by Pat Mullen
Ten documentaries are now Oscar nominees. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced the nominees for the 97th annual Academy Awards this morning. Actors Bowen Yang (Wicked) and Rachel Sennott (Saturday Night) unveiled the contenders, including the nominees for short and feature documentary.
The nominees include the acclaimed Sugarcane by Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie, which explores the impact of Canada’s residential school system on Noisecat’s family and community.
“We are overjoyed and filled with gratitude for this acknowledgment from the Academy. We want to extend our deepest appreciation to our creative team, funders and National Geographic Documentary Films for the endless work and heart they gave to this essential story,” said NoiseCat and Kassie in a statement. “Above all, we want to acknowledge the courage and fortitude of our participants and the thousands of survivors of Indian residential and boarding schools across North America who have been ignored for too long as well as the generations of families who continue to suffer their harms. In a moment where justice seems out of reach, we are grateful that Sugarcane has helped illuminate the truth, bring about healing and called institutions of power to account.”
Also nominated in the feature documentary category is No Other Land by the Palestinian-Israeli collective of Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor, and Hamdan Ballal. The study of forcible displacements in Adra’s West Bank community has gained considerable attention–both for its artistic merits and for its lack of North American distribution even though it’s among the year’s most widely acclaimed docs.
Those films will compete with Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner Porcelain War, directed by Brendan Bellomo and Slava Leontyev. The collaborative effort goes to the front lines of the war in Ukraine where artists and everyday people like Leontyev keep up the fight. Meanwhile, Black Box Diaries, Shiori Ito’s potent investigation into her own sexual assault, scored a nomination. The film observes her fight for justice, which sparked the equivalent of the #MeToo movement in Japan, when authorities failed her. Finally, Johan Grimonprez’s jazzy Soundtrack to a Coup d’État scored a nomination for arthouse cinema with its archival study of the 1961 assassination of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba and the musicians who brought the story to the United Nations.
The Oscar nominees for feature documentary again represent an internationally diverse slate of films that tackle hot topics. Last year’s winner 20 Days in Mariupol offered a portrait of the war in Ukraine. The short docs slate boasts a similar level of political engagement from around the world.
No documentaries appeared elsewhere in the slate of Oscar nominees. France’s Oscar bid Emilia Pérez led the field with a whopping 13 nominations, setting a record for a non-English film and breaking the previous bar of 10 nominations set by Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The film also made history with leading actress Karla Sofía Gascón becoming the first openly transgender actor to receive an Oscar nomination. The winners for the Oscars will be announced on March 2nd.
The documentary nominees are:
DOCUMENTARY FEATURE FILM
Black Box Diaries –Shiori Ito, Eric Nyari and Hanna Aqvilin
No Other Land – Basel Adra, Rachel Szor, Hamdan Ballal and Yuval Abraham
Porcelain War – Brendan Bellomo, Slava Leontyev, Aniela Sidorska and Paula DuPre’ Pesmen
Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat – Johan Grimonprez, Daan Milius and Rémi Grellety
Sugarcane – Nominees to be determined
DOCUMENTARY SHORT FILM
Death by Numbers – Kim A. Snyder and Janique L. Robillard
I Am Ready, Warden – Smriti Mundhra and Maya Gnyp
Incident – Bill Morrison and Jamie Kalven
Instruments of a Beating Heart – Ema Ryan Yamazaki and Eric Nyari
The Only Girl in the Orchestra – Molly O’Brien and Lisa Remington