Grim, Global, Gutsy. And Going for GoldNominated docs confront rape, war, terrorism and illness as light fare falls away
Increasingly, the topline categories at the 96th Oscars are beginning to look locked in. This past weekend, the Directors Guild of America gifted Oppenheimer’s Christopher Nolan with its top award — making him the odds-on favorite for the best director Academy Award and adding to Oppenheimer’s momentum as it closes in on the best picture prize. But further down the list of this year’s nominees, there’s still suspense to be found. Consider the line-up for best feature documentary: The documentary branch threw Academy voters a curveball by ignoring several of 2023’s most high-profile docs like Matthew Heineman’s American Symphony, a sympathetic fly-on-the-wall account, from Netflix, of a year in the life of musician Jon Batiste and his wife Suleika Jaouard as together they navigated his career highs alongside her struggle during a recurrence of her leukemia, and Davis Guggenheim’s Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie, from Apple TV+, that chronicled both the star’s meteoric career and his battle with Parkinson’s disease. That only fueled speculation that the doc branch voters penalize films that are simply too popular or funded by the streamers, something noted in my colleague Peter Kiefer’s documentary story with the (apt) headline of “How Documentary Went Off the Rails.” Instead, the doc branch chose to elevate five challenging and often quite grim documentaries from around the world that explore tough subjects like rape, terrorism, political assassination and war crimes. The nominees, though relatively unknown to general audiences, do all have a certain pedigree — lots of film festival exposure, positive reviews and multiple awards — but none belong to any of the documentary sub-genres that would mark one of them as an automatic frontrunner. For example, there are no music docs in the line-up, and music docs have often played like catnip to Academy voters, resulting in trophies for 2012’s Searching for Sugar Man, 2013’s 20 Feet from Stardom, 2015’s Amy and 2021’s Summer of Soul. And none are cute, warm and fuzzy like 2020’s My Octopus Teacher. Rather, this year’s films tackle thorny social issues that don’t easily lend themselves to happy endings. For example, two of the films, both directed by women — Nisha Pahuja’s To Kill a Tiger and Kaouther Ben Hania’s Four Daughters — expose the often brutal circumstances that some young women face in their native lands. The National Film Board of Canada’s To Kill a Tiger, eight years in the making, begins with the account of the rape of a 13-year-old girl by three men in a village in rural India — and a literal trigger warning. But the girl’s father — rather than give in to shame or, worse, marry his daughter off to one of her assailants as some of the villagers suggest — decides to take the case to court, defying those around him. (At one point, the villagers even confront the filmmakers, objecting to their very presence.) Named best documentary at last year’s Canadian Screen Awards, the film attracted the attention of Mindy Kaling and Oscar nominee Dev Patel, who both signed on as executive producers to help raise the film’s profile.  “I had a visceral reaction whilst watching Nisha Pahuja’s tender and powerful story of a father’s love, and his determination to support his teenage daughter’s quest for justice. In a culture where submission is commonplace, to challenge a centuries-old system that has silenced the voices of victims is revolutionary,” Patel explained in a statement at the time. “A David and Goliath story to the highest extent, To Kill a Tiger is not only a rallying cry to dismantle the patriarchal system but also an inspiring anthem about the unwavering courage, resilience, and undeniable power of women. In my opinion, this film is one of the most important in modern Indian history.” That’s the kind of endorsement that should make Academy viewers take notice. Meanwhile, Kino Lorber’s Four Daughters adopts a more experimental approach to tell the story of Olfa Hamrouni, a divorced woman living in the town of Sousse, Tunisia and her four daughters. In 2016, Hamrouni’s two oldest girls left home to join ISIS in Libya, where they were ultimately arrested and imprisoned in Tripoli. Also adopting a metaphor from the animal kingdom, Hamrouni testifies “they were devoured by the wolf.” But the film is not just about their conversion but also the complicated family dynamics that set the stage — it could just as easily carry the added title “The Sins of the Mothers.” And since the two oldest daughters were not available to tell their side of the story, the director — whose 2020 film The Man Who Sold His Skin was nominated for a best international feature Oscar — recruited two actresses to play them as well as a third to play Hamrouni in scenes that were judged too difficult for the mother to re-enact herself. The film’s recreations of the siblings’ shared history shift constantly between scenes of girlish teasing, memories of painful arguments and earnest discussions of whether or not to adopt the hijab. Mixing actresses into the actual family was a daring gambit — and it paid off when Four Daughters was invited to screen as part of the official selection at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Golden Eye Award for best documentary. Still, for all its laurels, the film could encounter some resistance among more traditional-minded Academy voters who in the past have resisted docs that include dramatic re-enactments.  Those are just two of the five nominated documentaries, and here is a look at the other three: The Eternal MemoryChilean director Maite Alberto’s The Eternal Memory — from MTV Documentary Films and streaming on Paramount + — is arguably the most intimate of the five nominees. And it scored the 2023 Sundance World Cinema Grand Jury Prize: Documentary, with the jury proclaiming, “This film opened our hearts by bringing us closer to the meaning of life and death, and the element that threads sense into all of it — love.” Alberto, who was also nominated for best documentary feature for her 2020 film The Mole Agent, trains her camera on journalist Augusto Góngora and his wife actress Paulina Urrutia as they struggle with his gradual descent into Alzheimer’s disease. Aware that his condition is deteriorating, Gongora seems at first to be amused by his confusion and then later becomes distressed to find himself lost in his own home. There’s an added and painful irony to his condition since he devoted the first half of his career to resisting the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet and then ensuring its abuses were not forgotten as a co-author of the book Chile: The Forbidden Memory, in which he wrote, “This book is only helpful if memory helps us recover our identify.”  Alberto’s film may speak more powerfully to Chilean audiences than to Americans who are unfamiliar with Gongora’s career and the stature he enjoyed in his home country. When he died this past May at age 71, Chilean President Gabriel Boric remembered him as “a great journalist who brought the culture of our country to the highest level.” But The Eternal Memory is sure to strike a universal chord for anyone who has dealt with an ailing mate or parent and that could boost its chances. Bobi Wine: The People’s PresidentOf the five nominees, the film that plays most like a compelling narrative feature is Moses Bwayo and Christopher Sharp’s Bobi Wine: The People’s President, which follows Uganda musician Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu, better known as Bobi Wine, as he grows from Afro beats pop star to opposition political leader to presidential candidate challenging the country’s longtime and ruthless leader Yoweri Museveni. Accompanied by his wife, author and human rights activist Barbara “Barbie” Itungo Kyagulanyi, Wine, having survived periodic imprisonments, attracts a proverbial cast of thousands as he travels his country, taking his campaign to the people. National Geographic Films quickly picked up worldwide rights to the film, now streaming on Disney+, after its debut at the Venice Film Festival, where Wine, who was on hand, said, “My people, the Ugandan people, are familiar with my journey through music, politics, imprisonment and torture, but this film is a microcosm of my country’s larger struggles under an unrelenting dictatorship that has been operating with impunity for decades. I can’t wait for global audiences to see the reality of the situation and question their leaders’ support for this regime.” And as they’ve reached out for support from around the world, Wine and his wife have become genuinely charismatic figures. The film has won the IDA Documentary Award as best feature documentary. And if enough voters decide to bolster Wine’s cause with an Oscar, it could raise his visibility even further.  20 Days in MariupolFinally, the film with the most torn-from-the-headlines urgency is 20 Days in Mariupol. From the Associated Press and PBS’ Frontline, it bears harrowing witness to the early days of Russia’s 2022 invasion of the Ukraine. Ukranian cameraman Mstyslav Chernov and his small AP team were the sole journalists remaining in the port city as it was surrounded and then relentlessly bombed into near oblivion. Early in the invasion, his camera tracks fleeing citizens who angrily wave him away. But Chernov, in his voiceover that accompanies the searing images throughout, says, “I understand their anger. Their country is being attacked. It is our country, too, and we have to tell its story.” Risking their very lives, he and his team at one point find themselves in a hospital surrounded by Russian tanks, and they only narrowly escape. The film, winner of the 2023 Sundance Audience Award for Word Cinema Documentary, plays like an escalating horror movie, and, with all the suffering and destruction it captures, it also registers as a cry of protest against Russian war crimes. It just won the Directors Guild Award for outstanding documentary. And it could become the vehicle for Academy voters looking to make a political statement in support of Ukraine and in defiance of Russia — and that, in turn, could give it the edge in a tightly-contested Oscar race.  In the walk-up to the March 10 Oscar ceremonies, though, the upcoming precursor events won’t provide any further hints about the relative strength of this season’s Oscar nominees vis a vis each other. Because there were so many 2023 docs in contention — 167 films qualified for Academy consideration — both the Producers Guild of America and BAFTA came up with almost entirely different slates of nominees. Of the Academy’s choices, only 20 Years at Mariupol was included in the noms announced by the PGA and BAFTA. So there will be no way to gauge its strength against Bobi Wine or any of the three other films in the Oscar race until that fateful envelope is opened.
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