M.K.: As I wrote in this space last year: Award-winning documentary filmmaker Tom Isler (having wandered onto this amateurish site for reasons that remain unclear) checks in with his breakdown of the five Oscar-nominated documentary features.
This year the Academy did a better job with its short list than last year, when, arguably, the best documentary of the year (The Interrupters) wasn't even included. I would have like to see nods to Only the Young and maybe The Waiting Room or Detroipia, but we can't have everything.
Although each of the nominees would be a fine choice for the Oscar, I think this is a race between Searching for Sugar Man and 5 Broken Cameras. (The only one I haven't seen yet is The Gatekeepers, which I think is the only one that could challenge these two; it's already picked up a few best-documentary awards this year. Its release has been relatively small to date, and there's less buzz about it. It'd be hard for me to pick The Gatekeepers as the best of the year, not having seen it. Caveat complete.)
This year the Academy did a better job with its short list than last year, when, arguably, the best documentary of the year (The Interrupters) wasn't even included. I would have like to see nods to Only the Young and maybe The Waiting Room or Detroipia, but we can't have everything.
Although each of the nominees would be a fine choice for the Oscar, I think this is a race between Searching for Sugar Man and 5 Broken Cameras. (The only one I haven't seen yet is The Gatekeepers, which I think is the only one that could challenge these two; it's already picked up a few best-documentary awards this year. Its release has been relatively small to date, and there's less buzz about it. It'd be hard for me to pick The Gatekeepers as the best of the year, not having seen it. Caveat complete.)
Sugar Man has won the top awards from the International Documentary Association and the Cinema Eye Honors (the all-documentary awards that the doc community most respects). Sugar Man also took home the BAFTA recently, and has earned a slew of audience awards, from Sundance to Amsterdam to Melbourne. It's also the film that's most crossed over into the mainstream. (60 Minutes did a piece on Rodriguez, the musician at the center of the film; and Rodriguez's music career has taken off since the film came out.) It's the most entertaining of the crop, and what I like about it is that it tells one of the craziest, inspiring stories I've ever heard to come out of the music industry, which is a business saturated with myths and legends. (I don't want to give too much away.) I like the film's sense of discovery, the skilled storytelling and the story itself; I like documentaries best when they tell a story I wouldn't otherwise hear or know about. It's also the film I most often think about from this year's nominees. I like how the film presents a real-life case study in how a few misfires or missed connections can alter a person's life, and then, miraculously, documents Rodriguez as he's able to get a taste of what his life would have been like all along, if those misfires had hit their targets.
5 Broken Cameras is an outstanding film, putting a personal spin on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the West Bank. (It was the only other nominee that was also up for the Cinema Eye Honor this year.) It was shot, home-movie style, by Emad Burnat, a Palestinian, and co-directed by Israeli Guy Davidi, who helped Burnat structure the footage he'd shot over the years. (It reminds me, in that respect, of Trouble the Water, which was based largely on first-person footage of Katrina, later shaped into a documentary by other filmmakers.) This film is maybe the most valuable visual "document" of the five, for recording this history and spending enough time with a group of characters to make the conflict relatable on a human level.
I also liked The Invisible War , the best film that I've seen by Kirby Dick. It takes on the tough subject of sexual assault in the military, and a win for this film might give the subject matter more exposure. It's designed to elicit outrage and succeeds. Like The Gatekeepers, which is about the Israeli security agency, and which interviews all the living former heads of the agency, The Invisible War is a valuable work of journalism. At the same time, The Invisible War is fairly conventional in its filmmaking, and when I think about the best documentary of the year, I look for something with a bit more artistry.
How To Survive A Plague is a heroic achievement in editing, reconstructing one faction of AIDS activists in the 80s and 90s through archival footage and present-day interviews. I wouldn't be disappointed if this won, but, despite its relevancy to activist culture today, to me the film seems less urgent somehow than The Invisible War, and maybe less revealing than the other nominees, because it is a story that has been documented so well both in film and in other mediums.
If I had a vote, I'd cast it for Sugar Man.
If I had a vote, I'd cast it for Sugar Man.