Awards FYC 2024

While undertaking research following a near-fatal fall, forest ecologist and biology professor Nalini Nadkarni begins to expose, little by little, the tangled roots of her troubled and disturbing childhood. Director Andrew Nadkarni, Nalini’s nephew, talks to Business Doc Europe about his Oscar-shortlisted short film.

Fifteen films make the cut in each of the Documentary Film and Documentary Short Film categories. Mstyslav Chernov’s 20 Days In Mariupol (Ukraine) and Kaouther Ben Hania’s Four Daughters (Tunisia) are additionally shortlisted in the International Feature Film category. Nominations for the 96th Academy Awards will be announced on January 23 2024.

Frederick Wiseman can’t remember what he ate the first time he went to Le Bois Sans Feuilles restaurant in Ouche, France, but knows it was good. In fact it was so good he asked top chef and future successor César Troisgros if he could document life in the extablishment. “It’s very rare that I eat in a 3-star restaurant, and I can’t turn off my documentary filmmaker eye. I hadn’t planned to do it but I just blurted it [the idea] out and I was happy when he said why not,” Wiseman tells BDE.

32 Sounds is an immersive documentary and profound sensory experience that explores the elemental phenomenon of sound. The film is a meditation on the power of sound to bend time, cross borders, and profoundly shape our perception of the world around us. Academy Award-nominated director Sam Green discusses his film with fellow filmmaker (and Oscar winner) Steven Bognar.

It’s a magical place, a warehouse in LA which many have likened to Gepetto’s workshop in Pinocchio. Broken musical instruments are brought here in their dozens and craftspeople put them back together again. In their latest film together, Ben Proudfoot and Kris Bowers go inside the workshop which ensures that school kids without money can continue to play their violins, trumpets and pianos. The filmmakers talk to BDE.

The Ugandan filmmakers discuss their acclaimed doc together with Bobi Wine himself and Kenyan director Judy Kibinge. Running in the country’s 2021 presidential elections, Wine uses his music to denounce the dictatorial regime and support his life’s mission to defend the oppressed and the voiceless people of Uganda. In this fight, he must also take on the country’s police and military.

At the heart of Elisa Gambino’s multi award-winning short documentary is the unbreakable bond between Jessa and her young teen brother Jary whom the rest of her family rejected from birth due to his facial disfigurement. Despite living in poverty with two children of her own, she sets out to arrange the corrective surgery that will transform his life. “It was a profound honour to direct this film and share Jessa’s masterclass in unconditional love,” says director Gambino.

In her directorial debut at the age of 84, legendary US doc producer Sheila Nevins turns to the shocking restrictions placed by US educators on reading material for kids. These includes works by James Baldwin and Margaret Atwood as well as graphic novels like Art Spiegelman’s Maus, about The Holocaust. The constituency Nevins turns to in her film is the kids themselves. “I know what the left thinks, I know what the right thinks, I don’t know what the kid thinks,” she sums up why children are placed fully in the frame.

In Pulitzer Prize-winning Mstyslav Chernov’s 20 Days In Mariupol, Ukrainian journalists trapped in the besieged city struggle to continue their work documenting atrocities of the Russian invasion. As the only international reporters who remain in the city, they capture what later become defining images of the war: dying children, mass graves, the bombing of a maternity hospital, and much more. The director discusses his film with Danish director Simon Lereng Wilmont.

How did an upper middle-class English filmmaker like John Schlesinger, whose previous feature was a Thomas Hardy adaptation, come to make the definitive movie about underground New York in the late 1960s? And how did he get a Hollywood studio to pay for it? These are among the questions that Nancy Buirski asks in her new feature doc, which is well positioned to advance during the upcoming Awards season. She talks to BDE.