- Doc Soup: More Fearless Oscar Predictions – Looking at the Shorts with an Academy Voter
The Best Documentary Short award is probably the least watched, least understood and least appreciated category at the Academy Awards. Okay, maybe it’s tied with Best Sound Editing. Still, that’s too bad. Fortunately, some of the winners have made the most of this underdog status in their speeches, such as when Jessica Yu joked in […]
- Doc Soup: Fearless Oscar Predictions
It’s that time of year again — when some of us roll our eyes at the foolish, self-aggrandizing notion of awards and others of us lap it up, savoring every detail, prognostication and red carpet mishap. I am solidly in the latter camp, and this year’s documentary Oscar race is a particularly interesting one because […]
- Doc Soup: An Open Letter to Fisher Stevens
Hi Fisher, I want to congratulate you on your huge accomplishment in producing The Cove. It’s a fantastic film. It unspools like a great thriller and it captures a terrible wrong on tape — it does everything I think a great documentary should do. Your Oscar nomination is well deserved, and I have been watching […]
- Weekly Roundup: Big Sky Festival, Robert Kenner in NYC and MoMA's Documentary Fortnight
The Big Sky Documentary Film Festival began on February 12th in Missoula, Montana and continues through this weekend. The festival’s founding and artistic director is Doug Hawes-Davis, whose film Libby, Montana aired on POV in 2007. Among the award winners at the festival this year are two films that will be broadcast on POV: Lixin […]
- Oscar Noms for POV Films “Food, Inc.” and “The Most Dangerous Man in America”
Nominations for the 2010 Academy Awards were announced this morning in Los Angeles, and we were thrilled to hear that two upcoming POV films, Food, Inc. and The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, were nominated for Best Documentary Feature. About Food, Inc.: How much do we know about the […]
- Journalism Lives! Or Does It?
“Journalism is not dead!” was the defiant cry from Thursday night’s Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Awards. Columbia Journalism School Dean Nicholas Lemann exhorted the “connected crowd” to turn off their phones and go off the grid for an hour to celebrate the journalistic achievements of their colleagues. The awards, presented as they have been since […]
- Weekly Roundup: Cinema Eye, Sundance and More
This week, we take a look back at the Cinema Eye Honors, a look ahead to the Sundance Film Festival and give POV fans a second look at The Way We Get By. The Cinema Eye Honors took place last Friday, and by all accounts, it was a brilliant evening! Doc Soup Man Tom Roston […]
- A POV Intern Plays Mad Libs with Albert Maysles at the Cinema Eye Honors
POV intern Alice Rhee is a sophomore at Oberlin College. This January, Alice is watching lots of documentaries and working with POV’s Interactive department on POV’s Web presence. She reports back from last week’s Cinema Eye Honors ceremony. Can you find a more fascinating group of people than documentary filmmakers? They are socially conscious, inspiring […]
- Doc Soup: The Glittering Docerati at the Cinema Eye Honors
So, how about those Golden Globes! What, who cares? That’s right — all of you doc lovers know that the real big night in documentary film wasn’t in L.A. on Sunday (the Hollywood Foreign Press doesn’t even have a nonfiction filmmaking category) — it was last Friday, when the third annual Cinema Eye Honors took […]
- Weekly Roundup: Awards Report, Sundance and Haunting Slideshow from Iraq
This week, POV is racking up the awards and getting ready for Sundance. Read on for more news, a smattering of links and a giveaway! It’s been a great week for POV filmmakers. Three POV filmmakers have been nominated for the DGA Awards for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Documentaries (Geoffrey Smith for The English Surgeon, […]
- Three POV Filmmakers Garner DGA Nominations
This just in . . . Three POV filmmakers have been nominated for DGA Awards for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Documentaries for the year 2009! We are thrilled for Geoffrey Smith, who directed last season’s The English Surgeon, and two filmmakers who are part of our upcoming 2010 season: Robert Kenner for Food, Inc. (which […]
- Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program Announces Fall 2009 Grants
The Sundance Institute announced yesterday that they are awarding grants to 23 nonfiction film projects that will receive financial and creative support from the Sundance Documentary Film Program (DFP). One of the projects is directed by POV alum, Bernardo Ruiz, who co-produced Alex Rivera’s The Sixth Section (POV 2003) and worked on the first installment […]
- POV and Food, Inc. Kick off Awards Season With Wins!
Christmas trees are up, temperatures have dipped, and as we flip the calendar to December, it’s clear that movie awards season has begun. Yesterday, the International Documentary Association announced winners in several categories for the 2009 IDA Documentary Awards. We’re thrilled to learn that POV won the Continuing Series Award! The ceremony for the IDA […]
- Doc Soup: Oscar Short List
It’s head-scratching season again, which is to say: it’s Oscar time. Last week, the shortlist of 15 documentaries being considered for the five Academy Award nominations was announced. And, sure enough, there were some head-scratchers out there. The most confounding was the exclusion of Michael Moore‘s Capitalism. Sure, this further confirms what I said a […]
- “The Way We Get By” Receives IFP and Fledgling Fund Grant for Outreach and Community Engagement
The Independent Filmmaker Project (IFP) has teamed up with The Fledgling Fund to award the first The Fledgling Fund Outreach and Engagement Grant for Social Issue Documentaries to The Way We Get By, which aired on POV this week. We send our congratulations to filmmakers Aron Gaudet and Gita Pullapilly for this fantastic honor. For […]
- Last Chance to Register for the 2009 National Film Challenge
Here are a couple of items in my inbox that I thought filmmakers might want to note: There is only about a week left until the launch of the 2009 National Film Challenge, the sister competition of the 48 Hour Film Project. There is still time to organize your team and register before the kickoff […]
- Michael Moore Says “Good Luck” to POV's Emmy-Nominated Filmmakers!
We heard POV alum Michael Moore (both Roger & Me and Pets or Meat aired on POV in 1992) was in our neighborhood doing some publicity for his new film Capitalism: A Love Story. So we hit the sidewalk, in true Michael Moore-style, to see if he’d speak to us on camera. Lo and behold, […]
- Interview with 'Ars Magna' Director Cory Kelley
POV’s 2008 lineup received a record 10 Emmy nominations, including one for a short film entitled Ars Magna in the New Approaches to News & Documentary Programming: Arts, Lifestyle & Culture category. The amazing thing about Ars Magna is that it was produced in five days as part of the International Documentary Challenge (IDC), an […]