OSCARS FYC '23

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.

Submitted for consideration in the Academy Awards Feature Doc category, Master of Light tells the incredible and vital story of George Anthony Morton who, having spent eleven years in federal prison for dealing drugs, now paints like a latter-day Rembrandt after honing his artistic skills while incarcerated. Director Rosa Ruth Boesten and producers Ilja Roomans and Anousha Nzume discuss their feature doc.

In her new film, which won The Golden Lion in Venice and which is now in contention for an Oscar, Laura Poitras (a previous Academy Award winner with Citizenfour) shows how campaigning artist Nan Goldin, together with advocacy group PAIN, takes on the notorious Sacklers, a very wealthy family that got even richer through sales of the highly addictive opioid OxyContin.

Five feature docs and five short docs have advanced to the final round of Oscar voting. The winners will be announced March 12 during 95th Academy Awards ceremony at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood. This year, 144 documentary features and 98 shorts were eligible for consideration.

Matthew Heineman talks to BDE about his film that starts at the end, as the Taliban has seized back control of Afghanistan, as American forces are pulling out, after trillions of dollars have been spent and thousands of lives lost - and it’s all ending in utter chaos. “We all know how it ends, but we are going to give you a different view of these final moments,” explains Heineman.

Filmmaker Shaunak Sen discusses how his Oscar-nominated doc All That Breathes took flight. “There is no film, in a way, without Rise Films. They’re phenomenally important,” the director says of the production company whose other credits include Icarus and The Invisible War. “Teddy [Leifer] and I became like a pitching machine. We pitched ad infinitum…”

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.

It’s a year now since US director Alex Pritz’s Oscar contender The Territory premiered to rave reviews at Sundance. The film, which was picked up by National Geographic, explores the conflict between the indigenous Uru-eu-wau-wau people in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest and the settlers who want to cut down the trees and seize their land. Pritz explains more to BDE.

Danish producer Monica Hellström already has two Oscar noms to her credit, both for the 2021 film Flee, in the Best Doc and Best Animated Feature categories last year. Now, she is back in the running for awards, for Simon Lereng Wilmont’s A House Made of Splinters. What’s more, after more than a decade working with production company Final Cut For Real, she set up her own outfit, Ström Films, last summer.

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.