LA MONTE PRODUCTIONS/ SIMONSAYS ENTERTAINMENT/ WANBLI
RELENTLESS RELEASING
Dog Warriors
Diane Warren: Relentless
The Hemingway
Trade Secret
Andrew Abrahams (Director/Producer/Principal DP)
Diane Warren (Songwriter/Subject)
Bess Kargman (Director/Producer)
Patrick Sean O’Brien (Co-Director)
Evan Mathis (Co-Director)
Abraham Joffe (Director/Producer)
VIVA VERDI!
Yvonne Russo (Writer/Director/Producer)
Christine La Monte (Writer/producer)
Nicholas Pike (Music Composer)
The Age of Disclosure
SCHEDULE AND SPEAKERS SUBJECT TO CHANGE
Dan Farah (Director/Producer)
STRENGTH IN NUMBERS
Deadline’s Contenders Film: Documentary event hosts a broad collection of the year’s best in nonfiction
By Matt Carey
Just over 200 documentary features qualified for Oscar consideration this year, a recordbreaking number.
With so many films in the race, it becomes a major challenge to navigate through titles that originate from across the globe. That’s where Deadline’s Contenders Film: Documentary event comes in: it’s your comprehensive guide to many of the most accomplished and award-winning nonfiction films with serious aspirations for Oscar recognition.
We’ll welcome Oscarnominated director Tamara Kotevska and producer and DOP Jean Dakar for a discussion of The Tale of Silyan, their National Geographic documentary that tells a story infused with North Macedonian legend about a man who rescues an injured white stork.
When it comes to legends of rock n’ roll, no group surpasses a British band founded in 1968. We’ll hear from the creative team behind Being Led Zeppelin, a Sony Pictures Classics release with the distinction of being the
highest-grossing documentary of the year.
Along with Being Led Zeppelin, music underscores several more films featured on Contenders Film: Documentary. Diane Warren: Relentless explores the songwriter and 16-time Oscar nominee who has written songs for Celine Dion, Beyonce, Lady Gaga, Cher and many other greats. Ai WeiWei’s Turandot takes us inside an astounding production of the Puccini opera directed by one of the world’s most famous artists. And VIVA
VERDI! opens the doors to a fabulous retirement home for opera singers and musicians established by the brilliant composer Giuseppi Verdi. Casa Verdi’s hallways and elegant drawing rooms thrum with violin, percussion, piano and soaring vocals.
We count on documentary filmmakers to bring their acute focus to the most significant social, political and environmental issues of our time. On Contenders Film: Documentary we will hear from directors behind some remarkable investigative films: Eugene Jarecki will tell us about his penetrating analysis of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange in The Six Billion Dollar Man; Dog Warriors follows the scent of ex-military men who engage in a thrilling, white-knuckle attempt to rescue canines from a grim fate; Trade Secret exposes a disturbing threat to polar bears that has seen the magnificent creatures trafficked for their skins and body parts; The Age of Disclosure blows the lid off the U.S. government’s knowledge of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena—what used to be called UFOs.
A medical mystery that afflicts a surprisingly large number of people, especially children,
IT’S YOUR GUIDE TO MANY OF THE MOST ACCOMPLISHED AND AWARD-WINNING NONFICTION FILMS WITH SERIOUS ASPIRATIONS FOR OSCAR RECOGNITION.
comes under the microscope in Complicated, from Open Eye Pictures. In The Hemingway, a filmmaker living with ALS, Patrick Sean O’Brien, takes us inside the world of his imagination in a short film of startling humor and visual audacity co-directed by Evan Mathis.
No film this year is more audacious than Trains, a blackand-white journey along steel rail lines through events of the
20th century, some poignant and evocative, others terrifying. The film from Polish master Maciej J Drygas chugs along without a word of dialogue. However, we can promise that Contenders Film: Documentary will not lack for dialogue—with some of the most talented nonfiction filmmakers in Oscar contention speaking to us this year. We invite you to experience the conversation.
MEET YOUR HOST AND MODERATOR
MATT CAREY
Documentary Editor, Awards
Matthew Carey joined Deadline fulltime in 2020, after a long association as a freelancer, to specialize in coverage of the nonfiction film landscape. Matthew is a writer and producer whose work has appeared on CNN, CNN International and CNN en Español. He has written extensively about documentary film for CNN and CNN.com, Documentary magazine, NBCNews.com and TheWrap.
FILMS THE
CHARLOTTE STREET FILMS/ WATERMELON PICTURES
● The Six Billion Dollar Man Eugene Jarecki’s documentary The Six Billion Dollar Man explores the dark underbelly of classified information. Parsing through the WikiLeaks files exposed over the years, like the “collateral murder” video that showed U.S. military personnel in Apache helicopters firing on innocent people in Iraq in 2007, killing a dozen people. Jarecki also documents the twists and turns in the American government’s legal case against Julian Assange, which charged him with violations of the Espionage Act and conspiracy related to computer hacking.
EPF MEDIA & DRYGAS FILM PRODUCTION
● Trains
An audacious cinematic effort, Trains is a stunning portrait in black and white of life in the 20th century as embodied by the sprawling, historychanging impact of railroad development. The film from Polish master Maciej J Drygas captures hopes, desires and the passage of time without a word of dialogue, carried along with a minimalist electronic score.
INCIPIT/LA MONTE PRODUCTIONS CO-PRODUCTION
● Ai WeiWei’s Turandot
The film follows Chinese artistactivist Ai WeiWei as he debuts Giacomo Puccini’s century-old masterpiece opera Turandot at the Rome Opera House. Plagued by production issues that began in 2019 and were halted in March 2020 when Italy went into the Covid-19 lockdown, the film shows how Ai’s production
1 Trains
2 The Six Billion Dollar Man
3 Ai WeiWei’s Turnadot
THE FILMS
transforms the iconic opera into a powerful statement piece on more contemporary issues such as war, immigration as well as the pandemic.
LA MONTE PRODUCTIONS/ SIMONSAYS ENTERTAINMENT/ WANBLI
● VIVA VERDI!
VIVAVERDI! is an intimate look at the lives of the celebrated opera singers and musicians, now elderly, who live out the remainder of their lives at Casa Verdi in Milan, a retirement home built in 1896 by the most influential Italian opera composer of the 19th century, Giuseppe Verdi. Writer-Director Yvonne Russo and co-writer Christine La Monte showcase how the residents, ranging in age from 77 to 103, still actively create and perform while also mentoring the 16 gifted music students from around the world who study and live among them.
MASTERCLASS/ GREENWICH ENTERTAINMENT
● Diane Warren: Relentless This music documentary, directed by Bess Kargman,
1 Complicated 2 VIVA VERDI!
focuses on the career of songwriter and 16-time Oscar nominee Diane Warren. The doc features archival footage, an in-depth look at her infamous office and interviews with some of Warren’s famous collaborators, such as Cher, Gloria Estefan, Jennifer Hudson, Kesha and more. It delves into Warren’s distinctive songwriting, work ethic and iconic musical duets.
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC DOCUMENTARY FILMS
● The Tale of Silyan
Set in rural North Macedonia, Tamara Kotevska’s The Tale of Silyan follows Nikola Conev, a struggling farmer whose livelihood is threatened by imposing government policies that restrict him from selling his crops or land. As his family leaves in hopes of starting anew elsewhere, Nikola lands a menial
job at the local landfill, where he encounters Silyan, an injured white stork. As he rehabilitates the bird, a unique friendship between the man and nature begins to bloom.
ONERIC LTD
● The Hemingway
The Hemingway, a short film, co-directed by Patrick Sean O’Brien and Evan Mathis, follows Patrick as he struggles with daily tasks and the narrative voice in his head offers insights into the peculiarities of life during his most intimate moments. The film balances life’s many trials and tribulations through dark humor and beautiful, touching explorations of the intricacies of relationships in the silent world of ALS.
OPEN EYE PICTURES
● Complicated
Andrew Abrahams’
Complicated, filmed over the course of seven years, tells the untold stories of children suffering from complex, invisible illnesses as their families and loved ones navigate a difficult medical system that fails to provide the care they need. The film sheds light on the horrors in pediatric medicine, where parents pushing for answers risk being accused of medically harming their children and even losing custody.
THE FILMS
● Dog Warriors
Set in South Korea, Dog Warriors infiltrates the Asian dog meat trade. Andrew Abrahams sets out to investigate the tens of millions of dogs that are farmed or stolen and then killed for food, as well as visiting the places that the custom is believed to have originated. Following a team of war-hardened, canineloving combat veterans, the film showcases the team’s surveillance and recovery missions as they risk it all to save as many dogs as possible.
RELENTLESS RELEASING
● The Age of Disclosure
The Age of Disclosure, directed and produced by Dan Farah, who made the documentary in secrecy over three years, reveals a shocking 80-year global cover-up of non-human intelligent life and a secret war among major nations to reverseengineer advanced technology of non-human origin. In other words, the documentary, featuring the testimony from 34 members of the U.S. government, military and intelligence communities, exposes the nature of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) that visit our planet. It features Secretary of State and former U.S.
Sen. Marco Rubio and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, amongst other top government officials, who speak to their knowledge of non-human intelligent life.
SONY PICTURES CLASSICS
● Becoming Led Zeppelin
Bernard MacMahon’s hybrid docu-concert film features never-before-seen footage, performances and music to create an experimental cinematic odyssey exploring Led Zeppelin’s creative, musical and personal origin story. Written by MacMahon and Allison McGourty, the film also features a brandnew sound mix and exclusive interviews with Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones and the late John Bonham.
UNTITLED FILM WORKS
● Trade Secret
Filmed over the course of six years across nine countries, Trade Secret, directed by Abraham Joffe, uncovers the legal but cutthroat trade of polar bear skins. Aimed at revealing how conservation, politics and commerce weave together in ways the public was never meant to see, the documentary follows three activists as they expose the murky lines between crime sanctioned under the guise of species protection. 3
From groundbreaking exposes to intimate portraits of extraordinary lives, Deadline’s docs and unscripted events and programming takes a deep dive into the thought-provoking, visually stunning stories of the season that inform, inspire, and ignite conversation. Explore these stories on Deadline.com DISCOVER THE DOCUMENTARY STORIES THAT ARE CAPTIVATING THE WORLD.
