Innholdsfortegnelse for Awards Special 1A January 8, 2021 i The Hollywood Reporter

Parasite has blown open the doors of the international feature category, long thought to be the purview of “serious message movies,” to the experimental and the strange. If a movie about a family of South Korean con artists — one that shifts in tone among thriller, horror and straight-out farce — can win the highfalutin international feature Oscar, than even the weirdest overseas films have a shot this awards season. There are a few odd ones among this year’s contenders, from the satire-slash-mysticism of Poland’s Never Gonna Snow Again — featuring Stranger Things actor Alec Utgoff as a Ukrainian masseur in a gated community — to the claustrophobic horror of Beginning, set among religiously persecuted Jehovah’s Witnesses in the former Soviet state of Georgia and shot entirely in long, still…

In early 2017, reports began to emerge out of Chechnya that authorities were detaining gay men and subjecting them to torture and humiliation. Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov immediately repudiated the claims (he maintains that there are no LGBTQ individuals in Chechnya), but the documentary evidence of abuse is impossible to deny. In response to the anti-gay purges, a group of queer activists in Russia began an underground operation to evacuate queer Chechens and place them in safe houses in Moscow until they could flee the country. Upon hearing about this movement, journalist and filmmaker David France (an Oscar nominee for 2012’s How to Survive a Plague) flew to Russia to embed himself with the activists, capturing their life-threatening work with GoPros and camera phones. The result is Welcome to Chechnya,…

BIODOCS Be Water ESPN BAO NGUYEN An installment of ESPN’s acclaimed 30 for 30 series, Be Water offers a glimpse of martial arts icon Bruce Lee previously unseen to movie audiences. The documentary gives insight into his legacy and life beyond his athletic and acting talents, examining the struggles he faced on his path to success as he found himself caught between the two competing worlds (and cultures) of Hong Kong and Hollywood. Belushi Showtime R.J. CUTLER Using audio recordings of interviews with the actor-comedian’s friends and family, R.J. Cutler’s documentary about John Belushi is a love letter to the Saturday Night Live star’s comic legacy while examining the dark downside of his sudden fame and fortune. Crazy, Not Insane HBO ALEX GIBNEY The prolific Alex Gibney — who also…

IRELAND ARRACHT Set in 1845 on the eve of the “blight” that would wipe out the country’s potato crop and lead to the tragedy of the Great Hunger, the film — a striking debut feature from Tom Sullivan — centers on a fisherman who takes in a former Napoleonic soldier at the behest of a local priest. Told nearly entirely in the Irish language, Arracht first bowed at the Tallinn Black Nights Festival in 2019. MEXICO I’M NO LONGER HERE A vivid and vibrant second feature from rising name Fernando Frías de la Parra, the genremashing musical drama — touching on themes of identity, poverty and immigration — is the story of dance-obsessed teen and gang leader Ulises, who is forced to flee his village near Monterrey and escape to…

CRIP CAMP (NETFLIX) Nicole Newnham and Jim LeBrecht’s stirring Netflix documentary about Camp Jened (an upstate New York camp for children with disabilities), and the birth of the disability-rights movement at large, boasts smart focus, remarkable archival footage and inspiring subjects. The story kicks off in 1971, with LeBrecht, born with spina bifida, taking the three-hour bus trip into the Catskills to attend the camp run by hippies. Reductively, the Jened experience was about having a place where the campers could just be kids, but in the bigger picture it’s easy to see the lessons they were learning about solidarity, inclusion and, whether any of them knew the word at the time, intersectionality. Barack and Michelle Obama are among the executive producers, though this is a story that is truly…

Until Roma tied its record in 2018, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon had tallied the most Oscar nominations ever for a non-English-language film (10). Ang Lee’s romantic action epic earned success critically — winning the best foreign-language film Oscar and Golden Globe in 2001 — and at the box office, garnering more than $213 million worldwide on a $17 million budget, including $128 million in the U.S. as a Sony Pictures Classics release. The Taiwanese American director, known for Sense and Sensibility and The Ice Storm, brought his feminist outlook and dramatic interest in repression to Chinese martial arts wuxia films, resulting in a blend of delicate psychology and fluid choreography. “It’s about innocence and true emotion: the hidden dragon underneath,” says Lee. “I was trying to make an A movie…

HOUSEBOAT (1958) Loren starred alongside Cary Grant in this romantic comedy, one of her major Hollywood films. TWO WOMEN (1961) Loren won an Academy Award for playing a widow trying to protect her daughter from the horrors of World War II. YESTERDAY, TODAY AND TOMORROW (1963) Loren and Marcello Mastroianni each play three roles in this comic Italian triptych. MARRIAGE ITALIAN STYLE (1964) Loren and Mastroianni again played lovers in this decade-spanning romp about an on-again, off-again love affair. A SPECIAL DAY (1977) Loren and Mastroianni starred in this World War II drama about neighbors who bond while avoiding Hitler’s visit to Rome.…

We’re onto something. We don’t know if it will turn out to be right or if we’re on the wrong track, but let’s try.” This was the call Alexander Nanau received from Romanian journalist Catalin Tolontan in late 2015 after Tolontan had — somewhat reluctantly — agreed to let the director into the newsroom at the Bucharest paper Sports Gazette and film his investigations into Romania’s notorious health care system. “I had a narrow mind,” says Tolontan. “I saw the newsroom as a refuge, with boring norms and standards. I was also worried that our sources, the whistleblowers, might suffer.” But the chief concern of the editor — who admits to being “far from a film specialist” — was the “disaster” that would unfold when Nanau turned up with his…

“I am not exaggerating when I say I really felt like I was living in a spy movie,” says filmmaker Ryan White of crafting Assassins, the documentary exploring the 2017 murder of Kim Jong-nam — the elder halfbrother of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un — at the hands of two young women, who insisted they believed they were participating in a prank show and duped into rubbing a lethal chemical weapon in the victim’s eyes. Crucial to Assassins’ storytelling is an abundance of revealing closedcircuit television footage casting a penetrating light on the women’s claims. “There would have been no film without the CCTV footage, and there definitely would not be a film making a case for their innocence,” said White. “We tried everything to get it.” The production was…

In March 2020, a documentary short I co-directed with filmmaker Kevin Gordon, Caregiver: A Love Story, wrapped. But all of our plans — film festivals, theatrical openings, an impact campaign — evaporated as the film world, and the world in general, suddenly shut down. As despondent as I was that our movie might never see the light of day, I had more urgent things to worry about. Aside from being a filmmaker, I am a physician, and needed to turn my attention to caring for COVID-19 patients at the public hospital in Oakland. Like other hospitals around the world, visitors were banned and patients died alone and in fear. It was devastating to watch. Necessity being the mother of invention, we created a virtual space in which patients and their…

MY LITTLE SISTER (SWITZERLAND) Francophone Swiss actresses and occasional directors Stéphanie Chuat and Véronique Reymond chose two giants of the German art house scene to star as fraternal twins from a theater family with plenty of drama. Nina Hoss and Lars Eidinger, along with iconic Swiss actress Marthe Keller as their mom, give acting master classes in this melodrama about the family ties that bind. HOPE (NORWAY) Norwegian writer-director Maria Sodahl drew directly on her own life — and relationship with fellow filmmaker Hans Petter Moland — for this intimate tale of a couple navigating a crisis in their relationship. Andrea Braein Hovig and Stellan Skarsgard play the pair, Anja and Thomas, over an eventful holiday period in which Anja is diagnosed with a life-threatening brain tumor. SONG WITHOUT A…

SUN CHILDREN (Iran) Iranian director Majid Majidi’s emotionally gripping film tells the story of street boys hired by a local crime boss to dig for a treasure. Centering on a clever, courageous 12-year-old protagonist (Roohollah Zamani), it succeeds both as entertainment and as a forceful condemnation of child labor and the inaccessibility of education for the poor. — DEBORAH YOUNG NEVER GONNA SNOW AGAIN (Poland) In Malgorzata Szumowska’s film, co-directed with Michal Englert, emptiness and longing afflict residents of a wealthy gated community in Poland until a mysterious visitor (played with delicious ambiguity by Alec Utgoff) arrives, offering massages with his healing hands. The result is hypnotic — a work that pushes the envelope technically and thematically. — D.Y. APPLES (Greece) Debuting Greek director Christos Nikou creates an arresting account…

Since its world premiere at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, Garrett Bradley’s Time — which documents the life of Fox Rich, a woman raising her six sons while fighting for her husband’s prison release — has collected a string of honors, including Sundance’s documentary directing prize, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association award for best documentary, and LAFCA’s runner-up recognition for Gabriel Rhodes’ editing. Available on Amazon Prime, Time is a decades-long tale that unfolds through the eyes of Fox, who in 1997 landed in jail with her husband, Rob, after a botched bank robbery. Fox served three and a half years and, after getting out, worked tirelessly for the release of her husband — who was sentenced to 60 years — while also working and raising their sons. Fox…

Alex Gibney, 67, says he first “caught the bug” of film and filmmaking while studying Japanese at Yale, through campus screenings of documentaries like Gimme Shelter and narratives like The Exterminating Angel. After graduating, he moved to Los Angeles to attend UCLA Film School, which he “absolutely loved,” but dropped out when he landed a job at The Samuel Goldwyn Co. cutting trailers, reediting films made by others and eventually serving as a film editor in his own right. “Slowly but surely,” he recalls, he began getting the opportunity to make docs for television. He landed a job as a producer on a Martin Scorsese-executive produced docuseries called The Blues (2003), on which he worked closely with Wim Wenders. “That was a gamechanger for me because I got to see…

Filmmakers Tommy Oliver and Garrett Bradley each looked at the country’s prison industrial complex through the intimate lens of families affected by decades of incarceration. The Bradley-directed Time (Amazon Prime Video) follows Fox Rich as she fights for the release of her husband, Rob, while he serves a 60-year sentence for a bank robbery. Oliver’s 40 Years a Prisoner (HBO) chronicles the 1978 raid on the Philadelphia-based radical back-to-the-land movement MOVE and focuses on Mike Africa Jr., whose father and then-pregnant mother were arrested in the raid, and his attempt to exonerate his parents. In a December conversation over Zoom, Oliver and Bradley talked about the most difficult aspects of making their films — from parsing hundreds of hours of archival footage to threats of arrest — and the relationships…

When director Bryan Fogel first became interested in telling the story of The Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s 2018 murder, the main characters he believed were central to the story weren’t interested in chatting. Two of those figures — Hatice Cengiz, Khashoggi’s fiancee, and Omar Abdulaziz, his friend and an activist — were emotionally distraught and declined to participate. The third source, the Turkish authorities investigating Khashoggi’s murder, needed to feel that they could trust the filmmaker and that he wouldn’t politicize the story before agreeing to any interviews. And so Fogel, the filmmaker behind the 2018 Oscar-winning documentary Icarus, began the long, hard process of trying to build trust with those key sources. He flew to Montreal with producer Jake Swantko to meet Abdulaziz and offered to leave all…

Greta Thunberg, Jon Batiste and a schoolgirl in China were some of the inspirations behind the protagonists in this year’s crop of animated features. These were just a few of the secrets shared at THR’s Dec. 15 Animation Roundtable by Pete Docter, director of Disney/Pixar’s Soul; Glen Keane, director of Netflix’s Over the Moon; Tomm Moore, co-director of Wolfwalkers from Cartoon Saloon, Apple TV+ and GKIDS; Kori Rae, producer of Disney/Pixar’s Onward; Gitanjali Rao, director of Netflix’s Bombay Rose; and Mark Swift, producer of DreamWorks Animation and Universal’s The Croods: A New Age. Speaking of this unprecedented year, the animation pros also addressed diversity efforts and the impact of COVID-19 on the industry. As Docter puts it: “We made this movie to be seen on a big screen.” Glen, en…

In the Australian horror film Relic (IFC Films), a befuddled elderly woman starts attacking her family while her body crumbles before our eyes. Her bones snap and gouge her skin. Her flesh rots and grays, peeling off in oozing flaps. When she can no longer walk, she scuttles on her hands and knees in pursuit. She hunts her daughter (Emily Mortimer) and granddaughter (Bella Heathcote) through their pitch-dark house, unable to recognize them as she chokes and maims them. “It’s not her anymore,” the daughter whispers. Edna (Robyn Nevin) has become a monster. Relic literalizes elder deterioration. Throughout, Edna appears to be slipping into dementia — she goes missing, snaps at her relatives, locks a child in a closet — but her psychological decay soon bleeds into body horror. Still,…