(ISSN # 1559-1034) is the publication of the International Documentary Association, a nonprofit organization established in 1982 to promote nonfiction film and video and to support the efforts of documentary makers around the world.
Lilla Sparks / Fiscal Sponsorship Program Coordinator
Abby Sun / Director of Artist Programs
Bethany Weardon / Fiscal Sponsorship Program Manager
Dominic Asmall Willsdon / Executive Director
Zaferhan Yumru / Director of Marketing, Communications & Design
Armando Zamudio / Public Programs & Events Coordinator
IDA Board
Ina Fichman / Co-President
Michael A. Turner / Co-President
Chris Albert / Secretary
Maria Agui Carter / Treasurer
Bob Berney
Paula Ossandón Cabrera
Toni Kamau
Grace Lee
Orwa Nyrabia
Chris L. Perez
Alfred Clinton Perry
Amir Shahkhalili
Marcia Smith
Abby
In its work with superstar athletes, G otham Chopra’s full-service documentary studio maneuvers through tricky questions of access and creative control
Nora Stone
40 years later, the creation and circulation of the Miners’ Campaign Tapes offers lessons in filmmaking solidarity
Ruairí McCann
No Other L and’s collective of Palestinian and Israeli co-directors imagine a reciprocal, shared future in front of and behind the camera
Mackenzie Lukenbill
What does the makeup of films awarded at IDA’s Documentary Awards tell us about the history of documentaries?
Dan Schindel
On the proliferation of documentary awards
Noel Ransome
2024: Unleash the Niche
Lázaro at Night, The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire, Measures for a Funeral, Collective Monologue, Youth (Hard Times), Youth (Homecoming), and exergue –on documenta 14
Winne Wang
The Seed of the Sacred Fig, Youth (Hard Times), Youth (Homecoming), 7 Walks With Mark Brown, and Little, Big, and Far
Jonathan Mackris
From the Reel World
Ina Fichman & Michael Turner
Zac
Screen Time: Winter 2024 Releases
The Last Republican Night Is Not Eternal Nocturnes
Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham in No Other Land (dir. Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, and Rachel Szor). (p. 26) Courtesy of Rachel Szor
Cover image: Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham. (p. 26) Photo by Eman Mohammad
Simone Biles Rising. (p. 11) Courtesy of Religion of Sports
Brochure advertising screenings of the 1988 IDA Awards nominees and winners. (p. 34)
Dear Readers,
No Other Land is both narratively explosive and achingly personal. In terms of craft, it’s one of the most impressive examples of verité scene-making in recent years—though its directors, a collective of four Israeli and Palestinian journalists, aren’t format purists in their story of how Israeli state legal machinations and individual soldiers force expulsions of Palestinian villagers in the West Bank. Mackenzie Lukenbill examines how the quartet of Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, Hamdan Billal, and Rachel Szor made the film their story in every mutual way possible. After No Other Land was selected to be this issue’s cover feature, IDA’s board selected the film’s directors to receive the Courage Under Fire Award at the 40th IDA Documentary Awards.
The first IDA Awards (in 1985, for films made in 1984) took place in a very different landscape of film production and general public awareness of documentaries. To better understand the import and challenges of the awards, we asked two writers to critically examine the past four decades. Dan Schindel cross-referenced IDA Award and Oscar winners in his essay, which compares the whims of the awards voting bodies with a more general history of documentary film development. Documentary has covered the rising costs of Oscar campaigns for documentary filmmakers many times over the past decades. Zooming out, Noel Ransome takes a look at the general practice of awarding documentary films, from film festivals to the Oscars and newer awards. Does the proliferation of entities awarding documentaries mean that more and better films are receiving their roses?
We also commemorate another 40-year anniversary. Ruarí McCann finds an interesting model of making and disseminating activist films in the Miners’ Campaign Tapes. The feature looks into the tapes—six short videos—and how their funding, collaborative production, and unique distribution were all enabled by the 1982 Workshop Declaration, the result of years of campaigning by radical filmmaking collectives.
The “Making a Production” profile on sports powerhouse Religion of Sports has been in the works for five months. Nora Stone makes her Documentary debut with her reporting on this Santa Monica–based production company utterly dedicated to making creative work out of the celebrity bio-doc format. For “What’s in My Bag,” we asked cinematographer and director Zac Manuel, whose work spans public broadcasting and streamer fare, to write down why big rigs aren’t always better for filming intimate, observational work. “Screen Time” continues with capsule-length reviews on notable new winter releases, some of them pegged to Oscarqualifying runs as the awards season ramps up.
There are crises around the world, including in film, arts, and culture. After many recent government changeovers, we have already witnessed funding cutbacks and anticipate state-level support of documentaries to further erode. Since August, I’ve been on a partial leave of absence from IDA to research media policy that supports independent documentary filmmaking around the world, including already existing local, state, and national policies in the U.S. This work is supported by Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center Documentary Film in the Public Interest program, where I am a current fellow. I will return to full-time work at IDA by the end of 2024 and will share the results of my research in the next issue.
Until then,
Abby Sun Editor, Documentary
Abby Sun
Abby Sun
Abby Sun
Dear IDA Community,
At the time of writing, there has been a recent spate of momentous elections in the U.S., Taiwan, India, Mexico, France, Georgia, and many other corners of the world. Political change always brings uncertainty, but IDA will be here, as always, to support and defend the interests and voices of documentary makers.
As the IDA Board Co-Presidents, we are stepping in to give you updates while Dominic Willsdon is on brief medical leave. We expect Dominic to make a quick recovery and be back soon. In this column last time, Dominic described the strategic planning that IDA staff and board members have been undertaking for the past six months. The planning process continues and will conclude at the end of 2024.
We are now finalizing our strategic plan based on stakeholder feedback and internal assessment. We look forward to announcing IDA’s clear priorities and commitments for the years ahead. The direction of this plan has depended enormously on consultation with many of you in the field, ranging from former board members to grantee filmmakers and IDA members from around the world. We thank you for the opportunity to listen to and learn from your experiences.
One indication of our future direction came earlier this fall, when we welcomed three new board members: Picturehouse CEO Bob Berney, Chiledoc Director Paula Ossandón Cabrera, and Kenyan-born, Oscar-shortlisted producer Toni Kamau. They bring a wealth of experience in distribution and marketing, across commercial and grassroots approaches, in the U.S. and internationally. Their breadth of work accounts for the way we want IDA’s board to continue to evolve—with a more global presence and representing documentary professionals and perspectives, just like our membership does. We plan to add more board members in 2025.
IDA staff is hard at work planning the upcoming edition of the IDA Documentary Awards, which will be held on December 5. This year, we are thrilled to honor Dawn Porter with a Career Achievement Award, Shiori Ito with the Emerging Filmmaker Award, and the directing team of cover feature No Other Land, Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Rachel Szor, and Yuval Abraham, with the Courage Under Fire Award. The IDA Documentary Awards have been vital for the documentary community for over 40 years, and its long history is explored in this issue. We look forward to seeing many of you at the ceremony.
Ina Fichman & Michael Turner Co-Presidents, IDA Board of Directors
Ina Fichman
Michael Turner
What’s in My Bag
Capturing reality without the barriers of bulky equipment
By Zac Manuel
Zac Manuel is a director and cinematographer from New Orleans, Louisiana. Zac’s work in documentary draws from complex legacies of Southern identity, with a particular interest in the impacts of identity, history, and inheritance on Black communities. Zac’s cinematography credits include Alone (2017), Academy Award–nominated Time (2020), Buckjumping (2018), and Descendant (2022, Netflix). His directing credits include This Body (2021, PBS); Nonstop (2021, Criterion Channel), and Lil Nas X: Long Live Montero (2023, Max).
Zac’s latest feature documentary, Ghetto Children, premiered at the 2024 New Orleans Film Festival and was produced by XTR. Zac is the proud son of a touring jazz musician and a community builder at the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
In 2017, I traveled to Japan to film a documentary. It was a couple of years into my career as a DP, and I was straddling the wide chasm between commercial, music video, and documentary work. I was accustomed to big, elaborate rigs—the kinds where the setup’s size was often seen as a testament to skill. I liked to think I valued substance over spectacle, though I wasn’t immune to the film world’s expectations. At film school, outside Los Angeles, the culture encouraged the idea that bigger meant better; a sprawling rig was a mark of legitimacy. For the project in Japan, I aimed for what I thought was simplicity: a Sony FS7, with an extension unit for brick batteries, and a directorchosen 10:1 zoom lens, which was heavy and unwieldy but optically beautiful.
In Tokyo, we went to Panavision to tech our gear, where I learned that my “simple” setup was anything but. The zoom lens required extra support—a baseplate, 19mm rods, a bridge. Its heft demanded a sturdier tripod, so we were given an O’Connor head with standard-height sticks. After a few hours, the minimalist rig I’d envisioned had ballooned into something far more cumbersome. With gear in hand, we—three Black filmmakers in Tokyo—ventured out, our equipment in backpacks, our tripod broken down and bungee-strapped to an aluminum luggage carrier.
Accompanying us was a lovely fixer but no driver, and so we navigated Tokyo’s rush-hour crowds, lugging the tripod rig up staircases and through bustling train stations, and squeezing into packed trains. I wasn’t unaccustomed to roughing it, but this was different. The precariousness of our setup and the constant adjustments felt unsustainable.
Since then, I’ve refined my approach to building a gear package in a way that better aligns with my philosophy of storytelling. Every project demands a setup crafted with specific intention but open to flexibility. Through conversations with directors, I assemble each piece of gear in support of the film’s heartbeat. Decisions about camera format, lensing, or stabilization aren’t just about image fidelity—they’re also about creating the intimacy required to capture those images. I always consider the role the camera will play in a given space; sometimes it’s an unseen observer, and other times it’s an active participant in the environment. Not knowing exactly what an environment might demand, I focus on the very real and often possibility of spontaneity, creating a setup that embraces adaptability.
These days, my equipment bag is lean, intentional, and designed for any lastsecond pivots. I keep a Cinesaddle for handheld stability or mount the camera on my shoulder if I need height. Advances in sensor technology now allow me to
Zac Manuel filming Lil Nas X.
Image: Vivian Lau Courtesy of the writer
What’s in My Bag
What’s in my bag.
Courtesy of the writer
use smaller formats, like the Sony FX6 or Canon C500, which offer the quality I desire without the weight. I love the Angénieux EZ zoom series; it’s versatile and perfectly suited to my style. Alongside my gear, I always carry the Leatherman multitool my father gave me for my 21st birthday, a few BongoTies to keep things tidy, Velcro stickies, basic lens cleaning equipment, a notebook for jotting down story thoughts and shot ideas, a few novelty pens (my latest obsession), and some Tylenol or ibuprofen. It’s an unassuming collection that helps me focus on the essence of filmmaking: capturing real human moments with as little distraction as possible.
Back in Japan, the bungee cord held up until the very last day of shooting, when it finally snapped. The luggage carrier was so misshapen it hardly rolled anymore. We laughed about it—these improvised pieces of equipment held everything together, only to give out just as the job was done. I often think about that trip
because we made a beautiful film by the skin of our teeth, and you’d never be able to tell. The rigor of those 10 days holds a special place in my heart, reinforcing the necessity of preparation and an appropriate gear package that serves the story, the environment, and the crew, however scrappy they may be.
Ultimately, my goal is to create a setup that makes the mechanisms of filmmaking invisible. I want the experience in front of the lens to feel real, unfiltered, and unhindered by the barriers of bulky equipment. My rig allows me to work quickly, pivot when necessary, and pause to reflect when the situation demands it. This nimbleness and ability to stay both present and adaptable is what I’ve come to value most. .
A tiny, short-cabled shotgun mic so I always have some sort of camera audio—I’ve often requested shotgun mics for shoots only to receive a really long mic probably meant for a boom pole
Airpods—from my partner because I keep losing mine
Ibuprofen
Novelty pen that looks like a matchstick
Nora Stone is Assistant Professor of Film Production at the University of North Alabama. Her monograph How Documentaries Went Mainstream: A History, 1960–2022 was published by Oxford University Press in 2023. She produced and art directed the independent narrative feature The World Drops Dead (2024).
Religion of Sports
In its work with superstar athletes, Gotham Chopra’s full-service documentary studio maneuvers through tricky questions of access and creative control
By Nora Stone
Seven projects in production. Dozens more in development. And in the summer of 2024, three high-profile series about gamechanging athletes: In the Arena: Serena Williams on ESPN+, Simone Biles Rising on Netflix, and Welcome to the J-Rod Show on FS1. Religion of Sports is on a roll, having achieved a scale and consistency quite remarkable for a documentary production company.
In a creative team meeting before its release, directorcinematographer Bryant Robinson and creative producer Omri Kruvi provided updates on editing Welcome to the J-Rod Show, a series on Julio Rodríguez of the Seattle Mariners. They beamed with pride at the work they had done, and Robinson hyped up Kruvi’s contribution. SVP of development and production Victor Buhler congratulated them, then reported on several projects his team had been pitching. Not all had been successful, and he gamely fielded suggestions for next steps. The vibe was relaxed and confident, with an open exchange of ideas on all sides. While Religion of Sports is an overtly commercial enterprise, its leaders have created a system where values like trust and curiosity are a help, not a hindrance to success. And success is making a living making documentaries.
Religion of Sports has several strategies to achieve such scale and consistency, including a narrow focus and a talent-first approach. First is the focus on sports—and collaborations with major celebrity athletes. Though Religion of Sports is diversifying its subject matter as it grows, having a niche was important for the company to build a reputation. “We work with GOATs,” says Giselle Parets, who joined the company when it was founded
To Chopra, athletes are like saints, even deities, that fans pilgrimage to see and venerate by chanting anthems in unison. And rather than sowing doubt through investigations or radical historical revisions, Religion of Sports documentaries are essentially celebrations.
in 2017 and now works as a showrunner. And the results are uncommonly handsome, sensitive portraits of these superhuman figures. Religion of Sports’ directors dig into their subjects’ emotional truth in pursuit of powerful storytelling. The interviews they conduct are intimate and revealing. Just as impressive are the meticulous, sensitive sequences of archival video, audio, and animated graphics that bring the subject’s inner world to life.
In addition, Religion of Sports has figured out how to produce documentaries at ever-increasing speeds. Such was the case with the release schedule of Simone Biles Rising. The first two episodes of the four-part series, now out on Netflix, were released on July 17, a week before the opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympic Games. They cover Biles’s history, including the case of the twisties that caused her to pull out of the women’s team final at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, and her reentrance to the world stage at the World Gymnastics Championships in 2023. The third and fourth episodes, released on October 25, cover the Olympic trials and the Paris Olympics. The remarkable speed of production required Religion of Sports to build out (1) a team to shoot in Paris, (2) a small post-production footprint in Paris, and (3) a system for U.S.-based editors to access footage moments after it is shot. It is the practice they used in the past for time-sensitive series like Tom vs. Time (2018) and Simone vs. Herself (2021).
The company’s approach to sports is unique: founder Gotham Chopra, the son of author and guru Deepak Chopra, is fascinated by the quasi-religious aspect of sports. To Chopra, athletes are like saints, even deities, that fans pilgrimage to see and venerate by chanting anthems in unison. And rather than sowing doubt through investigations or radical historical revisions, Religion of Sports documentaries are essentially celebrations. In telling the story of an athlete’s season or career, Religion of Sports films affirm the worth of their subject to fans. Thinking in lofty terms permeates the planning and pitching stages of each project. According to Buhler, “The central idea remains that when we come up with a story, we often think of what religious figure, mythical figure, historical figure, what mythical great imprint narrative does it remind me of.” But Religion of Sports does not practice blind faith: they don’t gloss over missteps or debacles in their celebrations. Building relationships with athletes is the cornerstone of Religion of Sports’ filmmaking. Relationships are intangible, requiring respect and emotional investment, but Religion of Sports proves that the intangible can move mountains. Chopra and Buhler first worked together in 2013 on The Little Master, an installment of ESPN Films’ 30 for 30 about cricket superstar Sachin Tendulkar. It was released in 2015, the same year as Kobe Bryant’s Muse, the Showtime documentary that put Chopra on the map. The result of a long-percolating friendship with the legendary Laker, this documentary was the first time Bryant publicly addressed the sexual assault allegations against him. This project propelled the formation of Religion of Sports in 2017. As Buhler puts it, “What it established for people, not just athletes but buyers, was that Gotham could get some truth out of athletes.”
At first, Religion of Sports shared personnel and processes with other production companies before ramping up their own production capabilities. They worked with production partner Dirty Robber on early series like Tom vs. Time and Why We Fight (2018), then with Film 45 on Stephen vs. The Game (2019) and Simone vs. Herself. The Versus series are long-form verité shows, streaming on Facebook Watch, that established Religion of Sports’ skill at creating timely, exciting accounts of athletes’ careers. When producers Giselle Parets and Meg Cirillo joined the company, they each brought distinct expertise: Parets in the speed and unpredictability of unscripted content from her years producing The Amazing Race, and Cirillo in editing and graphics from her years as a postproduction supervisor. Chopra continues to be highly active on every Religion of Sports project, and he directs the biggest films and series.
Making a Production
He performs the interviews and watches cuts. But he has stepped back from some day-to-day production tasks in recent years. Instead, he oversees projects, checking that the planned creative vision is coming to fruition. Other leaders, “trained under the camp of Gotham” in Cirillo’s words, are capable of carrying out what he started on more and more projects. On the most ambitious projects with the most episodes, like Serena Williams: In the Arena, there will be a showrunner, a director, four editors, three story producers, three archival producers, eight graphic artists, and a finishing team. Teams will be smaller on less-involved projects, or those with a longer period to completion.
Since the beginning, the way Religion of Sports makes documentaries with the biggest stars in the sports world is by thinking like a talent agency. It has a roster of high-profile protagonists-cum-collaborators, and those relationships are more important than any single project. By creating and maintaining trust-filled, mutually beneficial relationships, Religion of Sports has become a favored documentary production company for superstar athletes. Practically, Religion of Sports does not typically have exclusivity agreements. Most of their talent subjects have existing deals with sponsors, brands, and content studios like Amazon and Apple, which preclude giving exclusivity to Religion of Sports.
Parets attests to the primacy of protagonist relationships: “We build these relationships with these athletes that are long-lasting. Even when the project is done, the relationships are not done.” Religion of Sports is always open to doing additional projects with athletes. And
when they do so, they utilize the same crew and producers who already understand the athletes. For example, Religion of Sports’ first project with Simone Biles was Simone vs. Herself, a series on Facebook Watch in 2021 that followed Biles at the Tokyo Olympics. There was no plan to create another project with her until Biles made her return to competition. When they began the new project, Simone Biles Rising, Religion of Sports brought back Katie Walsh, supervising producer on Simone vs. Herself, as co-director, along with the same director of photography and story producer. Parets was co-executive producer on Simone vs. Herself and is now showrunner for Simone Biles Rising. “The fact that [Biles] was going for Worlds showed there was a lingering desire to keep going,” as Parets puts it. “We talked with her, we talked with her team, and we talked with Netflix, because we thought it was gonna be the right home for it. The deal wasn’t even done, but in good faith we got on a plane with her to Belgium [for gymnastics Worlds] last September.” In their continuing projects with athletes, Religion of Sports also wisely rewards the people behind the scenes who made the original project a success.
Part of the reason Religion of Sports could fly a team to the World Gymnastics Championships to film Biles, even without a signed contract with Netflix, is because the company isn’t financed solely through production financing of projects. They also have venture capital investment. Under the guidance of CEO Ameeth Sankaran, Religion of Sports raised US$3 million of seed funding in 2018, US$10 million in Series A funding in 2020, and US$50 million in Series B funding in 2022. Buhler admits that this
Simone Biles Rising.
level of investment changes the creative side in significant ways. He says, “In the early phases, we were trying to make the best project for the budget we had. We were sort of living from project to project.” Now decisions are more complicated because they are not directly constrained by budget. But there are also more stakeholders: the investors who are counting on the company to grow and reward their investment.
Diversifying the slate of projects is also tricky. Buhler explains, “What’s hard about growing a business is to maintain the curiosity. We are trying to make sure everyone’s engaged and inspired by things that don’t require one of the best athletes in the world.” While documentaries on superstar athletes are their specialty, Religion of Sports is feeling the pressure to expand. In particular, they are looking to make a repeatable series they can make 100 or 1,000 episodes of. In addition, Religion of Sports is expanding into new territories, such as pop music. Their first music documentary is Thank You, Goodnight: The Bon Jovi Story. Produced independently, the series premiered at SXSW this year and found a home on Hulu.
Religion of Sports’ prospects list showcases these new priorities. They use a large shared spreadsheet to track and categorize a long list of potential projects. Columns include estimated budget, estimated revenue, likelihood, urgency, and status. A large section is devoted to the music initiative. Scrolling through it at a recent creative team meeting, Buhler pointed to projects and updated the team on
status: making contact with a talent agent, pitching to a streamer, retooling a pitch. Most important was knowing who was buying what. The team discussed a recent pitch about a troubled former professional athlete, which Amazon had deemed “too serious.” They bounced ideas about where to take it next and how to bring the subject into pitch meetings so that buyers would feel the story’s potential more clearly.
What remains certain is that Religion of Sports will continue growing its stable of protagonist-collaborators. It is this quality that makes the company a fascinating entry in the world of documentary. Studying Religion of Sports’ practices offers a glimpse at the benefits and quandaries of making documentaries about megawatt talent who already have sophisticated imagemanagement practices in place. Access to the subject is challenging, but relationships can have hidden benefits for the filmmaking process. Questions of creative control and ethics arise in configurations quite distinct from those facing filmmakers making investigative documentaries.
ACCESS IS A POINT of negotiation from the start. Busy, in-demand celebrities have a limited amount of time to dedicate to a documentary so they control the amount of access given filmmakers. Cirillo, showrunner on In the Arena: Serena Williams, lists the expectations for access that Religion of Sports negotiates, using examples from
In the Arena: Serena Williams.
a Production
an early meeting with Serena Williams. “Fees. How much time are you willing to give for each episode. She would sit down [to film an interview] for like three hours, she was so gracious. Figuring out the promotional terms, the speaking engagements. Archival from her personal life. How many cuts she’s willing to watch.” These upfront conversations delineate the talent’s responsibilities. They also help producers plan for episode arcs so story editors can best mold and shape the relatively small amount of footage.
Religion of Sports creatives often come up against time constraints in working with athletes. But despite these limitations, they are committed to finding creative solutions to make the series work. At a recent creative team meeting, Robinson and Kruvi related the limitations they faced in making Welcome to the J-Rod Show. They had just three or four days’ time to interview and follow Rodríguez, but they came up with a new beat to augment the story. Robinson and Kruvi called it a “pleasant diversion” in the third act. They filmed with a kid who is a superfan of Julio’s and who also lives with cystic fibrosis. On Opening Day 2024, he ran the bases at the Mariners game and then ran into Rodríguez’s arms. It is a beautiful story that conveys the blessings of sports fandom—a pleasant diversion that brightens up a difficult life. Robinson and Kruvi were very proud of this solution, with Robinson saying, “It always makes me emotional. We couldn’t ask for a better final act.”
While access to A-listers is important for Religion of Sports’ projects, just as significant is the team’s ability to innovate and find the heart in each episode’s story arc.
Collaborating with esteemed subjects and their powerful teams also increases Religion of Sports’ leverage with powerful sports institutions for access to archival materials. Sports organizers actively manage their own brands by suppressing ugly episodes and redirecting attention away from mismanagement and ethical lapses.
Take the Indian Wells episode. Often called the “fifth Grand Slam,” the 2001 Indian Wells Open was a consequential moment in Serena Williams’s career. She and her sister Venus Williams were slated to face each other in the final, but Venus dropped out because of a knee injury. They were accused of match-fixing. Then Serena faced a hostile crowd as she played against Kim Clijsters. The boos grew louder, continuing as Serena defeated Clijsters. Richard Williams said he had heard racial epithets uttered amidst the boos. This hurtful treatment caused Serena to boycott the tournament for 14 years.
Despite Serena’s agreeing to compete again at Indian Wells in 2015, the Women’s Tennis Association had never allowed a documentary to show footage from the final match in 2001. But after initial interviews with Serena
Collaborating with esteemed subjects and their powerful teams also increases Religion of Sports’ leverage with powerful sports institutions for access to archival materials.
demonstrated that Indian Wells remained a turning point for her, Religion of Sports producers were sure they needed to show the incident in their series In the Arena: Serena Williams. The redemption arc was too potent to skip. Cirillo and her archival producers asked the WTA to license the footage. According to Cirillo, “We were shot down immediately. They said they would not send us footage at all.” But they did not give up. Instead, Cirillo and her team took a risk: they continued putting together an episode with Indian Wells at the center of it, with the hope that WTA would relent.
The WTA did relent, finally, from pressure not from the filmmakers but from Williams’s team. Cirillo recounts, “Ultimately it took Jill [Smoller], Serena’s agent, who went to the head of the WTA.” Religion of Sports got “a huge win” of six minutes of footage. The WTA could shrug off a documentary production company. But Smoller convinced them that licensing the footage was important to Serena. While working with megawatt stars means limitations on access and time, Religion of Sports’ experience shows how the partnership can persuade powerful institutions to cooperate.
Ultimately, the limitations of celebrity access are more existential than mere production concerns. When you make documentaries with wealthy, powerful celebrities, who is in control of creative decision making—the filmmakers or the celebrities and their teams? How do you make a documentary with strong truth claims when the subject is an executive producer? Lately, numerous critics have posed these questions, insinuating that celebrities are mainly interested in documentaries in order to burnish
Making a Production
their own reputations, bury their scandals, and avoid the accountability that journalists (and the public) demand. The headlines are indicative: “Every Star Wants a Documentary Now. Is it just P.R.?” (Calum Marsh, New York Times); “Who is the celebrity documentary for?” (Israel Daramola, Defector); and “Why is every celebrity making a documentary about themselves?” (Lucy Ford, Cosmopolitan).
This concern is top of mind for Religion of Sports. Their work with celebrities entails necessary compromise. In agreeing to participate, the content is automatically branded by the celebrity’s brand. The company works to preclude the vanity project label by discussing sticky subjects with their collaborators from the very beginning. As Cirillo puts it, “Our subjects need to know that we are talking about tough topics, but to trust that we are telling the story and [that] we are going to make it really poignant without ever making somebody feel uncomfortable.”
Cirillo points out that major benefits accrue from subjects’ willingness to be vulnerable. Addressing the ups and downs guarantees a better story, with greater emotional payoff. Even when a subject is an executive producer, as Tom Brady was on the 2021 series Tom Brady: Man in the Arena, there is no getting away from hitting hard topics. Cirillo recalls, “Tom Brady did not want to talk about Deflategate, but he realized he had to.” And if talent is uncomfortable discussing a tough topic in an interview, the key is to film them saying just that: “I don’t want to talk about it.” Then, in the edit, that line can be a catalyst to bring in other contributors and archival footage to tell the story the filmmakers want to tell. Journalistic integrity dovetails with aesthetic and commercial appeal, and Religion of Sports is expert at conveying this logic to subjects.
Religion of Sports’ documentaries are profiles of newsworthy figures in context, not investigative journalism.
Top: Pietro Moro, COO and CFO of Religion of Sports, at his desk, balancing creativity, deadlines, and finances.
Image by Bryant Robinson
Bottom left: Chelsea Marotta, graphic designer, sketching the early designs for the Welcome to the JRod Show (Fox) film poster. Image by Bryant Robinson
Middle: Justin Skelly coordinating between creatives and networks. Image by Bryant Robinson
When you make documentaries with wealthy, powerful celebrities, who is in control of creative decision making—the filmmakers or the celebrities and their teams? How do you make a documentary with strong truth claims when the subject is an executive producer?
idea was not fully fleshed out. Translation: a documentary that whitewashes wrongdoing and hardship from the protagonist’s life is a half-baked idea not worth pouring time and resources into. That is, Religion of Sports frames this ethical decision in business terms.
They determine the story and framework, do extensive archival research, and interview people about their subject. Key to this process is selecting the right subject; otherwise, Religion of Sports runs the risk of elevating a problematic person. Parets testifies to the intuition involved in deciding who to work with. She says, “The projects we take on are because we feel like we can add and contribute and tell that athlete’s story, and we feel deeply inspired by the story. And that is a filter. We have our own internal rules, deep in your heart and in your gut.”
Cirillo agrees that the creative team is usually of one mind about which projects are worth pursuing. And who is not the right subject for Religion of Sports project? Cirillo is clear: “A person or people that don’t align morally with the ethos that RoS stands for. I’d hope we’re not doing projects on bad people.” According to Cirillo, while Religion of Sports has not rejected individuals outright who seek to work with them, they have turned down projects where the
IN THE END, it all comes back to trust. Trust is not just a buzzword—it is the bedrock of Religion of Sports’ reputation. Athletes must trust that Religion of Sports will tell their story accurately and sensitively. Time has shown that Religion of Sports can do that, and that they can exercise an ethics of care in the process. Parets calls the filmmaking process “very healing, very therapeutic for them.” She points out that, for in-demand, globally celebrated athletes under high pressure to perform, “there is not a lot of time for them to stop and think and reflect. The projects allow them to be vulnerable, take the time to reflect and think. In doing that, you build this relationship.” Once again, Religion of Sports’ goals—creating great, saleable documentaries and building strong relationships with talent—fit hand-in-glove with their subjects’ needs.
The payoff can be seen in the first episode of In the Arena: Serena Williams, which ably drills to the core of Williams’s emotional journey, cresting with the 1999 U.S. Open. Williams narrates her premonition about this Grand Slam. “I knew I was gonna win the Open,” she says dreamily. Animation of a sparkling night sky fills the screen, while her father’s coaching echoes on the soundtrack. We see her dream world and we hear the determination that has fueled her since she was a little girl. Through this internal, psychological context, we lock into Williams’s match against Martina Hingis. She talks us through her thought process during the match, reveling at her body’s ability to suppress the pain of a twisted ankle until she won. This combination of interview, archival, and animation offers viewers a fresh look at a decisive tournament from 25 years ago, revivifying the essential miracle of Williams’s rise to superstardom.
Ethical concerns in documentary filmmaking usually surface when there is a significant power differential between the filmmakers and the people being filmed. Groups like the Documentary Accountability Working Group have tackled the problems of extractive filmmaking and advised employing an ethics of care when working with vulnerable or marginalized subjects. Religion of Sports confronts a different power differential. But their take is not cynical. Their practices and the resulting films acknowledge their collaborators’ innate humanity. They may be winners, All-Stars, MVPs, and Olympic gold medalists, but as Biles was brave enough to admit on the world stage, they are people, too.
Religion of Sports’ success presents possibilities— that might become dilemmas—about the future of documentary. In some ways, Religion of Sports’ documentaries resemble a 60 Minutes profile or piece of branded content in speed of production and quantity of projects. Religion of Sports’ films lack the intention of definitiveness; instead, they join the churn of the present moment. Sports news powerhouses use Religion of Sports to stock their streaming service libraries, providing a reliable stream of new content on big names. As the speed of production on topical documentaries begins to trend toward broadcast news, what is the difference between the two?
Throughout Religion of Sports’ evolution, their documentary films and series have retained high production values and a convincing empathy for their high-profile protagonists. Whether they can maintain those qualities when they sell a repeatable series is uncertain. But throughout the ups and downs of their journey, the pressure to perform has not resulted in a tense work environment or a toxic hierarchy that silences opinions. Instead, team members speak openly about successes and struggles. This work culture is the clearest indication that Religion of Sports may be able to preserve the magic—trust and curiosity—that powered its early wins. .
Posters of Simone Biles Rising in the Religion of Sports office. Image: Bryant Robinson
Ruairí McCann is a writer, programmer, illustrator, and musician from Ireland, born and living in Belfast but raised in County Sligo. He is co-editor of the film journal and virtual cinematheque Ultra Dogme, a contributing editor to photogénie, and his writing can be found in MUBI Notebook, aemi, Defector, Sight & Sound, Screen Slate, and Senses of Cinema, among other publications.
A Workshop for All 10 years later, the creation and circulation of the Miners’ Campaign Tapes offers lessons in filmmaking solidarity
By Ruairí McCann
In a 2023 Weekly Worker obituary for Gustav Schlake, co-founder of the radical British film collective Cinema Action, filmmaker, activist, and ex-miner David John Douglass recalls an electrifying moment during the making of the collective’s People of Ireland! (1973).
Joining “a delegation of miners, Young Socialists, Trotskyists, and Troops Out supporters,” they confront MP Edmund Marshall over the army’s violent presence in the North of Ireland. The meeting quickly got heated:
When I looked over my shoulder, Schlacke, who had been wearing a large nightridertype cowboy raincoat, stood up, pulled it aside like Clint Eastwood did with his poncho in A Fistful of Dollars, and started to take out what some at first thought was a big machine gun! In fact, it was a large movie camera, and while he filmed he announced in his heavy German accent, “You are facing the British trade union movement.”
This talismanic moment fuses a cinematic apparatus with the cause and force of the organized working class. Many British radical collectives, including Cinema Action and its peers, sought this relation throughout the late ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, often focusing on the struggles of miners.
The Miners’ Campaign Tapes. All images courtesy of BFI
This solidarity crested with the climatic, existential struggle of the 1984–85 Miners’ Strike. Elected in 1981, the Tory government led by Margaret Thatcher enacted mass privatization and savage public cuts, cementing today’s neoliberal status quo. The acceleration of pit closures and mass redundancies—in addition to breaking the back of the trade union movement to overturn hard-won labor protections and the sense of pride and community that came with them—was seen as an attack on the working class at large, turning workers into an atomized, precarious morass who could be more easily exploited.
The Miners’ Strike stretched to 12 months and ended in the miners’ defeat. But it reverberated across many movements and perspectives. Its torch was taken up by the British working class; queer, Black, and Asian communities; those fighting apartheid in South Africa and genocide in Nicaragua; and miners and industrial workers across the world. Artists played their part, too.
In the case of film and television, one of the most prominent acts of solidarity began in 1984, when the London-based Platform Films organized a meeting of film and video makers from across Britain. The agenda was to develop a project that could contribute to this existential struggle by not only supporting the striking miners and their families financially but also countering mainstream media hostility toward the strike. Tabloids, broadsheets, and television press regularly denigrated pickets and the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) leader Arthur Scargill. Images were frequently used to slander organized labor. One of the most egregious examples was the BBC’s depiction of the Battle of Orgreave, where the police coordinated a brutal attack on a peaceful picket of a coking plant, leading to dozens of injuries and arrests. But when the incident was televised, the BBC reversed the sequence of events, making the miners and their supporters look like the instigators.
The outcome of the Platform Films meeting was the formation of the Miners’ Campaign Tapes Project, with 13 groups (including Platform; Trade Films in Gateshead and Newcastle; Chapter Community Video Workshop in Cardiff; Amber Films in Newcastle; Birmingham Film and Video Workshop; Open Eye Film and Video Workshop in Liverpool; Active Image in Rothertham and Sheffield; Films at Work in London; and the London Media Research Group) committed to producing footage interviewing miners and
their supporters and documenting strike and fundraising activities. The material was then sent for editing down, mainly by Chris Reeves of Platform and Chris Ruston of London Video Arts, into what was originally planned to be 10 shorts and one feature-length work. The final project would consist of six short tapes.
The participating groups were free to film and interview what, who, and where they wished, though they followed the loose structure and springboard of set topics (one theme per each tape) from preliminary research conducted by Platform’s Lin Solomon and Geoff Bell. The resulting tapes are wide-ranging in their panoply of voices and vicissitudes of styles. They are also focused works of political, historical, and media analysis, and stirring calls to stand up and be counted.
The first tape, Not Just Tea and Sandwiches, is concerned with the involvement of miners’ wives and women’s action groups in the struggle. It is one of the more conventionally structured. Like the third tape, Solidarity, about the support network across the wider trade union movement, and the sixth and last tape, Only Doing Their Job? about police militarisation and brutality during the strike, it alternates between one-on-one and group interviews, historical footage, and footage of strike actions in order to create an oral history recorded emphatically in the present tense.
The second, The Coal Board’s Butchery, one of the shortest, is sweeping and dense with information. It’s a propulsive blitz of voices, text, and indignation, given shape and thrust by recurring sonic elements like the impassioned cry of “Which pit is safe?” and the stomp and chant of “Crushed by the Wheels of Industry” by Heaven 17. This tape’s use of music, which includes the working-class synth-pop duo China Crisis, Kirsty and Ewan MacColl (two generations of the intersection between popular song and labor activism), and dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, grant the tapes a sense of popular urgency and vibrancy in contrast to some of the dourer examples of agitprop.
The fourth takes a different tack. Straight Speaking is a moving political cartoon mocking the double-talk of politicians and coal board officials. The most idiosyncratic and experimental of the series, it uses the voice as a didactic but also playful and barbed formal device in its skewering of National Coal Board puppet Ian McGregor. His double-talk is voiced with a mocking, mealy-mouthed American accent, a cross between an old Hollywood gangster and a black-hatted Western villain.
This satirical approach continues with the fifth tape, The Lie Machine, a collaboration with the politically charged variety act Belt and Braces. It tears apart the overwhelmingly hostile mainstream media response with an incarnation of the news show format. Fronted by B&B’s Gavin Richards, interviews with miners and sympathetic, unionized journalists such as Paul Foot are interspersed with deconstructions of sensational tabloid headlines and stories. They are either demolished brick by brick by Richards or sometimes so absurd that a barrage of animal noises and hysterical screaming says it all.
These latter two tapes, with their kinetic and unpredictable bricolage construction, rhyming montage, earnest social and political intent, and a mischievous, surreal sense of humor, place the project in a hinterland between Dziga Vertov’s Kino-Pravda series, the films of Santiago Alvarez, and Monty Python.
The tapes also draw on their power as a vessel and a catalyst for testimonies of expanding working-class and greater political consciousness, from the warm, unwavering determination of the Chesterfield women running the soup kitchen in the first tape to the lengthy group interview with Doncaster miners and supporters in the last. One person recalls how being on the receiving end of a police baton, surveillance, and media demonization made him think about how the same hammer falls on those in Black and Asian communities. Although he is only becoming aware of this systematic violence because of the strike, he now realizes that they have had to deal with such treatment all their lives, whether they actively resist the state or not.
In Steel Bank Film Co-Op’s 1984 film, Notts Women Strike Back—one of many other solidaristic works made in this fraught yet galvanizing period—a miner’s wife describes this inner and social transformation, of going from the duties of a housewife before the strike to social and community work during and after, as “feeling bionic.” It would be a fitting description of the form of the tapes as well, from its propulsive and declarative editing and sound design, use of pop music, and the teletext that burns across the images, offering up conflagrations of facts and figures as well as advice and encouragement to the viewer to get up and join the fight. In this era, the use of video emphasizes documentary filmmaking immediacy that started with the introduction of handheld 16mm camera technology with sync sound in the 1960s. It also allows for a dynamic chopped-and-screwed approach, in which historical footage of the 1926 general strike
galvanizes the otherwise present-tense footage and point of view.
JuST AS THE 1984-85 STr Ik E stems from a long history of industrial unionization and struggle following the more successful 1972–74 miners’ strikes and quasi turning point of the 1926 general strike, the Miners’ Campaign Tapes have their own lineage. Following the late ’60s revolutionary fervor and global movement of filmmaking—illustrated by the Godardian adage, “The problem is not to make political films, but to make films politically”—there was a rise of radical British filmmaking interested in class struggle.
Cinema Action was one of the first groups. With a free-flowing membership around a core group of writers, activists, filmmakers, and
Following the late ’60s revolutionary fervor and global movement of filmmaking— illustrated by the Godardian adage, “The problem is not to make political films, but to make films politically”—there was a rise of radical British filmmaking interested in class struggle.
political exiles, they drifted between different communal spaces in London, sometimes rented, some squatted. On top of offering free and open postproduction facilities and showing their radical films through a mobile cinema that traveled up and down the island, they made “campaign films” that both documented and advocated for various struggles. These included the London Rent Strikes of the late ’60s, the squatters’ movement, the General Electric strike in Merseyside, and a series of films about the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders’ occupation. The films were made in close collaboration with the workers, often edited and then shown while these struggles were still active, and screened in a wide variety of informal and battleground venues, from social clubs to union meetings to right on the spearhead: the picket lines.
Alongside Cinema Action, there were other influential groups. One was the feminist London Women’s Film Group. Another, the Berwick Street Collective, emerged after Richard Mordaunt, Humphry Trevelyan, and Marc Karlin left Cinema Action. They were later joined by James Scott and Mary Kelly. Berwick is noted for a diptych about unionization efforts with London’s women cleaners, Nightcleaners (1975) and ’36 to ’77 (1978), where the heat-of-the-moment style of Cinema Action was exchanged for a more experimental, allusive approach. Amber Films was another essential part of this scene. Initially formed in London in 1968, they quickly relocated north to Newcastle where they continue to remain active (for a remarkable 56 years and counting), making films about working-class life, culture, and traditions of the Northeast.
All these groups were engaged with the life, culture, and struggles of the miners long before 1984. Cinema Action made The Miners’ Film (1975), a triumphant account of the 1972–74 strikes, to which they added a more ominous prologue when it was shown again on Channel 4 in 1984. London Women’s Film Group made Betteshanger Kent (1972) and, with Trevelyan and Kelly of Berwick, Women of the Rhondda (1973). High Row (1973) was Amber Films’ first of dozens of short films, videos, feature-length films, and photographic exhibitions concerned with the miners’ exploitation, woes, and communities. A pivotal moment in both the history of these radical film cooperatives and British cinema and television at large was the 1982 Workshop Declaration. Years of campaigning by all these groups for greater funding, including attempts to join the Association of Cinematograph, Television and Allied Technicians (ACTT) and in 1974, the formation of the Independent Filmmakers’ Association, came to a head in 1982. The founding of new public service Channel 4 opened up negotiations between the channel, the British Film Institute (BFI), ACTT, and the collectives to allow a new stream of noncommercial film and television funding and exhibition. The resulting Workshop Declaration funded these collectives along with other new endeavors in the form of franchised workshops. This funding allowed the collectives to maintain their egalitarian ethos and flexibility, for unlike most union-sanctioned work, members could switch between or occupy multiple roles and would receive equal pay regardless of their presumed seniority or importance. Although Channel 4 reserved the right not to broadcast, each workshop production would retain the copyright of the finished work. So if the channel
did refuse to show it, the workshop could shop elsewhere. Workshop members received union wages, benefits, and protections instead of the precarity that marked independent filmmaking then and today.
In this way, nearly all of the groups involved in making the Miners’ Tapes received funding from the declaration and were expanding their operations and ambitions. The tapes themselves were distributed in a unique fashion. Platform Films and NUM distributed them freely to all NUM members, their families, and support groups, at a reported 6,000 to 8,000 copies. Other copies were sold through NUM’s publication The Miner and supporting publications on a fundraising basis to solidarity groups in Britain, other European countries, the U.S., and Japan. Unlike many other radical forms of media, they even remain available for purchase today—on DVD through BFI.
In more recent decades, the siege on public culture that Thatcher led in the ’80s has continued, workers’ rights have further eroded, and noncommercial avenues for making and disseminating art and film have gotten increasingly scarce. Moving image–making as a wing of grassroots activism today can be found and shown in screenings at picket lines and occupations, through filesharing, in sympathetic cinemas and film clubs, and through impact screenings. The latter can resemble the community and educational exhibition work undertaken by Amber, but more often than not it morphs into just another commercial-minded marketing strategy.
Moving image–making as activism today can primarily be found on social media. These platforms cast a far wider net than can a relatively small run of videotapes. And yet this ease and flexibility comes at a cost. In sharp contrast to a group like Cinema Action, with their own means of production and exhibition, these videos are released on products owned by multibillion-dollar corporations with a significant stake in opposing the very grassroots struggles that the images advocate for. These companies have the capacity to restrict the form and the dissemination of radical image making. As reported by Human Rights Watch, Meta and other social media conglomerates use algorithms to shadow ban certain subjects and users, such as in content related to Gaza and Palestinian solidarity.
It is a level of interference potentially more overwhelming and difficult to counter than the methods wielded by the now quasi-fossilized BBC. The makers of the Miners’ Campaign Tapes
and their contemporaries not only opposed the BBC, but more significantly, attempted to boycott and bypass the broadcaster by building new structures so that the old, with their inflexible hierarchies, would wither away. It is difficult to find an analogue on the same scale today. With corporate wealth behind so many platforms and funds, it can be a struggle to even imagine an alternative, never mind actively seek one out. Nonetheless, for filmmakers concerned with radical and grassroots struggles, or better yet, filmmakers in general, The Miners’ Campaign Tapes can offer important lessons. The key is to not just watch them but also understand the context, ideals, and unique practices underpinning the project and the Workshop Movement as a whole. Both endeavors comprised a collective commitment to reinventing film and television style, as well as its production, transmission, and relationship, to wider communities and struggles. They did so by embracing new technologies and outlets. But most fundamentally, their efforts succeeded through cooperation: banding together to organize workers and images alike. .
No
The Only Path Forward
Other Land ’s collective of Palestinian and Israeli co-directors imagine a reciprocal, shared future in front of and behind the camera
By Mackenzie Lukenbill
In 1996, Basel Adra, one of the four co-directors of the film No Other Land, was born in the Palestinian community of Masafer Yatta, an area of 20 small villages in the mountains of the West Bank. The fields of Masafer Yatta have limitless horizons, unadorned by high-rises. Its hills are dotted with historic stone dwellings which, as Adra says, “appear on maps from the 19th century.” Masafer Yatta can be seen on British maps of the area as recently as 1945.
Mackenzie Lukenbill is an audiovisual archivist and documentary editor. They have contributed writing to BOMB Magazine, and frieze
However, the Israeli state does not recognize that the community exists, and thus it does not appear on Israeli maps, rendering it vacant space. And land that is supposedly vacant is ripe for occupation. In 1980, Israel turned its military sights on Masafer Yatta due to its strategic proximity to the border, as Adra and co-director Yuval Abraham recounted in a piece published in The Nation in 2023. The IDF began attempting to displace the residents of the community to make room for an Israeli tank training facility. These military “firing zones,” as later admitted by the former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, were a tactic to vacate and then reserve land in the West Bank for Israeli settlers.
Adra was born to a family of activists who, as he says, knew the power of a camera as a legal tool. His father began prolifically filming soon after Basel was born, as did many other activists in the community. When matters of violence against Masafer Yatta’s inhabitants by the IDF were taken
to court, the perpetrators would flatly deny carrying out these actions, so it only made sense to have a visual record on hand. This continued process of documenting resulted in a considerable archive of footage before production of No Other Land had even begun, and many examples of such videos appear in the film. Most of the video is meant to capture illegal road closures or IDF soldiers forcing Palestinian occupants off their own private land, though an amusing, digressive, and unconstructive flyby by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair also makes an appearance.
No Other Land begins, in medias res, in 2019, as Israeli construction vehicles appear on the hillsides in the dead of night and prepare to drive out residents by systematically demolishing Masafer Yatta’s infrastructure. Immediately after, we witness the arrival of Abraham, an Israeli investigative journalist, to Adra’s home, who is greeted with terse but polite suspicion from Adra’s family.
Among the other activists and journalists who began to frequent the village as it strived to oppose occupation were Hamdan Ballal, a Palestinian farmer, photographer, and human rights researcher from Susya, a neighboring village in the South Hebron Hills, and Rachel Szor, an Israeli visual journalist. The three began to stay with Adra frequently, week after week, and became well acquainted, at which point Ballal suggested the four collaborate on a longform documentary. It was an easy decision, according to Adra and Abraham, as by that point the four had spent a considerable amount of time together and developed a sense of trust.
As a collective, the four committed to a decisionmaking process that required the agreement of all parties— if any of the four directors objected to a shot or sentiment, it would not be included. By way of example, Abraham was interested in the caste system of the Israeli workers sent into Masafer Yatta to demolish its homes, schools, and infrastructure—those in command were of European descent and those expected to do the physical labor were from Arab countries. Adra countered that this was of no interest to him as a Palestinian—they were all Israeli settlers who had come to destroy his home, after all—and this aspect of the film was dropped.
I tell Abraham and Adra that this level of nonhierarchical co-directing is nearly unheard of in Western nonfiction. They remind me that the making of the film was not born of any particular desire to be documentary filmmakers—none of the four had any experience in doing so—but of a simple necessity to record the encroaching settler forces upon the West Bank. “Often people think about filmmaking in a capitalist way,” Abraham admits, “as if there is one ‘genius’ director making the film, but our experience was entirely communal.”
In 2022, the Israeli high court officially ruled against the protests of Masafer Yatta’s residents. If the IDF is successful in their still-ongoing onslaught it would be the single largest mass expulsion of Palestinians from their homes in the West Bank since 1967. While Israel’s current siege on Gaza displaces hundreds of thousands, West Bank Palestinians are driven from their homes by a variety of legal pretexts. During the day, Israeli wrecking crews demolish the homes of Masafer Yatta’s families. As the sun sets, the families attempt to rebuild the structures with whatever materials they have available. As day breaks, the IDF returns to confiscate the building material. And so on.
FAST-FOrwA r D TO 2024 —I am speaking with Adra and Abraham before the film’s first screening at the New York Film Festival. Hamdan Billal could not obtain a visa to exit the West Bank to attend the festival and was also choosing to stay in Susya, where his family was at that moment facing expulsion at the hands of the IDF. The four had made a mutual agreement that, regardless of whatever prohibitive circumstances were thrown their way, an equal number of Palestinian and Israeli co-directors would speak to the press at all times, and so Rachel Szor
abstained from the interview. Adra and Abraham both appear exhausted: Abraham’s family has faced constant aggravated harassment since the film first premiered. Just days earlier, Adra’s father was kidnapped, bound, and held by Israeli forces. Also days before the interview, the filmmakers signed a still-growing call by NYFF participants for the festival to divest from Bloomberg Philanthropies, a partner in the Bloomberg-Sagol Center for City Leadership, bolstering infrastructure in Israeli settlements in the West Bank that were declared illegal by the International Court of Justice.
In the aftermath of October 7, 2023, the word “timely” plagues conversations and writings about No Other Land, despite the film’s refuting these claims by grounding its narrative in several decades of footage. In Isabella Hammad’s pre-October 7 lecture Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative, the novelist speaks of writer and theorist Edward Said’s interest in the elusive narrative structure of apartheid: “We hope for resolution, or at least we hope that retrospectively what felt like a crisis will turn out to have been a turning point.” No Other Land—despite its expertly defined and engrossing narrative—does not have a resolution, and neither does the moment into which it was birthed. Instead, the film has a stated hope for a resolution. In an early scene, Adra says, “If we are active and we document on the ground, it will force the United States to pressure Israel… to stop the expulsion.”
No Other Land—despite its expertly defined and engrossing narrative—does not have a resolution, and neither does the moment into which it was birthed. Instead, the film has a stated hope for a resolution.
to happen quickly, as if you came to solve everything in 10 days and then go back home.” There’s a brief pause, and then he continues: “This has been going on for decades. Get used to failing, you’re a loser now.”
I am reminded again of Hammad’s lecture, describing well-meaning human rights activists—much like Abraham—visiting Palestine:
They visited Hebron, and saw the soldiers patrolling, guarding settlers; they visited the destroyed town of al-Lydd; they navigated checkpoints; they traveled through Jerusalem and crossed in and out of the West Bank; they listened to statistics of killings and imprisonments and nighttime raids and asked careful questions. They seemed genuinely changed by the experience. I was moved to see them moved. At the same time, I couldn’t help but feel a kind of despairing déjà vu, the scene of recognition having become at this point rather familiar.
I ask the two co-directors if there were ever discussions around how to best utilize the footage during filming, as they were documenting a dangerous and rapidly unfolding situation over the course of five years. Should their work be saved and hoarded for the benefit of the feature film that they are producing, or broadcast out on social media channels in real time? Abraham and Adra point to an especially brutal and tense sequence in the film as a case study for their approach: In November of 2022, the IDF targeted a local elementary school for destruction on a day when class was in session. “Up to this point,” Abraham tells me, “[the IDF] had avoided targeting schools because they were afraid of the way it would harm Israel’s image.” The attack on the school is shown in No Other Land from the perspective of someone standing inside. Soldiers and two bulldozers surround the building. Children scream, and the older students help the younger ones escape through windows. Then, the school is destroyed.
On October 1, 2024, introducing the second screening of the film at NYFF, Abraham announced that the collective would not be staying for the post-screening Q&A, and that their remaining appearances would be canceled due to escalating violence in the region as the IDF advanced on Lebanon. Abraham and Adra had spoken to their families and decided that “it felt wrong to stay here as things were deteriorating and escalating back home.” Abraham reiterated a statement that he had given me a few days earlier, that while the film documented a war-crime-inprogress that had been going on for “a long, long time,” both the film and the existence of their Israeli-Palestinian coalition are pleas “for a different future”— a future of “no occupation” and “mutual security.”
The specter of time—patience and memory—haunts the film. In a scene of Adra and Abraham driving, Abraham frets that the articles he is writing are not getting enough views. “I feel you’re… a little enthusiastic,” Adra says tentatively, to Abraham’s confusion. “You want everything
“When we filmed this happening,” Abraham remembers, “it was clear to us that we would not ‘save’ this for the film. We immediately posted it.” This event is also recounted by the two in their 2023 article for The Nation “But a film is not a snapshot,” Abraham continues. “Now, we constantly see these snapshots of violence. Even if this material was already published online, [in a film,] a scene gets its meaning from the scene before it and the scene after it… You see the development over the years; you know Basel and you know he is the one holding the camera.”
No Other Land switches freely between informative action images and longer, slower, subdued moments, usually capturing intimate conversations that reflect Abraham and Adra’s developing friendship, a friendship of alleged impossibility. These scenes, and the emphasis on character, intimacy, and empathy, are what sets the film apart from other “protest docs.” As documentary editors, we are often warned about the easy production value but staid, numbing narrative effect of scenes of banners, marches,
and violence. Especially in contemporary times, when images of brutality by authoritative forces are so easily and readily captured and traded, they can blur together into a cacophony: Gunshots! Swirling handheld cameras! Voices in unison! The heavy breathing of the cameraperson! These long somber moments of camaraderie show that the collective knows that simply exposing contemporary violence is not enough.
The scenes of conversation, captured at night, are some of Szor’s best camerawork, successfully utilizing what little light is available (typically the construction lamps erected for the eventide rebuilding) and holding on shots for a considerable amount of time. In them, Abraham and Adra smoke heavily, fret about cell phone screen time, worry about Adra’s oft-arrested father, and wonder about the possibility of running away together, across the Mediterranean. Both men are certainly media-savvy—the
film shows montages of them appearing on viral Instagram stories and Democracy Now—but they are both naturalistic and believable subjects, clearly torn between their duties as activists and their protectiveness toward their families.
SuCH A NA k ED NA r r ATI v E A llEgIANCE between an Israeli and a Palestinian media maker is a rare sight in the West. In 2020’s Palestine: A Socialist Introduction, Palestinian writer Sumaya Awad writes that “the NationState Law passed in 2018 strips Palestinians of their right to self-determination and downgrades all aspects of Palestinian identity—from the Arabic language to the right of Palestinians to narrate their own history,” and points to the void left by the barring and deportation of journalists, activists, and human rights groups from the region as tools to silence Palestinians. So few instances of collective, boundaryless storytelling exist. For example, 2011’s Academy Award–nominated documentary Five Broken Cameras, although credited as being collaboratively directed by the Palestinian Emad Burnat—a farmer and activist in the West Bank—and the Israeli filmmaker Guy Davidi, was in actuality made using Burnat’s footage but compiled and edited by Davidi and supported by Israeli
state funding. Burnat was, tellingly, detained at Los Angeles International Airport when he attempted to attend the Oscar ceremony, while Davidi still referred to the film as “Palestinian.” This is a distinction between what Hammad would refer to as “anagnorisis”—the moment an Israeli recognizes that a Palestinian is a human being—and firstperson self-narrativization.
For the No Other Land team, true self-narrativization meant no involvement by the Israeli film industry. The quartet looked elsewhere for fiscal and material support, though, as Abraham and Adra clarified, “most of what we did was volunteer work.” Szor was able to take the footage that the collective had shot and apply for support from the Close Up Initiative, an organization based in Belgium that provides development and mentorship opportunities to filmmakers in the Middle East. One advantage of Close Up, in the collective’s eyes, is that it is entirely independently funded—the four had concretely decided to not accept any funds tied to investments from the Israeli state. Participation in Close Up connected Szor to the Norwegian production company Antipode Films, which opened up postproduction funding for the project. The program also, according to Abraham, gave the filmmakers a feeling of
No Other Land switches freely between informative action images and longer, slower, subdued moments, usually capturing intimate conversations that reflect Abraham and Adra’s developing friendship, a friendship of alleged impossibility. These scenes, and the emphasis on character, intimacy, and empathy, are what sets the film apart from other “protest docs.”
solidarity and companionship as they met and learned beside other documentarians from Iran, Jordan, Yemen, and elsewhere.
While the Israeli co-directors could travel freely during postproduction, Billal and Adra were not allowed to leave the West Bank, which presented a considerable challenge for a documentary prescribed to an ideal of collective decision making. It was decided that the film would be edited in Masafer Yatta. As Adra’s home had been demolished by Israeli forces, work was carried out in the cave beneath his home, as you can see in the film. In addition to the usual delays caused by a collaborative approach to story breaking and scene editing, this “was not always so easy,” Abraham regales dryly. Electricity to the community was consistently being cut. Raids happened frequently during the night. Hard drives had to be hidden away and stashed in bathrooms. Adra was already a known target for his family’s hosting of activists and journalists, something the IDF “hated,” Adra says with emphatic stress. Five cameras and a laptop were confiscated, resulting in a several-months-long legal battle to get them back. “When you’re editing,” Abraham reminded me solemnly, “you’re looking at violence on-screen while it is ongoing outside as well. This results in an added layer of tension. You may see it in the film. We were feeling it.”
No Other Land arrived at the New York Film Festival— at the time of writing, still without American distribution— just under the one-year anniversary of the events of October 7, 2023. Its path has been tumultuous. The filmmakers could not participate in the CPH:DOX screening as Adra could not receive a visa. Before that screening, while accepting the Best Documentary Award at the Berlinale in February 2024, Abraham restated the film’s portrayal of legal systemic inequality between himself and Adra, only to receive a surge of death threats against himself and his family.
“We made this movie imagining a horizon of political change,” Adra says to me, a wave of fatigue crossing his face, “and the movie may be succeeding, the movie may be managing, but things are moving in the opposite direction. The situation on the ground is very bad… More demolitions, more communities fleeing from their homes in the area.” Even writing about the film’s transcendent triumphs in style and narrative has become a temporally uneasy task. No Other Land should not be so simply slotted as timely, but as a timeless example of empathetic collaboration, and the presentation of a radical choice for the future: equity or destruction. .
40 Years of DocumentaryAwards
Schindel is a freelance critic and fulltime copy editor living in Brooklyn. He has previously worked as the associate editor for documentary at Hyperallergic.
The More Things Change
What does the makeup of films awarded at IDA’s Documentary Awards tell us about the history of documentaries?
By Dan Schindel
Though it’s tempting to try to glean the trajectory of notable cinema from the history of a film awards show, the shows ultimately reveal more about the changing tastes of its voting body, as well as broader trends within the industry. This isn’t all that damning of awards shows, though cinephiles and commentators may enjoy grousing about how much awards bodies like the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) have “gotten it wrong” over the years.
But these organizations exist to support their membership, not arbitrate proper taste. The IDA Documentary Awards are no different. Looking back at the list of laureates over the first 40 years of the awards’ existence, one can see the story of how the documentary industry has evolved. In the organization’s early shoestring-budget years, there were only a few categories, with the main Distinguished Documentary Achievement Award being given to five or six of the year’s standout feature docs. The inaugural crop (awarded in 1985 for the films of 1984) presents an interesting juxtaposition with the only major preexisting documentary awards, given out by the Oscars. The Times of Harvey Milk won both the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and one of the IDA Awards. But one of the other IDA winners was 28 Up. Despite the Up series’ stature as one of the preeminent longitudinal nonfiction film projects, the Academy has never acknowledged it. (On the flip side, the Academy nominated Streetwise, while the IDA passed it over.)
Dan
40 Years of Documentary Awards
The contrast is even sharper through the rest of the 1980s. In the IDA Awards’ second year, Shoah was one of the winners, while the Oscars did not even nominate it. In 1988, The Thin Blue Line was among the IDA Awards selections; the Academy outright disqualified the film from consideration because of its use of reenactments. In both these examples, IDA and not the Academy recognized an artistic movement that would accrue influence in the years to come.
Shoah stands out not just because it is now nearly unanimously considered one of the greatest films ever made. Along with Schindler’s List (1993) and director Steven Spielberg’s subsequent founding of the USC Shoah Foundation, it precipitated a surge of oral history projects collecting testimony about the Holocaust. Such efforts in turn resulted in numerous documentaries which themselves won Oscars, ranging from 1995’s One Survivor Remembers to 2000’s Into the Arms of Strangers. That AMPAS lauded these films but not their
Shoah.
Courtesy of Criterion Collection
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forebear is a great example of how awards can course correct and tastes can change.
And despite the Academy’s consternation, The Thin Blue Line ’s reenactments would prove incredibly formative for the art. Rather than sabotage filmmakers’ ability to depict real events, the technique opened new avenues for interrogating conflicting subjectivities. On a more mundane level, reenactment has become part of the regular documentary vocabulary. This has hardly come without its ethical qualms, but hindsight has shown the anxiety as overblown.
Comparing the IDA Awards and Oscars over the years regularly highlights the latter’s frustrating conservatism. As detailed elsewhere in this issue, another salient example comes not long after The Thin Blue Line with Hoop Dreams (1994), probably the most infamous Oscars documentary snub, thanks to how the backlash exposed issues with AMPAS’s nomination process. Meanwhile, it won one of that year’s IDA Awards without issues. Over the years, the vagaries of AMPAS’s qualification and
nomination rules have continued to exclude films that IDA has honored, such as Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004).
One large component of this is the Academy’s strict rule that films must premiere in theaters before showing on television. But television broadcast has historically been a huge part of documentary exhibition, arguably more important than theatrical releases. The increase in documentary theatrical distribution in the 2000s is one possible reason that from that point on, there was an uptick in convergence between the IDA’s winners and documentary awards from other bodies. In an especially befuddling move, after O.J.: Made in America (2016) won Best Documentary Feature (it also won Best Feature from the IDAs), the Academy changed its eligibility rules specifically to prohibit episodic work from being nominated going forward.
Another vital thread of the ’80s and ’90s comes in the form of documenting the gay rights movement, New Queer Cinema, and the AIDS crisis. IDA awarded 1990’s landmark Paris Is Burning, in addition to Living with AIDS (1987,
The Thin Blue Line. Courtesy of Criterion Collection
winner of the Student Documentary Award), Color Adjustment (1991), Absolutely Positive (1991), and Silverlake Life (1993). The Oscars would not entirely neglect this realm, awarding Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt (1993) Best Documentary Feature, but the difference seems illustrative of how the documentary community can find its own talent better than a broader collective of more generalized artists can.
Continuing to look at the first half of the IDA Awards’ lifetime, it is striking in retrospect to realize how the awards did not substantially address what was probably the largest and most important story in the world during this era: the collapse of the Soviet Union and its aftermath. Documentary can capture and respond to societal changes and conditions more quickly than any other kind of cinema. Yet if one were to judge solely by the IDA Awards nominees and winners from the ’80s, ’90s, and early ’00s, you would hardly know that the greatest geopolitical seism since the Second World War had taken place.
The sole exceptions were two Best Feature Awards for films by Latvian director Juris Podnieks. The first, Is It Easy to Be Young? (1987), surveys Soviet youth, identifying many generational fissures that in only a few years’ time would fracture the country. The second, the series Hello, Do You Hear Us? (1990), also known simply as Soviets, captures episodes of civil unrest in places ranging from Armenia to Uzbekistan, events that would lead to the Union’s imminent dissolution. Later on, The Children of Leningradsky (2005), about postSoviet Russia, would win Best Short.
The reason for this blind spot is obvious. Despite the “International” part of the IDA’s name, most voting members were based in the U.S. and overwhelmingly Western. Like many organizations in the U.S., it has had to make conscious and concerted efforts to diversify itself. For many groups, such processes have intensified over the most recent decade amid greater public scrutiny and discourse around representation.
Over the course of the ’90s, IDA added categories for short films, film preservation, works sourcing news footage, limited series, and the Pare Lorentz Award. The awards categories were also reoriented to be more like other industry awards, with a single winner (or two, in case of a tie) from a competitive field of nominees. During the 2000s, the “War on Terror” and America’s role on the world stage became a major focus within documentary. More than any other time in recent memory, U.S. documentarians adopted an adversarial role to the state, bringing to mainstream audiences stories about the corruption of the Bush administration, the mismanagement of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the use of torture within these campaigns, their effects on the populace of West Asia, and more.
The opening salvo came with Fahrenheit 9/11. Michael Moore was historically a very active IDA member and organizer, which may have contributed to IDA taking notice of him long before the Academy did, giving Roger & Me (1990) Best Feature honors. That same year, a protest filed with AMPAS over potential conflicts of interest in the documentary nomination process cited the film’s exclusion as evidence.
Page 6 of the script for the 1991 IDA Awards. Producer and filmmaker Jon Wilkman was the IDA board president and then-publisher of International Documentary.
Perhaps the most tangible inclination one can discern in IDA’s recent selections is toward a kind of first-person storytelling sensibility.
true crime being the most obvious one—but that hasn’t necessarily translated into awards. Making a Murderer (2016) won Best MultiPart Documentary, but the genre has hardly taken over. Given that many IDA members are independent filmmakers, this could be a manifestation of their pushback against the commercialization of such genres.
Fahrenheit 9/11 was followed by further politically attuned IDA Awards nominees and winners like Our Brand Is Crisis (2005), Off to War (2005), Iraq in Fragments (2006), Waltz with Bashir (2008), and The Oath (2009). The IDA Awards were in line with industry peers on this front. On the Oscars side, this trend manifested through nominations or wins for films such as The Fog of War (2003), Iraq in Fragments, My Country, My Country (2006), Taxi to the Dark Side (2007), and No End in Sight (2007). Film Independent Spirit Awards created a category for documentary features in 2000, and Film Independent members similarly rewarded The Fog of War and The Road to Guantanamo (2006).
This was also the era when filmmaking tools became more accessible and cheaper than ever before, and when the internet first became a viable platform for sharing video content. Netflix began offering streaming film in 2007, ventured into distributing films itself in the early 2010s, and secured its first IDA Feature Award with The Square in 2013. There’s not much to add about the significant proliferation of doc releases since the mid-2010s. Filtering the upended paradigm through the lens of the IDA Awards and similar awards, what stands out most is the way it has diffused trends. Trends still exist—
Perhaps the most tangible inclination one can discern in IDA’s recent selections is toward a kind of first-person storytelling sensibility. Recent Best Feature winners like Citizenfour (2014), The Look of Silence (2015), Dina (2017), Minding the Gap (2018), For Sama (2019), Crip Camp (2020), Flee (2021), and All That Breathes (2022) are either made directly by or in close collaboration with their respective protagonists. One may read into this a connection with the wider cultural preference for intimate sharing, which can also be seen in everything from influencers on social media to the rise of personal essays in journalism. As we become hyperconscious of how we mediate our relationship with the world through our communicative tools, many filmmakers reflect this awareness in their art. This movement also dovetails well with the increased interest from filmmakers and audiences in the ethics of subjects; such a setup is a sharply visible way of demonstrating how one interacts with their characters.
Over the late 2000s and 2010s, the IDA Awards added further categories for best editing and cinematography—though these would not be given regularly until the 2010s. In a related vein, it would take until 2011 for an award to be added for musical scores, 2012 for there to be a writing award, and 2019 for a category for directors to be introduced. This speaks to how long documentaries were considered almost entirely synonymous with their directors. The diversification of artistic recognition is undoubtedly a positive.
While post facto scolding generally isn’t a productive exercise, it is nonetheless noteworthy which great ex post facto documentarians the IDA Awards failed to honor during their lifetimes. To name a few: Barbara Hammer, Chris Marker, Chantal Akerman, and Harun Farocki. Jonathan Demme was
Flyer for a Film Classics screening of Pare Lorentz films at the DGA.
40 Years of Documentary Awards
given the Pare Lorentz Award as a producer on Mandela (1997), and Agnes Varda received the 2002 Pioneer Award, but neither ever won competitively. Les Blank only ever received a Career Achievement Award. A select list of still-alive filmmakers with long and influential careers who have not yet won is similarly stark: Ross McElwee, Kazuo Hara, John Akomfrah, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Jafar Panahi, Wang Bing, Kazuhiro Sôda, Thom Anderson, Adam Curtis, Jia Zhangke, Kevin Jerome Everson, and Wim Wenders. Like Varda, Alanis Obomsawin has a Pioneer Award, and Frederick Wiseman and Marcel Ophuls have Career Achievement Awards, but none have won competitively.
There is, of course, the factor that films have to be submitted for consideration, and many of these filmmakers work outside the normative system. (Or, in the case of those who mainly direct fiction, more investment in that world on their part.) Their absence from IDA Awards history may speak less to the organization’s taste than to this gulf between them and the doc industry. And again, this sin hardly belongs to IDA alone. None of the filmmakers listed above won a competitive Oscar for their nonfiction work either; indeed, most have never even been nominated. And nearly all these directors are still working, so the chance remains for their peers to elevate them.
On the flip side, there are the auteurs whom IDA has rewarded in their time. Filmmakers given IDA Career Achievement Awards whom the Oscars never even nominated have included Pare Lorentz, Jean Rouch, Albert Maysles (who also won IDA’s Best Feature Award for 1991’s Soldiers of Music), William Greaves, and Les Blank. As mentioned before, IDA awarded Errol Morris nearly two decades before the Oscars did. Werner Herzog, who has been nominated for an Oscar only once, has three IDA Awards. Patricio Guzmán, Steve James, Joshua Oppenheimer, and Chris Hegedus and D. A. Pennebaker may not have any competitive Oscars (though James was nominated in the Best Editing category for Hoop Dreams), but they all have IDA Best Feature Awards. Through such acclaim, IDA has helped facilitate their careers along with directors whom the Academy has similarly nominated and/or awarded, like Laura Poitras, Alex Gibney,
Cinema broadly is in an extremely uncertain place, besieged by competition from other media and continually decimated by financialization and corporate margin shaving.
Morgan Neville, Jehane Noujaim, Lucy Walker, and Michael Moore.
Then there are the more recently emergent directors who have made exciting pushes to elevate the artistry of nonfiction cinema. The IDA Awards so far lack a category dedicated to more experimental and nontraditional film, in the manner of the Spirit Awards’ Truer Than Fiction category or the Cinema Eye Heterodox honor. As the IDA Awards have broadened to include more specific elements of production, a logical next step would be finding a way to reward films that break the familiar artistic molds.
Possible laureates for such an award could include Sophy Romvari, Sky Hopinka, Radu Jude, Leho Galibert-Laîné, Kevin B. Lee, Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Véréna Paravel, Jon Bois, Penny Lane, Charlie Shackleton, Bill and Turner Ross, John Wilson, and Nathan Fielder. There have been some exceptions; Robert Greene was nominated for Procession (2020).
40 Years of Documentary Awards
One clear issue at hand is the growing influence of novel distribution methods. While the industry was able to shift to accommodate the rise of streaming services, it still doesn’t quite know what to do with social media platforms, even as they become an increasingly large part of the global communications landscape. Creators like Lee, Romvari, Wilson, Shackleton, and Galibert-Laîné all cut their teeth releasing their work on sites like Vimeo and YouTube, but they didn’t capture nearly as much critical and industry attention until they penetrated the festival circuit. Those who still primarily work on these platforms, such as Bois, remain underdiscussed in considerations of documentary’s future (though the Seattle Film Critics Society gave Bois and co-producer Alex Rubenstein their Best Documentary Award in
2020 for their series The History of the Seattle Mariners).
Cinema broadly is in an extremely uncertain place, besieged by competition from other media and continually decimated by financialization and corporate margin shaving. All these issues are compounded within the world of documentary, particularly since in a time of penny-pinching executives, nonfiction is seen as a cheap source of massproduced entertainment. In an age of “content” prioritized over art, organizations like IDA can counteract such dismissive instincts. In the grand scheme, awards are but one small part of this, but their record still tells the future what we consider important and what we want from our documentaries. .
Brochure advertising screenings of the 1988 IDA Awards nominees and winners.
Noel Ransome is a Toronto-based culture writer and critic with bylines in VICE, Shondaland, Vanity Fair, Complex, and more. In addition to interviewing cultural icons like LeVar Burton, Barry Jenkins, and Danai Gurira, he served as the national entertainment reporter for the Canadian Press, Canada’s equivalent of the Associated Press, regularly covering major events such as TIFF, the Grammys, and the Emmys.
Appreciate in Value
From film festivals to the Oscars, one writer traces changes in how topicality, commercial success, and critical acclaim lead to documentary awards
By Noel Ransome
The war-torn streets of a besieged Ukrainian city. An exiled Russian opposition leader. A cultural festival celebrating Black pride in the 1960s. A curriculum of history lessons is not the thing that connects these descriptions. Rather, they’re chapters in the unfolding legacy of documentary storytelling—a form that has grown increasingly central to understanding our shared reality. Films like 20 Days in Mariupol (2023), Summer of Soul (2021), and Navalny (2022) represent only recent entries in a decades-long journey, punctuated by high-profile accolades at global festivals and culminating, sometimes controversially, at the Academy Awards.
Yet as the stakes for documentary films rise in line with global crises and pressing social concerns, the road to recognition for these works is neither straightforward nor easily predicted. They pass through a patchwork of critical benchmarks, often starting at festivals like Sundance, Cannes, Venice, IDFA, and sometimes all the way to the Academy Awards, among others—each step shaping public perception and relevance. The question remains, however: What makes a documentary truly worthy? In a field where artistry intersects so directly with activism, prestige can blur with politics and honoring the “best” documentary is often as subjective as it is contentious. So, do awards serve as a final validation—or merely a lens through which we evaluate a documentary’s impact? As recognition builds for documentaries across this vast circuit, the answer becomes both more layered and more essential.
40 Years of Documentary Awards
It’s been a good stretch of time since Steve James’s Hoop Dreams (1994), Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line (1988), Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s Brother’s Keeper (1992), and Jennie Livingston’s Paris Is Burning (1990) were tussling for the most basic scraps of recognition from the Academy despite their significant cultural statuses. Starting with their film festival awards at Sundance and Berlinale, these films still carry a lasting cultural legacy—a phenomenon as old as film festivals themselves.
When Hoop Dreams was shut out of the Best Documentary Feature Oscar nominations, the late critic Roger Ebert famously called it “one of the most shocking omissions in Academy history,” arguing that the snub exposed the Academy’s disregard for documentaries as serious art. To Ebert, Hoop Dreams was “one
of the great moviegoing experiences of my lifetime,” radical in every respect: a threedimensional look into the lives of two young Black men, Arthur Agee and William Gates from Chicago’s inner city, pursuing a basketball dream as told in 1994, yet somehow omitted from the grace of prestige.
Although it did earn a nomination for Best Film Editing—an unusual nod for a documentary, the Academy’s exclusion of Hoop Dreams from the Documentary category was reportedly influenced by a flawed voting process. The documentary branch at the time used a point-based voting system that often disadvantaged films with niche appeal, possibly leading to the snub despite its critical success. Outrage over the oversight bellowed through the critic world, laying bare a longstanding
Hoop Dreams Courtesy of Criterion Collection
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frustration with the Academy’s documentary committee, long criticized for sidelining long-lasting, culturally significant films in favor of insider-backed choices. In a 1995 Entertainment Weekly interview, Los Angeles Times critic Kenneth Turan memorably blasted the committee’s “cronyism,” calling it a “Cosa Nostra” that prioritized connections over merit. Tensions peaked when Freida Lee Mock, a former committee chair, saw Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision win the Oscar, while Hoop Dreams and Terry Zwigoff’s Crumb (1994), both critical darlings, were shut out. For critics, it was a stark reminder of the Academy’s disconnect from some of the documentary community’s more inclusive, culturally attuned sensibilities.
“Being nominated is major, regardless of the outcome. It brings you into the spotlight during awards season. Once the shortlist is revealed, people start to notice,” says James over a phone call from Los Angeles. “That attention benefits both the filmmaker and the film.”
James recalls the loud campaign propelled by Kartemquin Films, the production company behind Hoop Dreams, as local press gathered in hopes of documenting their big moment in 1994. After Hoop Dreams was completely sidestepped, James went home, disappointed but half expecting the result.
“I didn’t say a whole lot. I wasn’t shocked because I knew about The Thin Blue Line and other films that had been snubbed. So, it wasn’t surprising to me at all that we didn’t get it,” added James, referencing the legacy of overlooked films stretching back to the ’80s.
This history of exclusion spurred alternative platforms to emerge in the 1980s, determined to honor documentaries that other awardgivers overlooked. For instance, IDA (which publishes Documentary magazine) launched its own Documentary Awards in 1984, positioning itself as a counterbalance to established awards like the Oscars and the Peabodys, which often favored socially urgent narratives emblematic of the Peabody’s emphasis on journalistic storytelling and public interest. Though there were overlaps between the Peabodys and IDA Awards in cases like Who Killed Vincent Chin? (1989) and Eyes on the Prize (1987)—IDA aimed to recognize films that larger institutions often
ignored, emphasizing artistic merit and cultural impact. Notably, The Thin Blue Line (1988) received an IDA award during the same period it was excluded from the Oscars.
IDA wasn’t alone in pushing for greater recognition of documentaries. By 1991, the Directors Guild of America (DGA) had joined in, adding a documentary category and extending its focus beyond traditional fiction—a move that nudged other guilds to consider documentaries’ place in their ranks. Around the same time, a new wave of prominent festivals dedicated to the genre, including IDFA (founded 1988), Yamagata (1989), and Hot Docs (1993) helped cement the role of international festivals as essential platforms for innovative documentary work. At the very first Cannes in 1946, the International Federation of Film Critics’ Association’s
Invitation to the 1988 IDA Awards Luncheon.
40 Years of Documentary Awards
FIPRESCI Prize was awarded to Farrebique:
The Four Seasons, a poetic glimpse into rural French life that blurred observation and artistry, igniting debate about what a documentary could be. Of course, a similarly loud conversation on dramatic reenactments happened in 1988 with The Thin Blue Line.
Heather Haynes, director of festival programming at Hot Docs, reflects that their festival juries prioritize work that engages and provokes. Still, she notes that a persistent challenge faces larger festivals in aiding each film to truly reach its audience. “It’s partly our responsibility,” she says, “to help these stories find their way to viewers, expanding the reach and resonance of each film.”
In the more recent past, other awards dedicated solely to documentary works add more depth to the types of filmmakers receiving recognition. The Cinema Eye Honors, first held
in 2008, celebrates standout documentaries and highlights the often overlooked contributions of cinematographers, editors, and other behindthe-scenes talents. Likewise, the just-announced Henry Awards for Public Interest Documentary, set to debut in 2025, aim to refocus attention on documentaries made to support “a thriving society focused on the public good”—often political and social-issue documentaries. The latter could be a response to the streamingdriven focus on popular true crime and celebrity biography documentaries. Together, these awards are dialing up the spotlight on the full spectrum of documentary work—giving even more credit to the craftspeople, diverse storytelling angles, and social messages that mainstream awards tend to miss.
Haynes also notes the broader cultural shifts in the types of documentaries gaining attention in more recent years:
Winners of the 2004 IDA Documentary Awards surrounding William Greaves (second row, fourth from right), who was awarded a Career Achievement honor.
Kartemquin’s Steve James (back row, third from right), Gordon Quinn (back row, second from right), and Gita Saedi Kiely (back row, far right) won Best Limited Series for The New Americans.
Documentary has the power to take us deeper into issues around social justice, personal identity stories, and global challenges. This shift is reflected not only in audience demand but also in who is telling the stories. In Canada for example, initiatives from organizations like the Indigenous Screen Office, Black Screen Office, and Disability Screen Office have been transformative... amplifying voices that have historically been wronged.
About that history of right and wrong: Documentaries that find themselves in an awarddriven footing today have the previously ignored to thank. A swell of award evolutions over decades find roots in the very inception of the concept, which occurred in World War II when Churchill’s Island (1941) became the first film to win Best Documentary (Short Subject) in 1942 at the Academy Awards.
Back then, documentaries were viewed as mostly educational or propaganda tools, focused on war efforts or nationalistic messages. As the landscape of nonfiction storytelling broadened beyond nationalistic promotion, so too did the range of awards seeking to honor these films, from the Peabodys to the increasingly global
embrace of documentary filmmaking at BAFTA and Cannes, which introduced a dedicated documentary competition, L’Œil d’or, in 2015.
Thus, awards for documentaries have proliferated to where we are now, even as the question of what deserves to be celebrated becomes more nuanced.
“Who decides what’s relevant? Who decides what’s quality?” says Radheyan Simonpillai, Toronto Film Critic for the CTV Television Network in Canada and a member of the Critics Choice Association (which first awarded the Critics’ Choice Awards in 1995). “I think so often that some of the most powerful documentaries have been ignored because the distributor class, the media class, and voter class didn’t think a film was relevant enough to what they cared about.”
In other words, as high-visibility shows like the Oscars increasingly reward, and in turn, place value on films that tackle timely, contemporary topics, the public begins to equate prestige with a documentary’s immediacy and social importance. This can create a hierarchy of subjects deemed most worthy of recognition, subtly shaping the public’s understanding of documentary excellence. An Oscar win for Navalny, for example, is a win for the
In other words, as high-visibility shows like the Oscars increasingly reward, and in turn, place value on films that tackle timely, contemporary topics, the public begins to equate prestige with a documentary’s immediacy and social importance.
40 Years of Documentary Awards
amplification of Alexei Navalny’s anti-corruption fight—a timely tribute, made poignant by his death a year later. Meanwhile, the following win for 20 Days in Mariupol becomes a win for urgency, and the much reported, scarcely seen realities of the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.
Every year, of course, there’s room for optimism that the best documentary will win, and that regardless of urgency it will be recognized. And sometimes, as with Summer of Soul in 2022—barring, of course, that the moment isn’t overshadowed by something as dramatic as a slap—it can happen. The film, a deeply reflective exploration rooted in the past, transcended the allure of topicality to revive a forgotten piece of Black cultural history, making it more than just a concert documentary but also a reflection on art, memory, and identity.
And yet, much like the general public, the larger Academy can still hesitate to see nonfiction filmmaking as true art, instead treating a good deal of it as elevated, timely
journalism. Despite the efforts of festivals and upstarts like Cinema Eye Honors, larger award shows like the Oscars remain the most well-funded, mainstream lens through which documentaries are viewed, often favoring streamer-backed, socially urgent titles. This is why some past winners can seem more like historical footnotes rather than lasting works of creative expression.
In the conversation around awards and documentaries, words like deserving and relevancy can take on an almost scripted clarity, placing less obvious narratives—films exploring more reflective or complex ideas—at the risk of being the chosen overlooked greats, as their impacts may not align as readily with immediate cultural concerns.
In the 1970s, it wasn’t surprising to see Bob Maurice’s Woodstock win an Oscar in 1971, just two years after the music festival, capturing a still vibrant cultural moment. Nor when that same year, Peter Davis’s The Selling of
2009 Oscar Best Documentary–nominated directors with IDA President Eddie Schmidt (far left) and new Executive Director Michael Lumpkin (second from right). They were photographed at IDA’s Oscar Nominee Reception, which was formerly held on an annual basis.
40 Years of Documentary Awards
the Pentagon earned a Peabody for its exposé on military propaganda during rising antiwar sentiment. By 1975, Davis’s Hearts and Minds would win a BAFTA for Best Documentary, aligning with ongoing debates over the Vietnam War. As covered elsewhere in this issue, in the late 1980s, the Oscars recognized the era’s growing focus on LGBTQ+ rights and struggles with an award for Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt (1989).
This tendency to award in-the-moment documentaries bleeds into the 2000s, with Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine winning best documentary awards across several stages for its urgent take on gun violence post the 1999 Columbine massacre, or similarly, An Inconvenient Truth (2006) winning for its focus on Al Gore’s climate change campaign, turning environmental awareness into a national conversation just a year after Hurricane Katrina. A great number of these winners come off like time-capsule indications of who we were at these junctures in time, or rather, who the award powers-that-be felt we were, and what they presumed the audience was thinking.
In contrast, there are also documentaries from the same 2K years, such as Daughter from Danang (2002) and Jesus Camp (2006),
which together presented a complex, culturally specific set of stories. The first focuses on the emotional and cultural dislocation a Vietnamese American woman experiences in reconnecting with her birth family, and the latter examines the stranglehold of evangelical indoctrination on children, which has become far more relevant today. Several past wins on mainstream stages reinforce a selective view of cultural importance that risks sidelining awards for films exploring less-publicized or -popular histories, which also include the struggles of specific Black communities and other complex immigrant experiences.
According to Simonpillai, as a Critics Choice voting member, the selection process isn’t purely about the subject matter; it can often hinge on the allure and marketing behind a project. “They’re prioritizing the movies that are presented to them most compellingly—maybe there’s a fancy Q&A with a big name attached or a cocktail event with some Hollywood star. They come for the glitz, and then, oh yeah, they watch the film,” he explains. Big distributors essentially seize on films that are “relevant and easy to sell,” putting substantial money behind campaigns to ensure visibility.
Attendees arriving for the 2012 IDA Documentary Awards ceremony, which was held at the DGA.
Several past wins on mainstream stages reinforce a selective view of cultural importance that risks sidelining awards for films exploring lesspublicized or -popular histories, which also include the struggles of specific Black communities and other complex immigrant experiences.
To put it simply, the necessity of award recognition and the progress made in terms of demographic representation over the years is undeniable and needed. However, it may never fully compensate for the fact that awards, being subject to human judgment, are inherently vulnerable to bias and interpretation, particularly within the realm of nonfiction content.
“Urgency and timeliness will always play a role,” adds Simonpillai. “I’ve always felt that award voters tend to vote with their hearts, you know? It’s not necessarily a concerted effort to push a certain agenda or stay relevant. They vote for what resonates with them emotionally, and sometimes it’s often going to align with what feels personally relevant. And that, unfortunately, will always be hard to avoid.” .
The reception after the 2008 IDA Documentary Awards ceremony, in the DGA lobby.
Photos by M. Madison
TIFF 2024: Unleash the Niches
On perceptible changes in the documentary lineup of North America’s largest film festival in light of an announced market launch
By Winne Wang
Before every screening at TIFF, a trailer from this year’s presenting sponsor teased that the festival awakens the inner film critics of Toronto residents. “It perfectly encapsulated the western-horror-docuscience-fiction-genre,” a school crossing guard declares, raised stop sign in hand. Seconds later, a sports broadcaster offhandedly remarks to her coworker that a film could be classified as “more of a docu-fiction hybrid.”
Among these observations, too, were comments from restaurant patrons and construction workers about confusing eyelines, the pleasure of enduring a 14-hour-long film, and the works of Catherine Breillat. The commercial, from a telecommunications giant, of all corporations, seemed to register the trends and figures beloved by arthouse connoisseurs.
We might glean, then, from the repeated mentions of hybrid films that the merging of documentary and narrative fiction traditions is currently enjoying a moment in the spotlight. But despite the attention paid to this particular genre, TIFF Docs, which aims to showcase “the best nonfiction cinema from around the world,” hybrid films were surprisingly absent among its 22 selections. Year after year, the festival section devoted to documentaries tends to be populated by glossy, formally conventional, commercial fare—occasionally punctuated by works from prolific documentarians and festival award winners. Nonfiction works marked by innovation and ambition are pushed to the periphery, a consistent gesture that betrays what the festival regards as “best” in the arena of nonfiction cinema. Here and elsewhere, I couldn’t help but feel the subtle repositioning of the festival in anticipation of the impending launch of TIFF’s official market in 2026. Intended as a North American counterpart to Marche du
Winnie Wang is a writer and programmer based in Toronto.
Left: Ernest Cole: Lost and Found.
Center and left: Lázaro at Night. All images courtesy of TIFF
Above: Grand Tour.
Film at Cannes and the European Film Market at Berlinale, these expansion plans impressed upon me the festival’s intention to prioritize sales, revenue, financing deals, and business activity—perhaps at the expense of creative freedom, experimentation, and innovation. I could already see the signs: films often bore the descriptor of “content” or “IP”; one conference speaker appealed to financial logic to address diversity and inclusion, noting that Hollywood forfeits billions of dollars annually due to unaddressed racial inequities; media releases readily identified sales titles in programming announcements. While none of these actions individually justify cause for alarm, I’m wary of what this shift might indicate about next year’s curatorial vision, budget allocation, and the industry at large.
To give credit where it’s due, TIFF Docs demonstrates a commitment to bringing urgent, timely films informed by pressing current events to Toronto audiences. Organized by Palestinian filmmaker Rashid Masharawi, From Ground Zero assembles a collection of 22 shorts from artists in Gaza that testify to the conditions of the ongoing genocide through varied forms and genres. No Other Land, a collaboration between Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, Hamdan Ballal, and Rachel Szor, and its chronicle of Adra’s enduring fight against the brutal expulsion of West Bank villagers by the Israeli military, are addressed in this issue’s cover feature. In Ernest Cole: Lost and Found, Raoul Peck explores the life of the late South African photographer and activist
whose 1976 book House of Bondage, which exposed the violence of apartheid to the world, sent him into exile—a stirring reminder of the importance of bearing witness, documenting, and attesting through images.
Still, invitations to seek hidden, artistically driven gems, to interrogate the collapsing of boundaries between fiction and nonfiction remained open across other programs such as Wavelengths and Centrepiece.
In the playful, enigmatic Lázaro at Night, Nicolás Pereda examines the creative, professional, and romantic tensions that arise when three friends contend for the same role in a film while ensnared in a love triangle. Played by actors of the same names, Lázaro, Luisa, and Francisco navigate strange, often absurd predicaments in varied configurations that reveal their idiosyncrasies, artistic ambitions, and eternal desires to one another. The film doesn’t flaunt its hybrid qualities in any traditional sense, but it would be imprecise to overlook the autobiographical details woven into the characters or the themes concerning performance and naturalism carried out by members of the Mexican theatre collective Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol. Miguel Gomes’s Grand Tour, a black-and-white 20th-century expedition, leans heavily on the fictitious conceit of a British diplomat traversing across colonial Asia to evade his fiancée. But the feverish travelogue filmed on a soundstage collides, at times, with verité footage of present-day landscapes from Myanmar, China, and Vietnam.
The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire.
Bridging modes of the essay and the biopic, The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire is a meditative, dreamlike film that considers the legacy of the Martinican writer and activist by means of a character readying to portray the eponymous figure. Between performing on set and reciting lines from the essay collection Le Grand Camouflage, we gather evidence of the actor’s other, newer role as a mother, a helpful layer for imagining how caregiving duties figured into Césaire’s productive life as an artist. Though the framing device is an invention of filmmaker and visual artist Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, this strategy closely resembles the real-life feeling of discovering a person through their written works, and of realizing their unknowability despite our best attempts.
In her latest effort to excavate the histories of her artistically gifted ancestors, filmmaker Sofia Bohdanowicz stages a séance that takes the shape of Measures for a Funeral to resurrect Canadian violin prodigy Kathleen Parlow, who mentored her grandfather. Longtime collaborator Deragh Campbell reprises her role as Audrey Benac, a recurring figure who uncovers family histories across Bohdanowicz’s filmography. Here, Audrey is incarnated as a Ph.D. student intent on learning more about the musician after finding a lost concerto dedicated to Parlow in university archives. In the film, Benac’s research on Opus 28 sends her to Toronto, London, and Oslo, locations that Bohdanowicz herself visited after the discovery of the composition by librarians at the University of Toronto. Bohdanowicz sensitively draws out the ability of sound to haunt, lure, reverberate through time, and serve as a vessel for memory, mapping out these ideas onto a detective story that generously holds personal biography and fiction.
But “hybrid” doesn’t quite capture the spirit of these films, despite the term’s aim to contain varying degrees of reality, operating as a catch-all for anything that defies neat classification. It’s often deployed in reference to documentaries with fictional sequences, reenactments, and dreamscapes, but the qualifier is less commonly wielded for films organized by the logic of narrative fiction while incorporating nonactors and unstaged scenarios. We could perhaps find potential in “docufiction,” recalling a tradition found at the origins of documentary, which feels more descriptive, malleable, and ambidextrous. Or, to borrow
language from the literary sphere, “creative nonfiction,” which remains capacious and summons John Grierson’s definition of documentary as the “creative treatment of actuality.”
As I contemplated how best to telegraph the blurring of fiction and nonfiction, I began to grow suspicious of the motivations behind pinning down these elusive, shape-shifting films with shorthand. In practice, these terms offer legibility to festival programmers sifting through submissions and drafting curatorial notes, to commissioners and broadcasters receiving pitches, and to distributors designing targeted marketing campaigns. Of its use to filmmakers and audiences, I’m not entirely convinced that an economy of words accomplishes the task of conveying the slippery nature of reality and myth in storytelling with efficiency or accuracy. The truth in Pereda’s beguiling tale vastly differs from the truth in Bohdanowicz’s dramatization of familial history, despite their similar approaches to actor-character boundaries. This shorthand language, while convenient at times on grant applications or poster taglines, primarily serves investors and decision makers who principally seek to flatten and streamline as a replacement for understanding and transmitting a film’s complexities.
In addition to films that troubled the confines of the documentary genre, audiences who closely surveyed festival offerings also located formally daring works that firmly resided within the bounds of nonfiction. You might’ve found Collective Monologue, a modern bestiary that locates its subjects in zoos and sanctuaries
Top left: Measures for a Funeral.
Below: Collective Monologue.
across Buenos Aires. With critical attention to social and spatial relationships, Jessica Sarah Rinland observes the exquisite creatures inhabiting these spaces, training her camera on their interactions with humans, architectural features, and each other. Intimate close-up shots disorient and mesmerize—tortoises seem to crawl at a glacial pace, a pink flurry of movement reveals itself as a flamboyance of flamingos—deconstructing any notions of hierarchy between animals and zookeepers where scale is concerned. A tender interspecies portrait, the film recalls the rigor of Frederick Wiseman’s institutional studies while affording a uniquely tactile, sensorial experience on 16mm that engages sight, sound, touch, and smell.
After the separate world premieres of Youth (Hard Times) and Youth (Homecoming) at Locarno and Venice, TIFF secured both final entries to Wang Bing’s trilogy following young migrant workers in the garment industry in Zhili between 2014 and 2019. Whereas the first film, Youth (Spring), attends to the personal trials and tribulations of individuals, the second and third broaden the scope of reference to examine their relationships with the local economy and their distant homelands. Upon completing nearly four hours of witnessing textile laborers ranging from their late teens to their mid-20s navigate workplace tensions, bureaucracy, wage theft, and exploitation in Hard Times, we’re granted relief from these punishing conditions with a sojourn to the province of Anhui for New Year rituals and wedding ceremonies in Homecoming. These are the families, friends, and sweeping rural landscapes traded for long hours, great distances, and the prospect of earning pennies per garment in dimly lit workshops. Originally intended as a single 10-hour film, Wang neatly cleaves the epic into distinct chapters that expand in breadth, presenting an exhaustive patchwork of the Chinese garment trade.
Despite operating strictly in the observational mode, the pair of films curiously occupied slots in Wavelengths
and were tagged under Luminaries, a subsection presenting “the latest from the world’s most influential art-house filmmakers.” What considerations or forces seem to be directing this contrived taxonomy of festival programming, where commercial appeal and auteur status appear to compete? Certainly, the duration of the works might be an argument for their inclusion in a section generally attended for its challenging, experimental fare, though an ambitious runtime didn’t seem to be an issue last year for Alex Gibney’s 219-minute In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon, which landed in Special Presentations, or Wiseman’s 240-minute Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros, in TIFF Docs.
The highlight of the festival was exergue – on documenta 14, Dimitris Athiridis’s 14-hour, sprawling documentary on the preparation leading up to the 2017 edition of Documenta, a prestigious international
Top: Youth (Hard Times).
Left: Youth (Homecoming).
exhibition for contemporary art held in Kassel and, for the first time, Athens. For three consecutive days, I returned to a 45-seat theatre, where I was transfixed by the 14 episodes depicting studio visits, curatorial meetings, and budgetary negotiations led by that edition’s artistic director Adam Szymczyk. Each installment grants a glimpse of the contradictions and inconsistencies between internal values and funding sources that exist at institutions of this magnitude, holding a mirror to the discourse that has circled TIFF’s sponsorship ties to the Royal Bank of Canada—an investor in pipeline projects across Indigenous land and weapons companies arming Israel—since 2023. An endlessly watchable character study, exergue offers unprecedented access to the labor required to mount the quinquennial showcase, unveiling the tedious administrative and economic demands required to support artistic expression.
I should admit that I slipped out of the screening on the second day for a brief excursion to see Dahomey, this year’s winner of the Golden Bear at Berlinale. In the follow-up to her 2019 feature debut Atlantique, Mati Diop reinvests in the spectral realm to trace the repatriation of 26 royal treasures from France to the present-day Republic of Benin. Should the restoration of 26 items out of an estimated 7,000 be celebrated? Or troubled, given the timeline that can be extrapolated from this overdue homecoming? How should royal treasures be displayed, and to whom? Pressed between several hours of exergue on either side, Dahomey lends subjectivity to that which is exhibited, a captivating counterpart to a portrait of those holding the power to exhibit.
Despite TIFF’s market-oriented shift, my search for nonfiction films that held high ambitions and ventured beyond the strict conventions of documentary proved successful. And I suspect I’m not alone. I encountered the same friendly faces at several screenings, friends waiting in a rush line for a program of avant-garde films, fans swarming Wang Bing for photos and autographs after a Q&A, and a room of indefatigable attendees who consumed in three sittings what Dimitris Athiridis envisioned for a streaming platform. In a media landscape fueled by mass appeal, this festival experience served as an affirming reminder of the communities of filmmakers and audiences who carve out their own spaces, embracing the strange and esoteric, and resisting mainstream pressures to fold and follow. .
exergue – on documenta 14.
exergue – on documenta 14.
NYFF 2024: Independent Means
Protest on and off the screen, and hidden gems at the premier festival-of-festivals in the U.S.
By Jonathan Mackris
The New York Film Festival (NYFF), now in its 62nd edition, is one of the biggest film festivals in the United States and, along with TIFF, the most important secondrun festival in North America. In practice, this means it holds particular influence over which films carry on to the U.S. from the major European premiere festivals in Berlin, Cannes, Locarno, and Venice. Sometimes this means highlighting certain cinephile favorites, such as Hong Sangsoo or David Cronenberg, or prizewinning films like Mati Diop’s Dahomey and Pedro Almodovar’s The Room Next Door, winners of the top prize at Berlin and Venice, respectively.
Other times, NYFF selections can set the tone for how certain films are discovered and discussed in the States. Eephus, Carson Lund’s directorial debut, had its premiere in the smaller sidebar competition Director’s Fortnight at Cannes earlier this year, but was elevated here in the festival’s Main Slate in its largest venue, Alice Tully Hall, alongside gala screenings and awards bait. In a few cases, the festival launches world premieres. This was the case, for instance, for the first part of Julia Loktev’s documentary My Undesirable Friends, about the crackdown on Russian dissidents in the months leading up to the invasion of Ukraine (discussed elsewhere in Documentary online). Such was also the case for the latest film by the maverick underground filmmaker Jem Cohen, Little, Big, and Far, premiering in the Currents section, the home for smaller, more experimental work within the festival.
This year’s edition found itself in the intersection of a number of conflicts surrounding the ongoing Israeli bombing of Gaza. In the days leading up to the festival, a “counter film festival” was announced, programming canonical protest films such as the classic Newsreel documentary The Case Against Lincoln Center (1968) and shorts by Palestinian filmmakers like Basma al-Sharif and Larissa Sansour. An open letter signed by many participants in NYFF and published on the eve of the festival’s opening night similarly called on the festival to end its relationship with Bloomberg Philanthropies and other sponsors abetting the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by Israel. Even without these protests, the festival itself could not avoid disruptions by politics. On the day of the press screening for No Other Land, the father of Palestinian co-director Basel Adra
Jonathan Mackris is a writer based in California.
was kidnapped by IDF soldiers in the West Bank. As Israel expanded its attacks in the West Bank and Lebanon, both Adra and Israeli co-director Yuval Abraham were forced to cancel their planned talk and return home to protect their families. These events serve as a reminder, despite the protestation of some donors, that no one can truly shut politics out of the festival.
The Seed of the Sacred Fig
As it happens, protest was itself the subject of many of films in the festival—we may add to the aforementioned titles Brett Story and Stephen Maing’s Union, Petra Costa’s Apocalypse in the Tropics, Neo Sora’s Happyend, and Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig. At first glance, the latter film may look out of place mentioned here in Documentary. Though he has directed documentaries, Rasoulof is best known for his social dramas. His first feature to gain attention in the West, The White Meadows (2009), extended the poetic lyricism of the heyday of Iranian cinema of the 1990s to the end of the 2000s. Since then, his films have increasingly taken on the character of allegorical blunt force objects, lauded as pieces of social criticism but too vacuous to hold interest for long, even as they rack up accolades. (Rasoulof’s previous film, There Is No Evil, received the top prize at the 2020 Berlinale.)
At its core, The Seed of the Sacred Fig shares with Rasoulof’s recent work the basic metaphorical veneer: a father, promoted to a top position within the court system of Tehran, finds himself increasingly at odds with his wife and two daughters. This tension escalates after his stateissued handgun goes missing—a loss that comes with a penalty of three year’s jail time for him if discovered. The father begins to employ against his family the same variety of interrogation techniques used by the state, bringing the film’s moral parable to a close. I have nothing to say about the film’s implausible second half, which, like many of Rasoulof’s recent films, fails to land dramatically. Of greater interest is the detour in the film’s first hour, during which the three women debate the real-life protests following the death of Masha Amini in police custody in September 2022, which unfold concurrently with the film’s main narrative. What has drawn the most attention in this portion of the film is the interpolation of actual footage of the protests into the fictional sequences directed by Rasoulof. Perhaps predictably, this aspect of the film has proved to be for many critics the most commendable part, and for this reason it has largely escaped serious scrutiny.
What’s useful about this section of the film is that it dramatizes the role the circulation of these images of state violence has come to play in modern life, drawing parallels not only to the protests in Iran but equally to any number
The Seed of the Sacred Fig. Courtesy of NEON
What has drawn the most attention in this portion of the film is the interpolation of actual footage of the protests into the fictional sequences directed by Rasoulof. Perhaps predictably, this aspect of the film has proved to be for many critics the most commendable part, and for this reason largely escaped serious scrutiny.
of comparable acts of state violence against civilians (e.g., the Russian invasion of Mariupol, the George Floyd protests in the United States, the Israeli invasion of Gaza). In this sense, it stumbles upon a subject even more relevant than the film’s main narrative through-line. For the same reason, this is equally the part deserving of the closest examination of how the film classifies various kinds of images. For his part, Rasoulof refuses to simulate any kind of protest action within the fictional portion of the film, limiting himself to a scene in which one of the daughter’s friends, an outspoken activist, treats her wounds at the family’s apartment. Otherwise, the fictional portions of this sequence contain the reactions of the characters: the daughters’ enthusiasm for the protests on the one hand, watching them unfold on social media, and their mother’s rejection of them on the other. The clear division of these two parts—further accented by the vertical aspect ratio of the protest footage distinguishing it from its fictional counterparts—neatly organizes the truth claims of the respective images. The bare fact of showing the protest footage suffices to ground it as true.
We have good reason to pause here to reflect on this reasoning. For one, it bears mentioning that, while the footage actually circulates online, Sacred Fig treats it as though it speaks for itself. This fact alone should be enough to make us wary, for reasons not the least of which include the fact that being worked into the narrative changes things about it. It’s never presented to audiences as a bare recording of reality but is always accompanied by some sort of caption clarifying—accurately or not—what the viewer is watching. When Sacred Fig incorporates it without this captioning, how does that denial change its meaning? In
the same way, we may ask what happens to this footage when it is transformed from a self-standing representation to an insert—that is, what happens when it is worked upon by montage. Lack of space prohibits me from pursing further the consequences of this double-denial within the film, but it’s clear the issue is a pertinent one. For now, it suffices to say that what is in question is whether it’s valid for the film to use this footage to anchor the veracity of its arguments, and whether the evasion of the question of montage as the work of the film affects its outcome as a political work.
Wang Bing Completes the Youth Trilogy
Now that the remaining two parts of Wang Bing’s Youth trilogy have been released—Hard Times and Homecoming, which had their world premiere in August at the Locarno and Venice Film Festivals, respectively— we’re in a better position to judge the latest project by the Chinese documentarian. All three parts are assembled from material shot largely in Zhili between 2014 and 2019. Zhili is a town around 150 kilometers from Shanghai that is home to some 20,000 small-scale textile factories no larger than an apartment building. In interviews before the first film’s release last year, Wang clarified that the three parts are intended to be seen as a whole, and it’s true that the shape of the project becomes clearer in retrospect.
Most of the critics I’ve talked to agree with my view that the first part of this trilogy, Spring, which premiered at last year’s Cannes, was an interesting film though not necessarily a major work on its own. The majority of its three-and-a-half-hour runtime is spent developing a feel for
the inside of the factories, where young workers—often in their teens and twenties and often traveling from villages in the faraway provinces Anhui and Yunnan—work 12 hours a day in cramped, noisy workshops stitching cheap clothes. An inverse approach is taken to the third film, Homecoming, filmed mostly in the workers’ hometowns on break between seasons at the factory, showing characters with their families, with some getting married and others starting families of their own.
The middle part of the trilogy, Hard Times, stands out as the most impressive. The longest and most narratively dense of the three, Hard Times is structured as a panoramic view of life in the factories. In one sequence, we follow a young man who is planning his trip home, only to discover he’s lost the notebook with his signed pay stubs needed to cash out, forcing him to leave the factory without pay. In another, the film cuts back and forth between the workers and owners of a factory after the boss’s son beats one of the employees nearly to death. Later on, we follow a group of workers who discover their boss has skipped town with their earnings, forcing them to sell the remaining equipment to make up for the loss in pay. Despite its size, Hard Times may be better understood as a short story collection, each individual entry capturing a separate piece of the desperation of the factories that hang together as a collective tapestry of modern industry. Wang moves quickly between these vignettes, aided by editors Xu Bingyuan and Dominique Auvray (the latter of whom previously collaborated with Wang on Bitter Money [2016] and earlier on films by Pedro Costa, Philippe Garrel, and Marguerite Duras).
What distinguishes Wang’s documentaries is his approach, which depends on two factors. With just a couple of exceptions, his films are shot only with and are thus reliant on available light. Second is his dependence on the film’s subjects themselves and the limits they impose on the filmmaking. With only one cameraperson filming in each setting, complete coverage of a given scene is impossible—Wang is required at each moment to make choices about when and who to follow at a given time. In an interview with Cahiers du cinéma, Wang explained that three camerapeople were filming in different factories concurrently at any given time in order to cover as much ground as possible. Most revealing of this is an early moment in Hard Times, where a young woman working in one of the sweatshop factories gets into an argument with her uncle downstairs. As the argument grows more intense, the uncle, suddenly aware of the camera further down the street, begins to turn his face out of view. As the French critic Alain Bergala has astutely pointed out, the distinctive shot in Wang’s films is one tracking its subjects from behind. Here again, a decision is made: some filmmakers lead, others follow.
Two From Currents
Much of the attention at NYFF tends to focus on films playing in the Main Slate or in Spotlight, the two sections typically featuring the most decorated films or the biggest name directors. I tend to be a bit more interested in the films in Currents, the section dedicated to independent and experimental works as well as the home for the festival’s shorts programs. For its part, the section has its own roster of heavy hitters, with new films by Heinz Emigholz, Matías Piñeiro, and Nicolás Pereda alongside new talents, including the debut feature of the Portuguese filmmaker Marta Mateus.
One of the delights of a section like this is its unpredictability. If the Main Slate tends to favor a certain kind of filmmaking—those usually benefiting from large promotional teams behind them—there’s a certain joy to the aspects of Currents that invites more surprise. Two of the most surprising for me were Pierre Creton and Vincent Barré’s 7 Walks With Mark Brown and Jem Cohen’s Little, Big, and Far. This pairing has more in common than may first appear. Both Creton and Cohen are of the same generation (Creton was born in 1966, Cohen in ’62), both films are inversions of the traditional nature documentary (the former a play on landscape documentary, the latter on outer space), and both continually pose questions about the adequacy of different kinds of representations for dealing with nature.
What distinguishes Wang’s documentaries is his approach, which depends on two factors. With just a couple of exceptions, his films are shot only with and are thus reliant on available light.
Second is his dependence on the film’s subjects themselves and the limits they impose on the filmmaking.
Pierre Creton has directed films since the early 2000s, but his international breakout came last year with the fiction film A Prince. Co-directed by his longtime writing collaborator Vincent Barré, 7 Walks returns him to his origins in experimental documentary, constructed along a two-part framework. In the first half, the pair record tours through seven gardens and parks led by the botanist Mark Brown, who throughout instructs one of the men to record specific plants with a smaller film camera. Accompanying the group are other artists: one who tries to sketch the plants into their notebook, another who jots down Brown’s encyclopedic monologues about each one. In the second part, Creton and Barré assemble the footage of the plants recorded on each trip, asking Brown to recount each one as they play out in montage. In contrast to the first part, Brown can sometimes no longer recall what it was about each plant that drew his attention in the first place, replying to their questions very simply, “Je ne rappelle plus.”
7 Walks with Mark Brown. Courtesy of Film at Lincoln Center
7 Walks with Mark Brown. Courtesy of Film at Lincoln Center
The structure of 7 Walks allows the audience to compare diverse kinds of representations—drawings, text, photographs, memory—for their strengths and weaknesses in capturing the essence of the moment. A similar effect is created in Cohen’s Little, Big, and Far, the director’s first feature in almost a decade. Cohen is probably best known for his 2012 feature Museum Hours, and the promotional materials for this new film have tried to draw on this recognition by justly comparing the two. However, his career as one of New York’s great underground filmmakers—with films such as This Is a History of New York (1987) and Chains (2004)—deserves just as much acknowledgment. Loosely structured as an epistolary film between a young English graduate student and an aged Austrian astronomer, the film compares a different set of representations: dioramas, graphs, maps. More than any other film I saw at NYFF, there’s an improvisational looseness to Little, Big, and Far, bringing subjects as varied as Alice Coltrane’s jazz records and Karl Kraus’s political writing into its orbit. The advantage to a career like Cohen’s is that it is totally, uncompromisingly singular. Most often, the label “independent film” tends to be a misnomer: The films may be deprived of the means of big-scale Hollywood productions, but they share its creative mentality and moral judgment regardless. Cohen’s films are independent in mind, and in the last instance that makes all the difference. .
Little, Big, and Far.
Courtesy of Film at Lincoln Center
Capsule reviews of newly released notable nonfiction
Screen Time
Intercepted
While recent Ukrainian documentarians predominantly focus on Ukrainian resistance, Oksana Karpovych’s Intercepted takes the opposite approach. Her film is based on intercepted conversations of Russian soldiers who call home to share stories of war crimes and their doubts about the rationale for Russia’s invasion. The visuals consist exclusively of static long shots of Ukraine, with its tranquil nature and alienated civilians, on which this cacophony of voices has left a deep wound.
Beneath the seemingly simple idea of the film lies a complex structure, wherein each element has its own internal narrative. The film exposes the core repetitive patterns of Russian propaganda and separately depicts the geographical trajectory of Ukraine’s deoccupied territories. The acousmatic approach stimulates the imagination and enlivens the desolate footage with a haunting presence. Karpovych places the victim and the aggressor in a shared audiovisual dimension in which the latter’s theses are challenged by the former. Intercepted manages to cinematically convey a strong cause-and-effect relationship that produces a genuinely surreal effect—as absurd as the rhetoric of the aggressor.
—Sonya Vseliubska
The Last Republican
After the 2024 U.S. presidential election, the entertaining banter between selfdescribed “far-left comedy-director” Steve Pink (Hot Tub Time Machine) and the titular Adam Kinzinger may work for those in want of a palliative. Pink’s The Last Republican covers Kinzinger’s last term, when he chose to join the January 6 Committee investigating the riots on Capitol Hill. One long sit-down interview anchors the film, delving into Kinzinger’s early political influences and some maneuvering of the January 6 hearings. An on-screen countdown marks the time Kinzinger has left in office, gesturing at the former congressman’s desire to take a political stand.
Pink’s doc is the first feature of the new Media Courthouse Documentary Collective (the Hands on a Hardbody team of Kevin Morris, Robb Bindler, Chapin Wilson, plus Pink, Jason Kohn [Nothing Lasts Forever], and former Netflix exec Sarafina DiFelice). In the hands of this team, The Last Republican is stylish, deploying handy split screens of news coverage between talkinghead explanations from Kinzinger and other staff. But its protagonist is just as bewildered at the perceived political changes he faced in 2022 as many of us face in 2024, and Pink’s direction whizzes his protagonist along, replicating the flaws of our media ecosystem by being more interested in the mechanics of media narratives than issuing political analysis or illuminating a path forward.
—Abby Sun
Top: Intercepted. Image credit: Christopher Nunn Courtesy of Grasshopper Films
The Last Republican. Image credit: Joshua Salzman Courtesy of MCDC
Capsule reviews of newly released notable nonfiction
Night Is Not Eternal
Nanfu Wang has built a career genuinely connecting with characters whose life circumstances are often far from her own. Striking examples include Hooligan Sparrow (2016), starring sex worker activist Ye Haiyan, and I Am Another You (2017), which saw the director traveling with a young drifter named Dylan. With Night Is Not Eternal, Wang draws a different conclusion. She spends seven years following Rosa Maria Paya, the daughter of Nobel Peace Prize–nominated activist Oswaldo Paya, as she continues her late father’s fight for freedom in Cuba. As Rosa develops into a celebrity force, eventually gaining a place on the international stage, Wang sees only the overwhelming parallels between her own experiences in China and as an exile abroad. That is, until a POV-upending moment on a political platform forces the filmmaker to bravely reassess both her own assumptions and the passionate idealist she thought she knew so well.
—Lauren Wissot
Nocturnes
Near the India/Bhutan border, ecologist Mansi and her Indigenous Bugun collaborator Bicki monitor Himalayan moth populations. They set up backlit, gridmarked sheets to attract the creatures and count, measure, and observe them. Anirban Dutta and Anupama Srinivasan’s Nocturnes studies the moths, these humans, and their wider ecosystem. The film constructs a rhythm of alternation between two modes. At night it adopts a micro view, getting pleasingly detailed close-ups of the moths flittering about. During the day it pulls back, framing its two leads against expansive mountain vistas. The moths seem big, and the humans seem small.
The cinematography also inverts the expected color palettes. The backlighting that draws the moths under the camera makes the blues and blacks of the darkness feel hot, while the frequently overcast skies and muted grading make the light seem cool. The film’s most impressive technical feat, though, is its sound work. It’s a veritable symphony of susurrations and pointed, extended silences. The silences are so pleasurable, in fact, that the film’s more dialogue-laden sequences often feel unnecessary. Such scenes make explicit the concerns about what the moth studies reveal about climate change, but the subtext present was already more than sufficient. Nocturnes excels at watching and listening but falters when talking.
—Dan Schindel
Top: Night Is Not Eternal. Courtesy of HBO
Nocturnes.
Courtesy of Grasshopper Films
Acknowledgments
We extend our heartfelt gratitude to all IDA members, donors, and sponsors. Your unwavering support is crucial to our ongoing success, and together we can continue to break new ground in the world of nonfiction media. The following report lists members, donors, sponsors, and supporters since September 2023.
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Organizational Members
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Corporate Members
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National Geographic Documentary Films
Individuals
$5,000 +
Fonda Berosini
Grace Lee
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$2,500 - $4,999
María Agui Carter
Melony Lewis
$1,000 - $2,499
Hallee Adelman
Chris Albert
Dee Brown
Lisa Kirk Colburn
Jessie V. Ewing
Scott Glosserman
Peter Nicks
Elias Savada
Dominic Asmall Willsdon
Jamie Wolf
We’re the global IDA community united by our passion and love for all things documentary.
We are a growing international community with members in 80 countries. There’s a place for you no matter where you are.
Become a member today and enjoy:*
• Complimentary subscription to the Documentary Magazine
• 80+ free film screenings annually in Los Angeles and virtually worldwide
• Monthly member gatherings + member-only workshops and talks
• Access to the IDA Membership Directory
• Voting rights at the IDA Documentary Awards
• Fundraising through the IDA Fiscal Sponsorship Program
• Discounts for the Getting Real conference, IDA Documentary Awards, and more!
documentary.org/membership
We are nonfiction thinkers, filmmakers, journalists, academics, industry professionals, and field practitioners—whether you’re a seasoned pro or just starting, there’s room for you at IDA. *Benefits may differ for different membership levels.
IDA celebrates the 2024 IDA Open Call Grantees
Enterprise Documentary Fund
For Venida, For Kalief
Director-Cinematographer: Sisa Bueno
Producer: Sisa Bueno, David Felix Sutcliffe
United States
Captions Will Be Needed
Director: Natalia Almada
Producers: Josh Penn, Esther Robinson Mexico, United States
Podium
Writer/Director: Rachel Leah Jones
Producers: Philippe Bellaiche, Rachel Leah Jones Canada, Switzerland, France, Israel
The First Plantation
Director: Jason Fitzroy Jeffers
Producer: Darcy McKinnon
United States, Barbados
The Last Nomads
Directors: Biljana Tutorov, Petar Glomazic
Producer: Biljana Tutorov Serbia, Montenegro, France, Slovenia
Untitled
Marjolaine Grappe Film
Director: Marjolaine Grappe
Producer: Amanda Pike, Marjolaine Grappe
United States
Untitled Middle East Project
Directors: Janay Boulos, Abd al-Kader Habak
Producers: Sonja Henrici, Janay Boulos, Abd al-Kader Habak
Lebanon, United Kingdom, Syria
Pare Lorentz Documentary Fund
Matininó
Director: Gabriela Díaz Arp
Producers: Karla Claudio Betancourt, Wendy Muñiz, Guillermo Zouain Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic
Mid Wif
Director: Mia Harvey
Producers: Natasha Dack-Ojumu, Mia Harvey United Kingdom
