Awards FYC 2024

Precocious 24-year-old New York-based Italian filmmaker Giorgio Ghiotto has already won a ‘gold’ Student Academy Award for his graduation movie, Wings Of Dust, Now, he is in contention for an Oscar for Best Documentary Short. The film profiles Vidal Merma, a Peruvian Indigenous journalist and activist fighting against the pollution caused by the industrial exploitation of his ancestral lands. Ghiotto talks to BDE.

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.”

Sam Green’s interactive 32 Sounds works across many frequencies. The Oscar-shortlisted film is part-science, part-history and part-personal reflection on all things sonic. It can also serve to channel the trauma we experienced during Covid, Green tells BDE. “I think that we all are still carrying around a lot of feelings from that, feelings that we probably don't really express much or have words for. And I think in some way, I'm not sure if this is true, but I have wondered this in some ways, the film is an opportunity for some of that to come out.”

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.

Nisha Pahuja’s Oscar-shortlisted feature doc started out as a study of toxic masculinity in India before transforming into the story of a father’s search for justice following the horrific rape of his 13-year old daughter. “I didn’t actually realise until the edit. It was two years into the editing process that we pivoted, switched gears and decided that we were just going to focus on this story,” Pahuja tells BDE.

While undertaking research following a near-fatal fall, forest ecologist and biology professor Nalini Nadkarni begins to expose, little by little, the tangled roots of her troubled and disturbing childhood. Director Andrew Nadkarni, Nalini’s nephew, talks to Business Doc Europe about his Oscar-shortlisted short film.

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.

Frederick Wiseman can’t remember what he ate the first time he went to Le Bois Sans Feuilles restaurant in Ouche, France, but knows it was good. In fact it was so good he asked top chef and future successor César Troisgros if he could document life in the extablishment. “It’s very rare that I eat in a 3-star restaurant, and I can’t turn off my documentary filmmaker eye. I hadn’t planned to do it but I just blurted it [the idea] out and I was happy when he said why not,” Wiseman tells BDE.

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.

It’s a magical place, a warehouse in LA which many have likened to Gepetto’s workshop in Pinocchio. Broken musical instruments are brought here in their dozens and craftspeople put them back together again. In their latest film together, Ben Proudfoot and Kris Bowers go inside the workshop which ensures that school kids without money can continue to play their violins, trumpets and pianos. The filmmakers talk to BDE.