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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Hot Docs: LGBT Films

Amir here, reporting from the Hot Docs documentary festival in Toronto. There are a few films at the festival this year that deal with LGBT issues. Paolo has already reviewed one of them – though I’m using the term “issue” very loosely with regards to that one - but on a more serious note, here are three more documentaries about the gay community.

First up is Valentine Road, which explores the story of a 15 year old student, named Larry King, in Oxnard, California who was fatally shot by a classmate, Brandon McInerney, during school hours for confessing his love for him in front of a group of friends. Larry, a biracial boy who had always shown female tendencies, had begun to dress in girls’ clothing and put on heels and make-up to school. On the face of it, the crime is one born of hatred, homophobia and racism, but director Marta Cunningham isn’t satisfied with such reductive explanations. Her film is a wild ride that smacks the audience right out of their conclusions every time one is apparently reached, digging layer after layer of evidence to uncover the complexity of the case.

Valentine Road spends its entire running time exploring the grey areas of human psyche. It’s a gut-wrenching film that patiently and intelligently unravels the background to the dark events of that fateful February 2008 day [more...]

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