170 Documentaries to Compete for the Oscar (Yup, That's a Lot!)

By Glenn Dunks

Turkish cats, white supremacist terrorists, underground artists, climate change activists, controversial politicians, hackers, ballerinas and YouTube celebrities. These are just some of the subjects of the ONE-HUNDRED-AND-SEVENTY films that have been submitted for the Best Documentary Feature Academy Award. Yes, that 170 figure is a record and no, you probably haven't heard of a lot of them. Not even I had, and I write a weekly column on the subject.

We have tried to cover as many as possible, but trust me there's only so much we can do! Of course, on one hand, the number of titles listed here is daunting and massive. On the other hand, I must admit that a number this large actually somewhat puts my guilt at not covering enough to rest. It's simply too many! And it ought to be even longer! It's disappointing to see award season-worthy titles like In Transit, All This Panic and Antarctica: Ice and Sky not even submitted, but that's how this thing always goes.

I have included links to any TFE reviews, but also included bite-sized snippets to give you a snapshot and even a few one-sentence reviews for films I have seen and will not be doing a full write-up on. Nobody can say we don't attempt to cover as many as possible!

The Academy's doc branch will soon whittle this list down to 15 soon before we find out, as always, what the five nominees will be on Oscar Nomination Morning...

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Doc Corner: 'One of Us' and 'Thy Father's Chair'

by Glenn Dunks

Not content to let scientology corner the market in controversial religion exposes, directors Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady focus their attention on New York’s Hasidic community in their latest feature. A dramatic change of pace after last year’s celebrity bio-doc Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You, the filmmakers return at least somewhat to the themes of their most famous film, the Oscar-nominated Jesus Camp. Yet despite the potential cross-over to be found in the pair that seek to uncover the alarming practises of organised religion, One of Us is a much different beast.

Unlike that earlier film, which trained its cameras on the inner-circle of a camp for raising the next generation of evangelicals, One of Us observes from the outside, following the stories of three individuals who have attempted to extract themselves from the community and tell some often haunting and traumatic tales of their times within it...

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What's Streaming from 1944?

Not too damn much, that's what! 

Whenever we prep for a Smackdown The Film Experience becomes newly alarmed at how scarce the availability of 20th century film titles actually is online. Streaming culture has somehow convinced people that everything you might ever want to see is easier to access than it's ever been. Alas, the further back in time you go, the less there is for your eyeballs as we move away from analog. Of course streaming is more convenient so we hope Hollywood will magically decide to make all their vaults available. We can dream!

Laura dear, I cannot stand these morons any longer. If you don't come with me this instant, I shall run amok.

But if you want to steep yourself in 1944 beyond the 5 films featured in the next Smackdown, here's what you can stream should you have any of these memberships...

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NYFF: Joan Didion's Magic Years

by Jason Adams

"Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends."

The instant. Not "an" instant, which is how most of us would sort that sentence. When writing of her husband's death in her book The Year of Magical Thinking Joan Didion said "the" instant, and in Joan Didion's wake nothing else seems right. Because it is not just any instant. It's the one that changed your life. At most, depending on how long we live, we might get a couple. Joan Didion, at 82, has had her own intimate yet earth-quaking share. And Joan Didion, as ever, is here to distill them down into apple crisp sentence form for us.

Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold, the new documentary on the author, was directed by Didion's nephew, the actor Griffin Dunne, and he makes similar Didion-esque economy of Joan's handful of instants...

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Doc Corner: 'Human Flow'

By Daniel Walber

Ai Weiwei’s Human Flow is the result of a truly enormous undertaking. Spread across four continents, the film is a distillation of the current refugee crisis. All of it. Rather than focus on a single geographic region or the fallout from a particular international conflict, this is a whirlwind tour of the entire global situation. Its scenes from the US-Mexico Border to the Mediterranean, Sub-Saharan Africa to Bangladesh. If that sounds like far too much, that’s because it is.

If the purpose were totally aesthetic and metaphorical, a wordless and breathtaking aerial tour of large-scale human movement, the scope might not have been a problem. It might have bypassed the head and gone straight to the heart. But Human Flow tries to have it both ways...

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