Weiner, 13th, and OJ: Made In America Among DOC NYC Short List

One week after La La Land won the Toronto People’s Choice Award – a key indicator of a film’s likelihood of securing an Oscar nomination for Best Picture – another major awards season clue has come to us in the form of the DOC NYC's Short List. DOC NYC is the largest documentary film festival in the country and it has hosted specially curated non-fiction in the city since 2010, but don’t let its infancy fool you. If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. And by anywhere, I specifically mean the Academy’s own shortlist for Best Documentary Feature; in the last five years, the ultimate winner of the prize and a bulk of runners-up have played the fest.

This year, the crop of fifteen films headed to DOC NYC include Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg’s marvelous collision of media and politics Weiner, Roger Ross Williams’ tear-jerker Life, Animated, and Ezra Edelman’s eight-hour saga OJ: Made in America. Legendary documentarians Barbara Kopple and Werner Herzog find themselves in the mix – as does the increasingly ambidextrous Ava DuVernay for her NYFF opener 13th – while well-received titles such as Under the Gun, The Eagle Huntress, and Strike a Pose (reviewed) are left on the sidelines.

The complete DOC NYC Short List is as follows
(Links go to our reviews of these films)

• Amanda Knox (Netflix) Dirs: Rod Blackhurst, Brian McGinn
• Cameraperson (Janus Films) Dir: Kirsten Johnson 
• Fire at Sea (Kino Lorber) Dir: Gianfranco Rosi 
• Gleason (Open Road & Amazon Studios) Dir: Clay Tweel
• I Am Not Your Negro (Magnolia Pictures) Dir: Raoul Peck
• Into The Inferno (Netflix) Dir: Werner Herzog
• Jim: The James Foley Story (HBO Documentary Films) Dir: Brian Oakes
• Life, Animated (The Orchard & A&E IndieFilms) Dir: Roger Ross Williams
• Mapplethorpe: Look At The Pictures (HBO Documentary Films) Dir: Fenton Bailey, Randy Barbato
• Miss Sharon Jones! (Starz) Dir: Barbara Kopple 
• OJ: Made in America (ESPN) Dir: Ezra Edelman
• 13th (Netflix) Dir: Ava DuVernay
• The Ivory Game (Netflix) Dir: Kief Davidson, Richard Ladkani
• Trapped (PBS-Independent Lens) Dir: Dawn Porter 
• Weiner (IFC Films & Showtime) Dir: Josh Kriegman, Elyse Steinberg

Is there an Oscar winner in our midst? Personally, this is a reminder to get myself out to the theater to see Cameraperson ASAP. Which of these are your favorites and which are you most excited to check out?

Doc Corner: 'O.J.: Made in America' a Compelling Success

Glenn here with our weekly look at documentaries from theatres, festivals, and on demand. This week we're looking at ESPN's much-buzzed five-part documentary about O.J. Simpson.

Even more coincidental than the release of ESPN’s O.J.: Made in America so soon after Ryan Murphy’s star-studded FX mini-series, The People v. O.J. Simpson, is that the rise to fame of their subject coincided so precisely with the rise to prominence of the African American civil rights movement. The irony was not lost on Simpson with the handsome man who everyone thought “had it all” never being able to out-run the shadow that his own meteoric ascent cast over seemingly the United States’ entire black population. Nor is it lost on director Ezra Edelman who makes the parallels the structural spine of this exceptionally thorough, exquisitely compiled, and exhaustively compelling five-part documentary. It’s not called “Made in America” for nothing – another coincidence it’s worth noting, Made in America is also the name of a pretty good 2008 documentary about the Crips and Bloods war in L.A. by Stacy Peralta – and across 463 minutes, Edelman and his collaborators have crafted a powerful demonstration of the dichotomy of race, fame, and justice in America.

Starting in the 1960s with Simpson’s rise in college football, Edelman’s film wisely doesn’t focus exclusively on the murder of Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman and the trial that followed. In fact, it takes until the third episode to even bring it up, instead preferring to spend time examining these early passages of his life for clarity and for clues. Unlike the FX series, O.J.: Made in America is more concerned with attempting to find out how a man like Simpson and the country came to be. [more...]

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