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Cinema Eye Honors, an organization that celebrates the artistic achievements of nonfiction and documentary filmmakers, has unveiled the feature film nominees for its 18th annual award ceremony, which takes place Jan. 9 at the New York Academy of Medicine in East Harlem, N.Y.

“Sugarcane,” from co-directors Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie, led the pack with six nods, including nominations for outstanding nonfiction feature and direction. The film investigates abuses and forced separations of families within a Canadian Indigenous community.

“Dahomey,” from Mati Diop, and “No Other Land,” from Yuval Abraham, Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal and Rachel Szor, also landed nods for outstanding nonfiction feature and direction. Both films pulled in five nominations each.

Nominees for the outstanding production category include Paula DuPre’ Pesman’s “Porcelain War.” Pesman previously won in the category at the 3rd Cinema Eye Honors in 2010 for “The Cove.” Shane Boris and Odessa Rae, who took...

Wow, November got here fast. This year’s election cycle seemed shorter than usual. The presidential candidates were all but a foregone conclusion, until they weren’t. Now with election season finally here, things continue to be tense. Are smooth transitions between administrations a thing of the past, or has the fever from last cycle broken?

Despite the strange reality we live in now, politics have always been fertile ground for nerve-fraying anxiety. Whether that’s the paranoia of being under the all-seeing eye of the Nsa today, the tragedy of the assassinations in the 60s, or the scandals of the 70s, politics have never been for the faint of heart. Struggles for power rarely are.

Here’s some of our favorite political thrillers to put you in the right mood for election season:

War Room

For better or for worse, the documentary War Room defined ‘90s politics. Unlike the ‘80s,...

Veteran cinematographer and director Kirsten Johnson has some thoughts on the power of image.

“There’s never one meaning,” she told filmmakers gathered to meet with her at the Ji.hlava Documentary Film Festival.

Having lensed more that 50 films from the early 1990s on, including “Derrida,” “Fahrenheit 911” “Pray the Devil Back to Hell” and “Citizenfour,” the ebullient and down-to-earth Johnson stepped into directing in 2016 with “Cameraperson.”

That film, a remarkable look back over her career, which spanned current affairs and doc shoots in war zones worldwide – and covered five genocides – helped Johnson deal with much of the trauma she’s covered in her career. “I needed to make that film to help me process,” she says.

It also led to insights in taking agency over what fills the screen, most recently 2020’s “Dick Johnson Is Dead,” which screened before deeply engaged Ji.hlava audiences.

The Netflix-produced project follows Johnson’s father,...

Fifteen-year-old Doc NYC, America’s largest documentary festival, has revealed its influential 15-film Short List. The festival will run its main lineup of 111 features, 32 world premieres, 24 U.S. premieres, and 129 short films in-person November 13-21 in New York City’s IFC Center, Sva Theatre, and Village East by Angelika and continue online until December 1 with films available to viewers across the U.S. All the films will have theatrical screenings at the festival, often with the directors in person.

Historically, most of the Doc NYC shortlist titles overlap with the Academy’s official 15-film Oscar shortlist. With the notable exception of Netflix’s Oscar-winning “My Octopus Teacher,” for 12 years, the festival has screened the documentary that went on to win the Academy Award, including “20 Days in Mariupol,” “Navalny,” “Summer of Soul,” “American Factory,” “Free Solo,” “Icarus,” “O.J.: Made in America,” “Amy,” “Citizenfour,” “20 Feet From Stardom,” “Searching for Sugar Man,...

“This is a film that I love dearly. I think we use the word urgent a little bit not with as much intention as we should. And I think a film like this really occupies that word,” said Oscar winner Laura Poitras (“Citizenfour“), introducing a special screening of the documentary “No Other Land” at Scandinavia House in New York City on October 14. The film chronicles the efforts of the Israeli military and settlers to displace the Palestinian population of the Masafer Yatta region of the West Bank, as seen from the point of view of Palestinian activist Basel Adra and Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, who co-directed the film with Hamdan Ballal and Rachel Szor. Abraham and Adra participated in a virtual Q&a from Israel and the West Bank, respectively, moderated by Oscar nominee Yance Ford (“Strong Island“).

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Hhmi Tangled Bank Studios, Tiger Baby, and Emaho Films have set the world premiere of Taira Malaney’s “Turtle Walker” at Doc NYC.

The documentary chronicles the life of Indian sea turtle conservationist Satish Bhaskar. Directed by Malaney in her feature debut, “Turtle Walker” explores Bhaskar’s journey along India’s coastlines in the late 1970s, where he studied and worked to protect endangered sea turtles. The film also examines the impact of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami on sea turtle habitats.

Submarine Deluxe, the hybrid sales, production, and distribution company, has acquired sales rights. Run by brothers and co-founders Dan Braun and Josh Braun, the company has a track record of success with documentary sales, having been involved with six of the last twelve Academy Award-winning documentaries. These include “American Factory,” “Citizenfour,” “20 Feet from Stardom,” “Man on Wire,” “The Cove,” and “Searching for Sugar Man.”

Prior to completion, “Turtle...

Predicting the winner of the Best Documentary Feature Oscar becomes a lot easier on December 17 when the academy announces the 15 films that make the shortlist. Those semi-finalists will be culled from the more than 100 titles that qualified this year for consideration. (Scroll down for the most up-to-date 2025 Oscar predictions for Best Documentary Feature.)

To winnow those down to a manageable number, the academy adds newly eligible documentary feature to a virtual screening room available to all 500-plus members of the documentary branch. While all members are encouraged to watch as many of these as they can, one-fifth of the voters are assigned each title. Each branch member will submit a preferential ballot listing their top 15 choices.

All of these ballots are collated to determine the 15 semi-finalists. Branch members are then encouraged to watch films on that list which they haven’t seen yet before casting another preferential ballot with their top five choices.

The news last week that Participant Media would be shutting down shocked the entertainment industry, but it hit the documentary community with particular force.

Going back 20 years, the production and distribution company has supported premium nonfiction content on a major scale, backing documentaries that took on important social and political issues ranging from climate change to race in America, education, the national security state, the U.S.-Mexico drug war, and much more. Along the way, it earned Oscars for Citizenfour, An Inconvenient Truth and American Factory, and Oscar nominations for a slew of others including Flee, Rbg, The Square, and Food, Inc.

On the latest episode of Deadline’s Doc Talk podcast, we discuss the developments at Participant and what they mean for a nonfiction field already been reeling from a sluggish acquisition market and slashed budgets at streamers. Our guests are Oscar-nominated filmmakers Betsy West and Julie Cohen,...

New York-based director/producer Katy Scoggin has worked with high-profile U.S. documentary filmmaker/journalist Laura Poitras on two shorts and three features, notably as co-producer and Dp on Poitras’ Oscar-winner “Citizenfour” and Cannes Directors’ Fortnight’s “Risk.”

Poitras now serves as executive producer on Scoggin’s feature debut “Flood,” one of six creative documentaries to be pitched as works in progress April 16, at the Visions du Réel festival in Nyon, Switzerland.

“Flood” centers on Scoggin’s journey to repair her relationship with her former missionary father, with whom she has become estranged. As the story unfolds, she relies on evolution to try to grasp change over time: in the fossil record, in American evangelicalism and in her own shift away from her parents’ religion and back home to reconnect.

The documentary was produced by Scoggin and Will Lennon for Archelon Films, and executive produced by Poitras, Nico Opper and Adam Blackman.

The South by Southwest debut of “Stormy” was not your typical Imagine Documentaries premiere.

About adult film star Stormy Daniels’ alleged affair with former President Donald Trump, the film drew an eclectic crowd that included porn stars and “Muppet” director-producer Frank Oz, who sat in the same row as Daniels and her entourage made up mainly of buff bodyguards. Dogs sniffed Austin’s Stateside Theater prior to the screening. After it unspooled, Daniels spoke to the SXSW audience, revealing that she first met “Stormy” exec producer Judd Apatow when he hired her for a small part in his 2005 film “40 Year-Old Virgin.” When she was a no-show due to a death in the family, Apatow sent her flowers and rescheduled her shoot date.

“I thought he would replace me,” Daniels, who would go on to appear in “Knocked Up” for the filmmaker, told the crowd, with director Sarah Gibson standing nearby.

Swiss documentary film festival Visions du Réel has unveiled its program for film professionals, VdR-Industry, which includes 29 projects in various stages of production. These will be pitched during the four-day event that runs April 14 through April 17, alongside the fest.

VdR-Industry, which sees more than a thousand film professionals descend on the small Swiss town of Nyon on the edge of Lake Geneva, aims at providing an opportunity to connect filmmakers with financing and distribution opportunities at a time when the documentary sector is faced with a contraction of funding from streamers and increased corporate consolidation.

Speaking to Variety, VdR’s new head of industry, Alice Burgin, says she’s excited to welcome a raft of new players this year such as the U.S.’s the Points North Institute and the Whickers Foundation, which support emerging nonfiction storytellers, the Catapult film fund, which backs doc filmmakers in the early stages of funding,...

Swiss documentary festival Visions du Réel has unveiled the projects to be presented at its 2024 industry programme VdR-Industry, taking place April 14-17, including features from Iran-born French filmmaker Mehran Tamadon and Chilean director Tana Gilbert.

A total of 29 projects have been selected. 15 projects in development will be part of VdR–Pitching, and six projects in finishing stages will be presented at the VdR–Work In Progress pitch. Four projects have been selected for both the VdR–Rough Cut Lab and the VdR–Development Lab respectively.

Scroll down for full list of projects

The line-up includes a number of returning Visions du Réel directors.

For director Laura Poitras, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed represents a departure of sorts. After centering films around people ranging from a former bodyguard for Osama bin Laden in The Oath to Edward Snowden in Citizenfour and Julian Assange in Risk, her latest documentary focuses on an artist: legendary photographer Nan Goldin. But there’s still a strong political dimension to the film, since Goldin was a major force in bringing down the Sackler family, the owners of Purdue Pharma, one of the global pharmaceutical companies largely responsible for the opioid epidemic in the United States.

It’s a deeply personal mission for Goldin, as someone who found herself addicted to OxyContin for a period of time until she nearly died from an overdose. Goldin’s activism, though, is, the documentary suggests, born out of not just her brush with the opioid crisis, but from a lifetime of dealing with mental illness,...

Sheila Nevins has produced documentaries for most of her professional life. But at 84, she’s still notching career firsts.

Last month, Nevins added “Oscar-nominated director” to her résumé, having landed her first nod for co-directing the short “The ABCs of Book Banning” with Trish Adlesic and Nazenet Habtezghi.

Nevins’ first Oscars as a nominee take place at the same time she is wrapping up her run as the head of MTV Documentary Films. Nevins joined the company in 2019 after 38 years at HBO.

“I went there to raise the bar for the intellectual quotient of what MTV could produce in the documentary arena,” Nevins says. “I did highbrow and lowbrow at HBO, but when I got to MTV, I just did highbrow.”

On Nevins’ watch, MTV produced 40 docs and landed five Oscar nominations, including a feature doc bid this year for “The Eternal Memory.”

“Sheila Nevins is an extraordinary storyteller,...

Exclusive: Submarine has acquired worldwide distribution rights to Ilya Chaiken’s music documentary feature Pretty Ugly: The Story of the Lunachicks, ahead of its world premiere at Doc NYC.

Concord Originals, the narrative content creation division of L.A.-based music management company Concord, has come on board to finance and produce.

The film revolves around influential underground New York punk band Les Lunachicks which had its heyday in the 1990s with songs such as Fallopian Rhapsody and Bitterness Barbie, and performed live with the likes of No Doubt, Green Day, The Offspring, The Go-Go’s, Nofx, Rancid, The Ramones, Rev Horton Heat, The Buzzcocks and Joan Jett.

Director and producer Chaiken catches up with the group decades after its messy break-up as its members attempt to reunite for one last show.

“I’ve been a devoted Lunachicks fangirl since I lucked into their very first show in 1988 when we were all teenagers.

For the 10th year in a row, the Scad Savannah Film Festival, the 26th edition of which ran from Oct. 21 through Oct. 28, was the place to be for documentary filmmakers and documentary lovers — specifically on Oct. 25, when The Hollywood Reporter presented and your humble correspondent hosted the fest’s Docs to Watch panel that brings together the directors of up to 10 of the year’s finest documentary features.

Over the past nine years, 45 films were nominated for the best documentary feature Oscar, 19 of which were first highlighted as Docs to Watch. And in seven of those nine years, one of the Docs to Watch went on to win the best documentary feature Oscar: 2015’s Amy, 2016’s O.J.: Made in America, 2017’s Icarus, 2018’s Free Solo, 2019’s American Factory, 2021’s Summer of Soul and 2022’s Navalny. (The other two eventual winners — 2014’s Citizenfour and 2020’s My Octopus Teacher — were not screened...

Thirteen-year-old Doc NYC, America’s largest documentary festival, has revealed its influential 15-film Short List. The festival will run its main lineup of 114 features and 129 short films in-person November 8-16 in New York City’s IFC Center, Sva Theatre and Village East by Angelika and continue online until November 26 with films available to viewers across the U.S. All the films will have theatrical screenings at the festival, often with the directors in person.

Historically, most of the Doc NYC shortlist titles overlap with the Academy’s official 15-film Oscar Shortlist. With the notable exception of Netflix’s Oscar-winning “My Octopus Teacher,” for 11 years the festival has screened the documentary that went on to win the Academy Award, including “Navalny,” “Summer of Soul,” “American Factory,” “Free Solo,” “Icarus,” “O.J.: Made in America,” “Amy,” “Citizenfour,” “20 Feet From Stardom,” “Searching for Sugar Man,” and “Undefeated.” The festival has also screened 49 of the last 55 Oscar-nominated documentary features.

Documentaries like Netflix’s Harry & Meghan are “almost in a different category,” the docs boss of Ron Howard and Brian Grazer’s Imagine Entertainment said today.

Responding to a question from Deadline at Mia Market, former HBO producer Sara Bernstein also said the “fees have raised in terms of what this access looks like and what it costs a producer like our company” on shows where the subjects exert a certain amount of editorial control.

Although it isn’t only Harry & Meghan that opted for this approach, the conversation was sparked by last year’s hit doc series, which was co-produced by the ex-royal duo’s Archewell Productions via a multi-million dollar Netflix deal.

“We live in a world today where celebrities, big personaltiies and talent of a certain magnitude understand what their value is to the industry and to an audience,” Bernstein said. “I think that has...

Hillary Clinton, the former first lady, senator, secretary of state and Democratic party presidential candidate, can now add another feather to her cap: Emmy winner.

Clinton, along with her daughter, Chelsea Clinton, were executive producers of the Netflix documentary In Her Hands, a film about the youngest female mayor in the history of Afghanistan, which on Thursday night was awarded the Emmy for politics and government documentary during the second evening of the 44th News & Documentary Emmy Awards.

At the ceremony, which the Clintons did not attend, it was not publicly revealed which individuals would be receiving statuettes for winning projects. But David Winn, head of the News & Documentary Awards for The National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, confirms to The Hollywood Reporter: “As executive producers on the film, [Hillary and Chelsea Clinton] are considered statue eligible.”

In Her Hands, the first project to emerge from the Clintons’ production company HiddenLight Productions,...

Documentary veterans Natalie Bullock Brown, Kirsten Johnson, Mary Lampson and Jacqueline Olive are the inaugural documentary film fellows for the documentary film in the public interest research initiative by Harvard’s Shorenstein Center.

As the first cohort of doc film fellows, the foursome will join the center for the fall 2023 semester. There, each fellow will conduct research and do public education activities about questions facing the documentary film field and civic information.

Led by Shorenstein Center’s director Nancy Gibbs and doc filmmaker Sara Archambault, the initiative, which was established in March, will work to examine the challenges facing the documentary field and their impacts on civic life and information.

“In this challenging moment for media and our information ecosystem, we are excited that the Shorenstein Center can provide the support and infrastructure to drive renewed and creative thinking about complex issues in the documentary film space,” says Gibbs.

Archambault...

Frederick Wiseman is busy. He’s always busy. Since he began directing films — his first, Titicut Follies, was in 1967 at the relatively late age of 38 — Wiseman’s been on the clock. He has made nearly a movie a year, 49 to date (the 50th, Menus Plaisirs — Les Troisgros, a portrait of a French Michelin three-star restaurant, will premiere at the Venice Film Festival on Sept. 3) and, at 93 years old, he shows no signs of slowing down. “I like to work. Work is my salvation, it’s my religion.”

For half a century, Wiseman’s work has been the creation of a series of cinéma vérité documentaries whose almost laughably generic titles — High School, The Store, Welfare, Law and Order, City Hall — belie the films’ complex and idiosyncratic portraits of American institutions. They can be shocking: Titicut Follies, an exposé of the inhumane treatment of patients at a Massachusetts asylum for the criminally insane,...

Documentary producer dedicated to using non-fiction storytelling to bring about change on many vital issues

Jess Search, who has died aged 54 of brain cancer, did much to shape and inspire the world of documentary film. With the colleagues who had joined her in creating the non-profit organisation Doc Society, she sought to harness the power of non-fiction storytelling to bring about change on such issues as the climate crisis and defending democracy.

The many dozens of films she funded, advised, mentored, distributed, produced or executive produced include Citizenfour (2014), about the whistleblower Edward Snowden; Virunga (2014), on protecting gorillas in the Democratic Republic of Congo; The Look of Silence (2014), recalling the murder of a million supposed communists in Indonesia in the mid-1960s; Knock Down the House (2019), following the campaign in which Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was elected to the House of Representatives; Cow (2021), a portrait of bovine life on the farm; and the...

Tributes paid to influential co-founder of Doc Society, who ‘lived a life of purpose on her own terms’

The influential documentary producer Jess Search, who co-founded the non-profit Doc Society organisation, has died of brain cancer at the age of 54.

She was involved in hundreds of projects including the overfishing documentary The End of the Line, the gorilla protection film Virunga, and the Oscar-winning Citizenfour, about the whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Jess Search, the veteran documentary producer and co-founder of the nonprofit film foundation Doc Society in the U.K., has died. She was 54.

Search died Monday in London after a short battle with brain cancer that began with a diagnosis in June, Doc Society announced in an Aug. 1 letter.

“As a fierce supporter of independent artists and co-founder of Doc Society, Jess spent the weeks following her diagnosis focused on her passions laid out in her recent announcement, No Time Like The Present,” which first revealed her brain tumor discovery, Doc Society said.

“Her greatest wish was to continue to secure the Doc Society mission of unleashing the transformational power of documentary film to address the two critical and intertwined issues of climate change and democracies in crisis.”

Films the Doc Society has helped finance include the Oscar-nominated Edward Snowden documentary Citizenfour, Virunga, Whose Streets, Hooligan Sparrow, The Square and The Look of Silence.

Search had published a letter revealing her brain tumour diagnosis last month.

Jess Search, co-founder and CEO of non-profit documentary organisation Doc Society, has died at the age of 54 from brain cancer.

Search’s death was announced in a statement on Tuesday, August 1 by Doc Society, which read:

Yesterday morning, our dear Jess Search died peacefully in London, England, from brain cancer. She was surrounded by the love of her life Beadie Finzi, their children Ella and Ben, and friends.

As a fierce supporter of independent artists and co-founder of Doc Society, Jess spent the weeks following her diagnosis focused...

Examining the growing pains of The 19th*, a non-profit, non-partisan news agency founded right before Covid swept the United States in 2020, Breaking the News is an immersive documentary exploring the importance of and some problems in their work. Founded by former Texas Tribune writers Emily Ramshaw and Amanda Zamora with their life savings as a digital-first, virtual enterprise, the outfit aims to address the gatekeeper problem in journalism: that most editors are still straight white men setting the agenda.

Kate Sosin, a nonbinary reporter who was an early hire, is tasked with covering all Lgtqia+ issues in the nation without much support. Candidly, Sosin speaks of feeling alienated by certain language used by Ramshaw and Zamora in staff emails touting the group as a “sisterhood,” while Ramshaw shares her concern over hiring a staff member that they fear they may not be able to properly support.

Another early hire, Errin Haines,...

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed.Long before Nan Goldin became a world-renowned photographer, she dreamed of making films. As a teenager growing up in 1960s Massachusetts, Goldin would go to the cinema almost every day to soak up double features. By the end of her teens she was an insatiable cinephile, fluent in the European arthouse—she loved Bertolucci, Bergman, and Fellini—intrigued by the US underground—Warhol, Waters, Jack Smith—and enchanted by classic Hollywood. Fittingly, it was Antonioni’s Blow-Up that first inspired her to pick up a camera, but although Goldin fell into photography she never shook her first love.Perhaps it is this deep-rooted cinephilia that critics sense when they describe Goldin’s photographs as “cinematic.” Goldin has dedicated her career to documenting her life, as well as the lives of her friends and chosen family. Her “subjects,” many of whom are as charismatic, stylish,...

With the 95th Academy Awards in the rearview, this week is light on new-to-streaming releases that could credibly contend for future awards. Our top pick this week was a contender – it was nominated for an Oscar, but didn’t win. It’s still very much worth watching once it hits HBO and HBO Max this weekend.

The contender to watch this weekend: “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed”

This documentary was nominated for Best Documentary Feature this year, losing to “Navalny.” It comes from acclaimed director Laura Poitras – a previous Oscar winner for “Citizenfour” – and follows artist and activist Nan Goldin’s righteous crusade to hold Oxycontin manufacturer Purdue Pharma and the controlling Sackler family responsible for the company’s role in creating the opioid crisis. The Sacklers were big funders of art institutions, and Goldin’s pressure campaign successfully got their names off many donor rolls. The documentary comes...

In her debut film, exec produced by Oscar winner Laura Poitras (“Citizenfour”), Syrian activist-journalist Lina chronicles the real-time transition from peaceful revolution, ushered in by the Arab Spring more than a decade ago, to civil war in Syria. The film plays in the Newcomers Competition at the Thessaloniki Intl. Documentary Festival.

At first, Lina thought she would document the women’s involvement in the Syrian uprising. “I was thinking that despite how much women are involved in every aspect of what is happening, once everything is over, somehow, we’re going to slip through the cracks and disappear from the story. So, I decided it was best to start documenting what we do as we do it, to make sure that memories were not erased. But as things progressed, and took unexpected turns, I had more and more reasons to keep making the film. And, some of the reasons changed because,...

Over the years, the Oscar for best documentary feature has provided the Academy Awards with some of the ceremony’s most contentious and divisive moments: In 1975, when the Vietnam War doc Hearts and Minds claimed the prize, producer Bert Schneider read a letter of thanks from the Viet Cong, so incensing hosts Bob Hope and Frank Sinatra that they took it upon themselves later in the broadcast to apologize “for any political references.” In 2003, while accepting his Oscar for the anti-gun doc Bowling for Columbine, Michael Moore was greeted with both cheers and boos when he cried “Shame on you, Mr. Bush” for launching the war in Iraq.

In the past couple of years, as Academy membership has grown larger and more diverse, the feature documentary results have been a lot more mellow, with crowd-pleasing choices — like the 2021 concert film Summer of Soul and the 2020 nature doc My Octopus Teacher — prevailing.

The Film Independent Spirit Awards took place on Saturday afternoon, March 4, during a ceremony that streamed live at 2:00 pm Pt/5:00 pm Et on IMDb’s YouTube channel and Film Independent’s YouTube channel and Twitter page. Comedian Hasan Minhaj took on hosting duties. But who were the big winners? And were there many surprises? Scroll down for our live blog with all the winners and developments.

SEEWhen are the 2023 Oscars? Date, time, and everything to know

For these awards honoring the best in low-budget filmmaking, nominees are decided by committees made up of critics, programmers, producers, directors, writers, cinematographers, editors, and actors, along with Film Independent’s board of directors. But the winners are determined by the entire membership of Film Independent. Membership is open to the public, so anyone who pays the organization’s yearly dues can make their voice heard.

“Everything Everywhere All at Once” came...

Before Nan Goldin was the subject of Laura Poitras’ documentary “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” Poitras first learned about her when she was studying filmmaking in San Francisco and saw a copy of “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency.” “I had a roommate who was a photographer, so she had one of the early editions and it was just mind-blowing. The intimacy, the rawness, the capturing of relationships and sexuality and the differences between genders,” she tells Gold Derby during our recent webchat (watch the exclusive video interview above).

When she actually got to experience Goldin’s art in-person, it became another incredible event for her. “It’s like she created this whole new visual storytelling, language and relationship. These were people she was friends and lovers with.”

See dozens of interviews with 2023 Oscar contenders

“All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” explores Goldin’s life and work as a visual...

“All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” seemed like a lock to win Best Documentary. The political exposé on artist Nan Goldin and the fall of a pharmaceutical empire was cleaning up among critics’ groups throughout awards season – including New York, Los Angeles, and Florida – as well as being named one of the top-five docs of the year by the National Board of Review.

But as we head toward the Oscars ceremony on March 12, “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” feels more vulnerable than ever despite a comfortable lead in the Gold Derby combined odds. After missing a nomination at the Producers Guild Awards, director Laura Poitras lost to “Fire of Love” filmmaker Sara Dosa at the Directors Guild Awards. Then on Sunday at the BAFTA Awards, “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” lost Best Documentary to “Navalny.”

Let’s start with the PGA Awards, which take place this weekend. The...

The Oscar® nominated HBO Documentary Film All The Beauty And The Bloodshed, from Academy Award®-winning filmmaker Laura Poitras (HBO and Participant’s “Citizenfour”), debuts Sunday, March 19 (9:00-11:00 p.m. Et/Pt) on HBO and will be available to stream on HBO Max.

From Participant, All The Beauty And The Bloodshed is an epic, emotional, and interconnected story about internationally renowned artist and activist Nan Goldin told through her slideshows, intimate interviews, groundbreaking photography, archival family snapshots and rare footage of her personal fight to hold the Sackler family accountable for the opioid overdose crisis.

The critically acclaimed film premiered at the Venice International Film Festival in the main competition, where it became the second documentary ever to win the Golden Lion for best film. It was the only film to play at Venice, Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, and New York Film Festival in 2022. The...

If you're like me, you've been anxiously compiling a list of all your returning and potential new appointment TV shows coming up in March. "The Mandalorian," "History of the World: Part II," "Shadow and Bone," "Yellowjackets," "Riverdale" — it's enough to make me grateful I've yet to get into either "Perry Mason" or "Ted Lasso," both of which are also coming back that month. There is, of course, another series making its much-anticipated return in March, but we'll get to that later ... in case you couldn't guess what it is from this article's header image alone.

In other words, there will be plenty of other shows to help fill the spot that Pedro Pascal's Joel and Bella Ramsey's Ellie have come to occupy in your heart these past two months. Everyone's new favorite feel-bad post-apocalyptic prestige drama, "The Last of Us," will cap off its freshman run mid-March, by...

“All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” has coasted through the season as the Oscar front-runner for Best Documentary Feature, so it makes sense that it’s also out front in our forecasts for the Directors Guild Award. But the guild doesn’t always agree with the Oscars when it comes to documentaries, and the Expert journalists we’ve surveyed from major media outlets are split between all five of the nominees.

SEEBrendan Fraser (‘The Whale’): ‘I needed only to look into Hong’s eyes’ to ‘reflect the authenticity’ [Complete Interview Transcript]

Laura Poitras is the director of “Bloodshed,” which explores the life and career of Nan Goldin, a photographer and activist who fought to hold Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family responsible for the opioid crisis across the United States. Poitras won the last time she was nominated at the DGA Awards, for “Citizenfour” (2014), and by winning again she would join a...

This year’s five Oscar-nominated documentary filmmakers agree: In an especially crowded content landscape, finding a story that they have to tell is critical. “Compelled, obsessed — I mean, you have to really love [a topic]. You have to just feel like it has a gravitational pull towards you,” “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” director Laura Poitras said.

“A film is very often like a fever dream. You jump off a cliff,” said Shaunak Sen, the director of “All That Breathes.” “It just takes a sort of life of its own.”

Poitras and Sen were recently joined by fellow 2023 nominees Sara Dosa (“Fire of Love”), Simon Lereng Wilmont (“A House Made of Splinters”) and Daniel Roher (“Navalny”) in a panel hosted by TheWrap’s CEO and editor-in-chief Sharon Waxman in Los Angeles. The wide-ranging discussion, held as part of TheWrap’s Oscar-Nominated Documentary Features Showcase and its 2022-2023 Awards Season Screening Series,...

After narrowing down 144 eligible documentary features to a remarkably strong shortlist of 15 docs, the Academy’s nonfiction branch whittled down that batch to five nominees: “All That Breathes,” “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” “Fire of Love,” “A House Made of Splinters,” and “Navalny.”

It’s a quintuplet of powerful films from five formidable helmers. It’s also a list that, as every year, is notably missing several heralded docus including Brett Morgen’s “Moonage Daydream,” Ondi Timoner’s “Last Flight Home” and Alex Pritz’s “The Territory.” But despite the omissions, five beautifully crafted movies remain from both veteran and relatively green directors.

Interestingly all but one of the nominated films, “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in 2022, which is a testament to just how vital the fest is to the nonfiction genre. But despite four of the five nominated docus having more than 12 months of exposure,...

Anonymous Content has signed Oscar and Pulitzer Prize-winning filmmaker and journalist Laura Poitras, the director behind “Citizenfour” and “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” which was recently nominated for an Academy Award.

“All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” premiered in competition at the 2022 Venice Film Festival where it won the Golden Lion for best film, making it the second documentary in the festival’s history to win the top prize. The docu, about U.S. artist and activist Nan Goldin and her battle to hold the Sackler family accountable for the opioid overdose crisis, also played at numerous high profile festivals including Telluride and Toronto. Last year “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” made history when it became the first docu to ever be selected as the centerpiece film at New York Film Festival. “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” was the only film – docu or narrative – to play at...

US documentary filmmaker Kirsten Johnson will direct, with filming commencing at the Berlinale.

Kristen Stewart is to play US writer, philosopher and political activist Susan Sontag in an upcoming feature for UK-Australia production outfit Brouhaha Entertainment, with US filmmaker Kirsten Johnson to direct.

Four chapters in the tumultuous life of the celebrated and controversial 20th century intellectual will be depicted in the drama, which is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography Sontag: Her Life by Ben Moser. The feature has the working title of Sontag.

New Yorker Sontag, who passed away in 2004, is known for her widely influential critical works such as Against Interpretation,...

Just when you think you’re out, the Oscars inevitably pull you back in.

This year’s biggest night in movies is set for March 12 at 8 p.m. Et, and will be televised on ABC per tradition (and a lucrative broadcast deal for the Academy). Cinema’s highest accolades have been broadcast for at-home viewers since 1953, when Cecil B. DeMille’s “The Greatest Show on Earth” took home Best Picture.

The 95th Academy Awards ceremony has as many analysts focused on the success of the show itself as the winners in each category. With Hollywood vying for audience attention, exactly which people tune into the Oscars — and the more opaque question of why — stands to cast a shadow over not just the future of how we honor film artistry, but the brass tax of business at the box office.

“Top Gun: Maverick” and “Avatar: The Way of Water” stand out...

We will update these predictions throughout awards season, so keep checking IndieWire for all our 2023 Oscar picks. Final voting is March 2 through 7, 2023. The 95th Oscars telecast will be broadcast on Sunday, March 12 and air live on ABC at 8:00 p.m. Et/ 5:00 p.m. Pt.

See IndieWire’s previous Oscars Predictions for this category and more here.

State of the Race

Because the much-enlarged documentary branch sees all fifteen shortlisted films when they pick their nominees for Best Documentary Feature, it wasn’t a surprise that a film that was not widely lauded on the awards circuit would sneak into the final five. Danish filmmaker Simon Lerent Wilmont’s Sundance World Cinema directing winner “A House Made of Splinters” was the surprise on Oscar nominations morning. Produced by Joshua Oppenheimer’s team behind “Flee,” the touching film goes inside a home for neglected children anxiously awaiting court custody decisions,...

Most Oscar documentary nominees launch at Sundance. There are exceptions, like winners “Citizenfour,” “Free Solo,” and “My Octopus Teacher,” but it remains the festival of choice for non-fiction films.

A Sundance award doesn’t hurt, either: The 2022 documentary Oscar winner, Questlove’s “Summer of Soul,” began its journey as a 2021 Sundance double winner with an Audience Award and Grand Jury Prize. This year, the Oscar nominees include “Navalny” (U.S. Documentary audience and Festival Favorite award), “Fire of Love” (editing award), “All that Breathes,” (Grand Jury Prize for World Cinema Documentary), and “House Made of Splinters” (World Cinema Documentary Directing Award).

This year’s Sundance crop, sampled by those in Park City theaters as well as online, is just as impressive. Jury prizes didn’t always go to the buzziest titles, but Sundance award-winners get a lift toward getting seen and often acquired.

Sheila Nevins’ MTV Documentary Films grabbed Chilean...

It’s hard to quite comprehend the scale of the North American opioid crisis. The rise of the hyper-addictive prescription painkiller OxyContin – a “blockbuster drug”, in putrid Big Pharma parlance – has contributed to the more than 600,000 total opioid-related deaths in the US and Canada since 1999. Experts have predicted that as many as 1.2 million more people may die from opioid overdoses by the end of the decade. Sometimes, the drug itself proves fatal; often, it leads directly to the use of other potentially deadly drugs, such as heroin or fentanyl. (Around 80 per cent of heroin addicts now begin on prescription opioids.) The tendrils of the opioid epidemic touch more or less every person in the US in one way or another. And at the head of it all, there is the Sackler family.

Beginning in 1995, through their pharmaceutical company Purdue Pharma, members of the Sackler family oversaw an unprecedented push to...

Just one year after Maggie Gyllenhaal (“The Lost Daughter”) became the second woman to win the Directors Guild of America’s First-Time Film Director award, Charlotte Wells (“Aftersun”) is set to follow her as the category’s third female champ. The 35-year-old Scottish filmmaker, who helmed three narrative shorts between 2015 and 2017, has already been heavily feted for her feature directing (and writing) debut with accolades such as the Cannes French Touch Prize and the Gotham Award for Best Breakthrough Director. Now, the fact that a whopping 96 of Gold Derby’s 2023 DGA Awards predictions odds-makers have her as their top choice in the rookie race should translate to a decisive win.

This category’s current lineup is the only one in its eight-year history to include just one male nominee. Last year’s unprecedented field of six consisted of two men and four women, including Gyllenhaal. Our odds show Wells far outpacing female contenders Alice Diop,...

‘Pathaan’ makes fast start; Venice winner ‘All The Beauty…’ launches.

Steven Spielberg’s semi-autobiographical drama The Fabelmans makes its UK-Ireland box office bow this weekend, with competition from Lionsgate action film Plane, Bollywood thriller Pathaan and Venice-winning documentary All The Beauty And The Bloodshed.

The Fabelmans is the widest opening title of the weekend, starting in 670 locations (and 767 screens) through eOne. This marks the company’s third-widest opening of all time in the territory, behind 1917’s 692 sites from January 2020, and The Bfg’s 680 from July 2016.

Those films started with £7.3m and £5.3m respectively; anything approaching either of those figures would...

MTV Documentary Films has acquired worldwide rights to “The Eternal Memory,” Maite Alberdi’s follow-up to her Oscar-nominated feature “The Mole Agent.” Sources say that the film sold for nearly 3 million.

The doc premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January, and will have its international premiere at the Berlin Film Festival next month as part of the “Panorama” section.

The film was produced by Alberdi, Juan De Dios Larraín, Pablo Larraín and Rocío Jadue. It is executive produced by Marcela Santibañez, Daniela Sandoval, Nicholas Hooper, Julie Goldman, Christopher Clements, Chandra Jessee and Rebecca Lichtenfeld.

MTV Documentary Films was set up in 2019 by legendary HBO Documentary Films boss Sheila Nevins, and Paramount Global executives Liza Burnett Fefferman and Nina L. Diaz. Nevins was at HBO for 38 years and won 34 Emmys in that period. Her credits include “Citizenfour,” “Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief” and “Paradise Lost.”

In “The Eternal Memory,...

After parting ways with its parent company First Look Media in December, the non-profit documentary production studio Field of Vision is at Sundance with four docus and actively seeking new donors and supporters.

Founded in 2015 by former Hot Docs programming director Charlotte Cook, “CitizenFour” Oscar winner Laura Poitras and SXSW prize winner A.J. Schnack (“We Always Talk to Strangers”), the company now run by Cook has become a force to be reckoned with in recent years. The filmmaker-driven visual journalism documentary company’s credits include the Oscar-winning film “American Factory” as well Academy Award nominated features including “Ascension,” “Strong Island,” and “Hale County This Morning, This Evening.”

Overall, Field of Vision has supported or produced more than 260 features, shorts, and series mainly via grant money provided by First Look Media, the company run by eBay founder Pierre Olmidyar. Over the last several years, the company has begun commercially investing in docus,...

‘All The Beauty And The Bloodshed’ director Poitras will be the 2022 guest of honour.

All The Beauty And The Bloodshed director Laura Poitras will be guest of honour at the 2022 International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), which has also set two Focus programmes and the theme for its new media section DocLab.

Fresh from winning the Venice Golden Lion for her Nan Goldin documentary All The Beauty…, Poitras has curated a ‘Top 10’ programme for the festival, of films she believes are key to the human condition. Titles announced so far include Steve McQueen’s Hunger, Frederick Wiseman’s Titicut Follies...

U.S. director-producer Laura Poitras, who won an Oscar and an Emmy with Edward Snowden film “Citizenfour,” and recently took the Golden Lion at Venice with opioid epidemic pic “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” will be the Guest of Honor at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam. The 35th edition of the festival takes place from Nov. 9 to 20.

Poitras will be honored at IDFA with the Retrospective and Top 10 programs, in which she curates 10 films. The Top 10 program includes reflections on political imprisonment (“Hunger” by Steve McQueen; “This Is Not a Film” by Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb), incarceration and psychiatry (Frederick Wiseman’s “Titicut Follies”), and genocide (Claude Lanzmann’s “Shoah”). As part of the Top 10, Poitras will be in conversation with several of her selected filmmakers during the festival’s public talks program.

In the Retrospective section, IDFA presents all seven films directed by Poitras from 2003 to today.