Doc Corner: 'The Kingmaker' and 'On the President's Orders'

By Glenn Dunks

Disingenuousness is a disaster for a documentary. I recently watched two documentaries about St*ve B*annon and while it’s obvious he is a despicable human and despite whatever I may have felt about the movies themselves, one thing you can never call that man is disingenuous. He truly believes every that he says.

The same cannot be said for former First Lady of the Philippines, Imelda Marcos, who is the narrative thrust and central subject of The Kingmaker. Something of a natural progression for director Lauren Greenfield’s whose earlier films The Queen of Versailles and Generation Wealth have each dealt with the lives of people with too much time and money. Marcos is foregrounded for the documentary’s first half and listening to her seemingly endless self-aggrandising about beauty, love, and this idea she holds so dear of being a mother to the Filipino people is – to be perfectly honest – a complete bore.

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Doc Corner: Five Highlights from the 159-deep Documentary Longlist

By Glenn Dunks

Have you heard? The Academy has announced the longlist of eligible titles for the 2019 Best Documentary Feature category. All 159 of ‘em; they don’t call it a longlist for nothing. The 15-wide shortlist will be derived from these and from there the five nominees will be chosen by the documentary branch.

As I suspected, Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old is not on the list. It is also worth noting – as I have done all year – that Amazing Grace gambled with the odds last year on a qualifying run and sadly didn’t make it. There were only a few films that we have written about in Doc Corner that either did not submit or were not eligible including Vision Portraits, The Raft, Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché and Beyoncé’s Homecoming would be the best of that lot.

All the big titles that we have long expected to show up, however, did. Box office hits like Apollo 11, The Biggest Little Farm, Maiden and Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice sit next to streaming heavyweights American Factory, The Edge of Democracy and Knock Down the House (Netflix), One Child Nation and Citizen K (Amazon), Gay Chorus Deep South (MTV), The Apollo (HBO) and big-name specialty titles like Western Stars and Diego Maradona with buzzy, low-key titles waiting to pounce like Advocate, Honeyland, The Kingmaker, 5B and Roll Red Roll.

We still have many of the movies featured on there to watch and (hopefully) get the chance to discuss. But we’re going to cheat and use this as a moment to play catch-up with some short paragraphs on some of the titles featured on the long list.

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"Apollo 11" and "American Factory" are big at the Cinema Eye Honors

by Nathaniel R

Cinema Eye is the only international documentary honor that surveys the whole craft of documentary filmmaking (like the Oscars, they look at cinematography, editing, and the like). They are now in their 12th year and have announced their latest batch of nominees. The nominations are determined by "top documentary programmers" from various festivals all over the world. The awards take place over an entire weekend, January 4th-6th, 2020, which serves as the finale of what is basically a multi-city travelling festival. 

This year Apollo 11 (Neon) and American Factory (Netflix) led the nominations (5 categories each) while Homecoming: A Film By Beyonce leads the Broadcast portion of the nominations with 3 nods. This year's "Legacy Award" will go to the trippy classic Koyaanisqatsi. Unfortunately Cinema Eye is one of those awards that appears to have no consistency of the number of nominees ranging anywhere from 4 to 8 nominations depending on the category.

The nominations are after the jump...

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Doc Corner: To Syria in 'The Cave' and 'For Sama'

By Glenn Dunks

The sheer audacity of making a documentary in Syria is something that astounds me. But part of what makes Syria such a fascinating subject for continued exploration is that theirs is a story we have seen unfold in real time. From its initial uprising to its deafening destruction and their continued traumas, the last decade have granted audiences a unique interior look into many facets of the Syrian Civil War from the side of rebels and side of the radicals, humanitarians and civilians.

So when I say that Feras Fayyad’s The Cave is easily among the very top of the docket, I don’t do so lightly. Fayyad is already an Oscar nominee for Last Men in Aleppo about the men known as The White Helmets. Here he has shifted gears to focus on the women doctors of what’s known as The Cave, an underground hospital network underneath the city of Ghouta. Mostly medical students who stayed behind to help those in need, the spotlight lands firmly on 30-year-old aspiring paediatrician Dr. Armani Ballour whose calming presence amid the storm of shells and fire around them is as compelling a non-fiction subject I have seen in a very long time...

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2019 Critics Choice Documentary Award Nominations

By Glenn Dunks

they shall not grow old

We do a good job here covering documentaries. Especially since I have a 9 to 5-Monday to Friday day job. But we cover, I want to say, somewhere between 50 and 80 films a year in Doc Corner. I only say this to preface the news of the 2019 Critics Choice Documentary Awards because my gosh there are still just so many we do not or can not (or will not) get to. There are an estimated 300+ docs released every year. That is, to put it mildly, quite a lot.

Which brings us to their nominees for 2019. The list features many that we have already covered, more that we plan to upon their theatrical release or as we get deeper into the season, and even some that we do not want to review. Leading the pack with six nominations are Apollo 11, The Biggest Little Farm (more good news this week for Parasite distributor NEON) and Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old (which some would consider a 2018 release).

Read on the see the nominations (AND NOW UPDATED WITH WINNERS) in full...

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