli businessman. When Oren dies unexpectedly, Thomas’ grief draws him to Jerusalem and to the cafe of Oren’s widow, Anat (Sarah Adler), who gives him a job. The two work side by side in the kitchen, baking beautiful cakes and pastries. But even as they develop a deep mutual affection, Anat…

WON’T YOU BE MY NEIGHBOR? (FOCUS) It’s hard to judge Won’t You Be My Neighbor? on artistic grounds because mostly it’s a documentary you want to hug. Starting with a 1967 interview in which Fred Rogers expresses the desire to “help children through some of the difficult modulations of life,” the film from Morgan Neville (20 Feet From Stardom) traces that desire and how it carried through decades of TV. Over and over, clips prove the faith Rogers put in kids. Again and again, the doc features shots of worshipful fans interacting with him that prove his confidence was rewarded. — DANIEL FIENBERG FREE SOLO (NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC) Vertigo sufferers need not apply to Free Solo, the latest doc from filmmaking team Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi (Meru), which follows…

Documentary films are having a moment — a big one. This year, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, a portrait of the enduring kids’ show host, Fred Rogers, directed by Morgan Neville, 51 (an Oscar winner for 2013’s 20 Feet from Stardom), grossed $22.6 million domestically. Fans of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg flocked to RBG, on which Julie Cohen, 54, worked, as it collected $14 million. And even though Three Indentical Strangers has no “names” — the film by Tim Wardle, 40, tells of the stranger-than-fiction tale of three brothers, triplets separated at birth — it intrigued audiences enough to gross $12.3 million. In October, the filmmakers, at THR’s invitation, came together to compare notes — along with Rashida Jones, 42, whose Quincy documents the life of her father,…

Writer-director Kirby Dick and producer Amy Ziering, who have joined forces on such influential documentaries as 2012’s The Invisible War and 2015’s The Hunting Ground, which exposed rape culture in the U.S. military and on college campuses, respectively, have turned to a new target, the $400 billion medical device industry. In The Bleeding Edge, airing on Netflix, they investigate how lax regulation and profit-driven corporations put patients at risk, documenting both the gruesome complications that some have suffered and the activists working to change the system. Why this film now? AMY ZIERING Typically, we try to look for things that no one is aware of. We try to break stories rather than follow news from the past. We had heard from one person who didn’t want to be in the…

Cristina Costantini and Darren Foster began making Science Fair, which follows nine high school students from around the world as they prepare to compete at the International Science and Engineering Fair in Los Angeles, before Donald Trump was elected — and before the current flare of controversy over immigrants in the U.S. The filmmakers spoke to THR about the film’s newfound timeliness, the unifying nature of science and what they learned from their young subjects. Why tell this story now? CRISTINA COSTANTINI Science fair the event has been very important to me personally — I competed for two years when I was in high school [in Milwaukee]. We set out to make the movie a long time ago, before the nation changed. So during the process of making the movie,…

ICELAND Fanciful and hard-hitting, Iceland’s Woman at War, from director Benedikt Erlingsson (Of Horses and Men), has one foot in the ancient and another in the very, very modern. The beating heart of the film is Halla (Halldora Geirhardsdottir), a strong-willed 50-something choir instructor with a secret: She’s an industrial saboteur who will stop at nothing to save Iceland’s pristine highlands from the government and its sinister bedfellow, the aluminum industry. In creating Halla, Erlingsson, 49, who co-wrote the film with Olafur Egilsson, drew from archetypes like the Greek goddess Artemis, “the protector of the wild and the innocent and a goddess with a bow,” Erlingsson explains, and Athena, the goddess of warfare and wisdom. The name Halla alludes to a revered Icelandic outlaw from the 17th century. And then…

NORWAY Oslo-born and -raised filmmaker Iram Haq was forced to leave her native country and live in Pakistan for more than a year when her parents kidnapped her at age 14 and forced her to live with relatives. This dark point in Haq’s life served as the inspiration for What Will People Say, a gripping father-daughter drama that follows Norwegian teenager Nisha, who is forced to live in Pakistan after her father catches her alone with her boyfriend. The 42-year-old filmmaker spoke with THR about the challenges of tapping into “every corner of [her] anxiety” to craft a film that is at once highly personal and fictional, and how working on the script ultimately brought her and her father back together. What Will People Say is clearly a very personal…

DOGMAN (ITALY) Matteo Garrone’s Dogman is a frighteningly real portrayal of a good man tempted by the devil. Specifically: A good man who loves dogs and grooms them for a living is tempted by a demonic brute to steal. His reward is hell. Superb performances by Marcello Fonte as the mildmannered groomer and a crazed Edoardo Pesce as his fatal attraction position the film between the realistic criminal world and a symbolic, universal dimension. — DEBORAH YOUNG THE FAMILY (VENEZUELA) A father and his 12-year-old kid from the outskirts of Caracas go on the run after the son knifes down a peer from a potentially vengeful family in La Familia, a lean and mean debut from writer-director Gustavo Rondon Cordova. Over the course of just a couple of days, Cordova…