Awards FYC 2024

"I wish to be able to exchange this [award] for Russia never attacking Ukraine, never occupying our cities," 20 Days in Mariupol director Mstyslav Chernov said during his emotional acceptance speech. Ben Proudfoot picks up second Short Doc Oscar in three years for The Last Repair Shop, co-directed with Kris Bowers.

Directors Kris Bowers and Ben Proudfoot discuss their Oscar nominated short film The Last Repair Shop with two-time Academy Award winning film composer Hans Zimmer. Produced by Breakwater Studios, the film concerns a Los Angeles downtown warehouse where a handful of devoted craftspeople keep over 80,000 student instruments in good repair.

Chilean Maite Alberdi talks to BDE about her Oscar-nominated feature doc The Eternal Memory, her second nomination in four years after The Mole Agent in 2021. The Eternal Memory offers a gentle, probing examination of a marriage, that between journalist and author Augusto Góngora, and Paulina Urrutia (an actress and former Minister of Culture). They’re a couple devoted to one another, and have been together for more than two decades. But Augusto has Alzheimer’s, and his memory is no longer reliable.

In Island In Between, nominated for an Oscar in the Short Doc category, S. Leo Chiang reflects on his relationship with Taiwan, China and the US from the islands of Kinmen, just a few miles from mainland China. “Kinmen connects Taiwan to China but also keeps them apart. Maybe that’s why I’m drawn to this place. I want to make sense of it. Growing up, this channel of water was the edge of our universe, separating good from evil,” the director underlines.

Five feature docs and five short docs have advanced to the final round of Oscar voting. The winners will be announced March 10 during the 96th Academy Awards ceremony in Hollywood. Within the feature doc category, nominee originating countries are diverse: Bobi Wine: The People’s President (UK/Uganda/US), The Eternal Memory (Chile), Four Daughters (France/Tunisia/Germany/Saudi Arabia/Cyprus), To Kill a Tiger (Canada), 20 Days in Mariupol (Ukraine).

We are told at the beginning of the Oscar-nominated short doc The Barber of Little Rock that the racial wealth gap in the US is not a million-dollar problem, nor a billion-dollar problem, rather a trillion-dollar problem. But at least one person, Arlo Washington, both a barber and a banker, is looking to right this financial wrong, and vows to “advance equity, create opportunities and build the community.” Filmmakers John Hoffman and Christine Turner talk to BDE about their Oscar-shortlisted film.

After Swiss director Morgane Frund agreed to edit footage that an amateur filmmaker had been shooting of bears in the wilderness, she discovered that the tapes had more than imagery of the natural world on them. They also contained footage he had secretly shot of young women on the streets. Frund’s subsequent short doc, short-listed for the 96th Academy Awards, became a work on voyeurism, the male gaze and the objectification of women. The filmmaker talks to BDE.

Filmmaker Jean-Marie Teno discusses the Oscar short-listed film with US directors Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson. The synopsis for the Sundance Grand Jury U.S. Doc Prize winner reads how it “travels through time and space to reveal the enduring influence of Nikki Giovanni, one of America’s greatest living artists and social commentators.”

George Michaels is one of the unsung heroes of US political life, a Democratic member of the New York State Assembly who, in 1970, changed his mind and supported a bill extending abortion rights, in the process bringing his political career to an end. His story is told in the Oscar shortlisted short film Deciding Vote. “We’re not used in this era to people who change their minds. It’s not something that politicians do,” says co-director Jeremy Workman.

When US filmmaker Madeleine Gavin was first approached to make a film on North Korea, she was reluctant to become involved. The producers had secured the rights to The Girl With Seven Names, the memoir by Hyeonseo Lee, one of the most high profile North Korean defectors. As Gavin tells BDE, she finally agreed to take on the assignment - but she was determined to broaden its scope and tell a more contemporary story.