OSCARS FYC '23

Due to hit Netflix on 11 November and exec-produced by Steven Soderbergh and David Fincher, Elvis Mitchell’s whistle stop tour of Black US cinema is now being tipped as a potential Oscar contender. Originally conceived as a book, no publisher was interested. But Oscar-winning director Steve McQueen saw matters differently. “I don’t think that is a book,” McQueen said. “I think it is a documentary.”

Holding Moses, shortlisted for the Short Documentary Oscar, is a deeply personal project for filmmaker Rivkah Beth Medow, she explains to Business Doc Europe. It follows Medow’s partner, dancer Randi Rader, as she learns to live with her young son’s severe disability. Medow directed the film alongside Jen Rainin with whom she founded Frankly Speaking Films.

A House Made Of Splinters, the heartbreaking Oscar-nominated documentary directed by Simon Lereng Wilmont and produced by Monica Hellström, has left an inspiring legacy. The film led directly to the formation of the Ukrainian charitable foundation, Voices Of Children, which now has a team of 60 psychologists who help kids across the country deal with the trauma of war, and is supported by the likes of Madonna and Oprah Winfrey.

The story of the Janes collective, a secret network which operated in Chicago in the late 1960s and early 1970s to provide abortions, is told in a hard-hitting new HBO-backed documentary from Tia Lessin and Emma Pildes. It is a film that seems all the more topical given the US Supreme Court’s recent overturning of Roe vs Wade. “We were hoping the film would speak to a past history but it turns out it speaks to a very present grim reality,” says Lessin.

When film director Jay Rosenblatt’s daughter Ella turned two, be began a ritual that would last until she was 18. Every time she had a birthday, he would sit her down on the same couch and ask her pretty much the same questions. He would film her answers. Now, his 29-minute documentary How Do You Measure A Year, made from all the footage shot on Ella’s birthdays, has made it onto the short list for the Oscars.

Daniel Roher’s feature documentary, about the investigation into the poisoning of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, headed off strong competition from Shaunak Sen’s All That Breathes, Laura Poitras’ All The Beauty and the Bloodshed, Sara Dosa’s Fire of Love and Brett Morgen’s Bowie doc, Moonage Daydream.

Hidden Letters may ostensibly be about Nushu, an old secret Chinese language used by women to communicate among themselves in periods of patriarchal oppression when they were prevented from reading and writing. Its real subject, however, is the situation of women in China today, co-director Violet Du Feng tells BDE. “It’s a film about them…about the challenges they are facing.”

Justice is at last being served for Martha Mitchell, the woman whose Cassandra-like role in exposing the Watergate scandal has been ignored for too long. Filmmakers Anne Alvergue and Debra McClutchy talk to BDE about their new short doc, shortlisted for the Oscars, that tells Mitchell’s story. “She was definitely a hidden figure. She has essentially been erased from Watergate history,” suggests Alvergue.

A change in Californian law allowed Eli Timoner to end his own life. The founder of Air Florida was in his early 90s, paralysed and in pain. He wanted to die on his own terms. His daughter, documentary maker Ondi Timoner, recorded his final 15 days in her new documentary, Last Flight Home (released in the US by MTV Documentary Films). “I thought I have to film him, I have to interview him…I have to record his final moments on earth,” she tells BDE.

When Daniel Roher was introduced to Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny in Kyiv in 2020, the Canadian docmaker knew his career was set to change forever. “Once I was confronted with Navalny and this extraordinary story, I saw my destiny unfold. I knew exactly what this was going to be. I understood that this was what I had been looking for my whole life, telling a story of this magnitude and importance,” he tells Business Doc Europe.