Awards FYC 2024

We are told at the beginning of the Oscar-nominated short doc The Barber of Little Rock that the racial wealth gap in the US is not a million-dollar problem, nor a billion-dollar problem, rather a trillion-dollar problem. But at least one person, Arlo Washington, both a barber and a banker, is looking to right this financial wrong, and vows to “advance equity, create opportunities and build the community.” Filmmakers John Hoffman and Christine Turner talk to BDE about their Oscar-shortlisted film.

After Swiss director Morgane Frund agreed to edit footage that an amateur filmmaker had been shooting of bears in the wilderness, she discovered that the tapes had more than imagery of the natural world on them. They also contained footage he had secretly shot of young women on the streets. Frund’s subsequent short doc, short-listed for the 96th Academy Awards, became a work on voyeurism, the male gaze and the objectification of women. The filmmaker talks to BDE.

Filmmaker Jean-Marie Teno discusses the Oscar short-listed film with US directors Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson. The synopsis for the Sundance Grand Jury U.S. Doc Prize winner reads how it “travels through time and space to reveal the enduring influence of Nikki Giovanni, one of America’s greatest living artists and social commentators.”

George Michaels is one of the unsung heroes of US political life, a Democratic member of the New York State Assembly who, in 1970, changed his mind and supported a bill extending abortion rights, in the process bringing his political career to an end. His story is told in the Oscar shortlisted short film Deciding Vote. “We’re not used in this era to people who change their minds. It’s not something that politicians do,” says co-director Jeremy Workman.

When US filmmaker Madeleine Gavin was first approached to make a film on North Korea, she was reluctant to become involved. The producers had secured the rights to The Girl With Seven Names, the memoir by Hyeonseo Lee, one of the most high profile North Korean defectors. As Gavin tells BDE, she finally agreed to take on the assignment - but she was determined to broaden its scope and tell a more contemporary story.

Precocious 24-year-old New York-based Italian filmmaker Giorgio Ghiotto has already won a ‘gold’ Student Academy Award for his graduation movie, Wings Of Dust, Now, he is in contention for an Oscar for Best Documentary Short. The film profiles Vidal Merma, a Peruvian Indigenous journalist and activist fighting against the pollution caused by the industrial exploitation of his ancestral lands. Ghiotto talks to BDE.

Justine Martin’s first film Oasis (a short documentary Oscar contender) concerns twin brothers who realise they are destined to live more separate lives as one’s developmental issues mean he will not be offered the same opportunities as the other. Martin’s approach to the subject is lyrical. “It was one of my goals to make it [the documentary] feel as if it was a fiction,” she tells BDE. “I really wanted the film to feel like a wave of emotions rather than of facts.”

Sam Green’s interactive 32 Sounds works across many frequencies. The Oscar-shortlisted film is part-science, part-history and part-personal reflection on all things sonic. It can also serve to channel the trauma we experienced during Covid, Green tells BDE. “I think that we all are still carrying around a lot of feelings from that, feelings that we probably don't really express much or have words for. And I think in some way, I'm not sure if this is true, but I have wondered this in some ways, the film is an opportunity for some of that to come out.”

In his Oscar short-listed feature doc, Luke Lorentzen follows outspoken hospital chaplain Mati and supervisor David as the former engages in an emotionally challenging and physically exhausting year-long residency at Manhattan’s Mount Sinai during Covid. “It was Mati pushing back that I think made the film a really profound and deeper dive into the work, but it required a reorientation of a certain way of working that I had applied in other projects,” the filmmaker tells BDE.

Nisha Pahuja’s Oscar-shortlisted feature doc started out as a study of toxic masculinity in India before transforming into the story of a father’s search for justice following the horrific rape of his 13-year old daughter. “I didn’t actually realise until the edit. It was two years into the editing process that we pivoted, switched gears and decided that we were just going to focus on this story,” Pahuja tells BDE.