Hoda Kotb and Jenna Bush Hager will kick off New Year’s Eve on NBC as the hosts of the primetime two-hour special, A Toast to 2022! beginning at 8 p.m.
04.12.2022 - 23:43 / deadline.com
The stars of the Amazon Studios documentary Wildcat are a man, a woman and an orphaned baby jungle cat they live with in a rainforest in Peru. The subject of this first feature from a filmmaking couple based in Virginia is something more: how to survive psychological damage and suicidal depression to find peace and a place in the world.
One half of the duo that made Wildcat, Melissa Lesh, wondered about the reception for a film that sounds easy to root for at first pass— because who doesn’t love people taking care of kittens? — and then digs into difficult topics including mental illness, despair and self harm.
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“It’s scary to put something like this out in the world and not know how it will land,” Lesh said at Deadline’s Contenders Documentary event, alongside her partner and fellow Wildcat director-producer, Trevor Beck Frost.
Wildcat follows a scarred British war veteran, Harry Turner, and an American wildlife biologist, Samantha Zwicker, who are living in a remote Amazon rainforest in Peru and raising abandoned ocelots — spotted, leopard-like jungle cats — which they hope to re-release into the wilderness. Part love story, part essay on nature, Wildcat also is a portrait of an ex-soldier’s battered psyche, rendered with an intimacy born of the film’s isolated surroundings.
The early returns are encouraging. Wildcat premiered at the Telluride Film Festival in September with an original song written by Robin Pecknold of Fleet Foxes. It won audience favorite awards at festivals in New Jersey and Indiana and earned thunderous ovations in November at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam.
Frost was a photojournalist when he met Turner four
Hoda Kotb and Jenna Bush Hager will kick off New Year’s Eve on NBC as the hosts of the primetime two-hour special, A Toast to 2022! beginning at 8 p.m.
Editors note: Deadline’s Read the Screenplay series debuts and celebrates the scripts of films that will be factors in this year’s movie awards race.
At the beginning of the Netflix documentary The Martha Mitchell Effect, Richard Nixon, deflated in his ex-presidential phase, sits for an interview with David Frost. A somber Nixon tells his natty interlocutor, “I’m convinced if it hadn’t been for Martha, there’d have been no Watergate.”
In August 1938 an American visitor appeared in a Polish village outside Warsaw, bearing an object of considerable novelty to the townspeople: a 16mm motion picture camera. David Kurtz filmed for not much more than 180 seconds, his shutter opening onto village life in Nasieslk, home to a Jewish population numbering several thousand people.
For years HBO Documentary Films, under the stewardship of Sheila Nevins, dominated the Oscars, racking up nominations and wins left and right. But since her departure in 2018 it has faced an Oscar dry spell, at least in the documentary feature category. All that could change this year, in a major way.
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From separating families at the border to promises to build a massive wall between the US and Mexico, the Trump administration took an aggressively hostile approach towards immigrants.
Paweł Łoziński started working on The Balcony Movie two years before the Covid pandemic forced people to adopt social distancing, but the air of separation between the filmmaker and his subjects in this documentary feature might feel familiar.
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Navalny has been marketed as an international thriller focusing on the conspiracy to assassinate Russian peace activist Alexander Navalny, but director Daniel Roher says that it was just as important to show him as a human being as it was an icon.
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In the new documentary Good Night Oppy, the Mars Opportunity rover becomes the scrappy robot that could: an instrument platform that trundles across a rusty landscape millions of miles away, searching for alien life signs, and outlasts its own projected existence by almost 15 years.
Sidney Poitier wasn’t just an actor, filmmaker or activist. He was a pioneer who smashed stereotypes, and helped change the perception of Black people.
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Selena Gomez has been candid about her struggle with mental health issues, including her 2018 bipolar diagnosis. With Selena Gomez: My Mind and Me, she and director Alek Keshishian wanted to create a public account of her long battle to recover her mental wellbeing.
Higher Ground, the production company founded by Barack and Michelle Obama, has established an enviable track record with Oscar voters, earning a Best Documentary Feature nomination last year with Crip Camp, and a win in 2020 for American Factory. It’s back in the Oscar race this year with Descendant, a Netflix documentary directed by Margaret Brown.
While crafting the documentary Sr. chronicling the life of writer, director and actor Robert Downey Sr., filmmaker Chris Smith found himself, much like Downey’s films themselves, setting aside advance notions and following where the story took him.