OSCARS FYC '23

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.

US filmmakers Cynthia Wade and Sharon Liese go inside the country’s largest manufacturer of American flags to tell the story of some of the company’s employees, the majority of whom are refugees and immigrants. The resulting award-winning short launched on National Geographic December 8 and hits Disney Plus on Dec 21. What’s more, Wade and Liese tell BDE, the story has been optioned for Broadway musical treatment…

Simon Lereng Wilmont’s heart-rending (and Sundance-winning) film charts the experiences of kids temporarily removed from their parents in an orphanage in eastern Ukraine. During a recent screening in Kyiv the ombudswoman for children’s rights was in attendance. “She saw it and came over afterwards. She was in tears and asked if she was allowed to show it at a closed screening to [President] Zelenskyy,” the director tells BDE.

Margaret Brown’s new documentary looks at the legacy of suffering and injustice left by The Clotilda, the last ship to carry African captives to the US – even though legislation prohibiting the importation of slaves had been written and passed over 50 years before. Brown and co-producer, co-writer and folklorist, Dr. Kern Jackson spoke to Business Doc Europe about their film during the recent IDFA.

When a former US Marine plots a terrorist attack on a small-town American mosque, he undergoes a radical change when he comes face-to-face with the Muslins he had set out to kill. He is literally disarmed by their kindness. Stranger At The Gate is the latest in a long series of short films Joshua Seftel has made about Muslims in the US, post-9/11. “I felt maybe I could do something with my filmmaking to counter this hatred that Muslims were facing,” he tells BDE.

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.

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.”

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.

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.”

The Armenian genocide has been explored in several films in recent years: in Atom Egoyan’s Ararat (2002), Fatih Akin’s The Cut (2014) and Terry George’s The Promise (2016). Now, one of the most traumatic and bitterly contested episodes in early 20th Century history is revisited in Aurora’s Sunrise, the remarkable new documentary by Armenian director Inna Sahakyan, who talks to BDE.