Awards FYC 2024

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.

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.

Fifteen films will now advance in each of the Documentary Feature Film and Documentary Short Film categories of the 97th Academy Awards®. One hundred and sixty-nine films were eligible for the Doc Feature category, while 104 films qualified in the Short Doc category. Nominations voting begins on January 8, 2025, and concludes on Sunday, January 12. Final nominations for the 97th Academy Awards will be announced on Friday, January 17.

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).

32 Sounds is an immersive documentary and profound sensory experience that explores the elemental phenomenon of sound. The film is a meditation on the power of sound to bend time, cross borders, and profoundly shape our perception of the world around us. Academy Award-nominated director Sam Green discusses his film with fellow filmmaker (and Oscar winner) Steven Bognar.

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.

Justine Martin’s first film Oasis (a short documentary Oscar contender) concerns twin brothers who realise they are destined to live more separate lives as one’s developmental issues mean he will not be offered the same opportunities as the other. Martin’s approach to the subject is lyrical. “It was one of my goals to make it [the documentary] feel as if it was a fiction,” she tells BDE. “I really wanted the film to feel like a wave of emotions rather than of facts.”

Fifteen films make the cut in each of the Documentary Film and Documentary Short Film categories. Mstyslav Chernov’s 20 Days In Mariupol (Ukraine) and Kaouther Ben Hania’s Four Daughters (Tunisia) are additionally shortlisted in the International Feature Film category. Nominations for the 96th Academy Awards will be announced on January 23 2024.

In his Oscar short-listed feature doc, Luke Lorentzen follows outspoken hospital chaplain Mati and supervisor David as the former engages in an emotionally challenging and physically exhausting year-long residency at Manhattan’s Mount Sinai during Covid. “It was Mati pushing back that I think made the film a really profound and deeper dive into the work, but it required a reorientation of a certain way of working that I had applied in other projects,” the filmmaker tells BDE.

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.