Director Kirsten Johnson On “Killing” Her Father In ‘Dick Johnson Is Dead’ – Contenders Documentary

Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson didn't always have it easy growing up. The 48-year-old actor is set to be the subject of "Young Rock," a comedy television series chronicling his childhood before his days as one of Hollywood's biggest names.

In a year of pandemic, social unrest and political polarization, one Oscar-contending documentary arrived to lift people’s spirits, not just in the U.S. but around the world.

“When I thought of Billie Holiday, I just thought of her as a jazz singer, maybe a troubled artist, you hear about drugs, a little bit of trouble with the law,” says Lee Daniels, director of the upcoming biopic The United States vs. Billie Holiday. With all that Holiday accomplished during her storied career, rarely highlighted is her work in the civil rights movement of the 1930s and ’40s, which was why Daniels was inspired to tackle this project.

“It’s a beautiful story of brotherhood, just a display of Black men expressing themselves healthily in a space that we don’t get the opportunity to see Black men be,” says One Night In Miami director Regina King of what inspired her to make Kemp Powers’ play her feature directorial debut.

Deadline on Monday launched streaming sites for its first two Contenders awards-season events that took place over the weekend: Contenders International and Contenders Documentary.

The pressure was on when directors Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine set about making Boys State, their film documenting an annual exercise in Texas that gives high school boys the chance to practice democracy in action.

The California town of Paradise was home to about 26,000 people in November 2018 when a catastrophic wildfire reduced most of the town to ash. Ron Howard’s National Geographic documentary Rebuilding Paradise begins with footage of the community in flames.

No one can say filmmaker Bryan Fogel doesn’t enjoy a cinematic challenge.

Qandeel Baloch, the subject of MTV Documentary Films’ A Life Too Short, became a new kind of celebrity in her native Pakistan. Beautiful and outspoken, she challenged the norms of her society by daring to post semi-nude photos of herself and to voice provocative opinions.

For more than 20 years, former music industry executive Drew Dixon held onto a corrosive secret. The HBO Max documentary On the Record, directed by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering, reveals how Dixon made the painful decision to come forward with allegations that she had been raped by her boss at Def Jam Recordings, hip hop impresario Russell Simmons.

Politics and Covid-19 have been intertwined ever since the novel coronavirus emerged in Wuhan, China a year ago. But when director Hao Wu made 76 Days, his harrowing film documenting hospital workers and Covid patients in Wuhan as the city went through lockdown, he left political questions aside.

For his documentary Notturno, Italian director Gianfranco Rosi did the unthinkable—spend most of his time in the field without a camera.

Neon’s documentary Totally Under Control paints a devastating picture of the Trump administration’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Russian-born director Viktor Kossakovsky says it was a monumental struggle to make his documentary Gunda, starring the title character: a sow raising her litter of piglets on a farm in Norway.

The Neon documentary The Painter and the Thief begins with a surprising “meet cute.” After two paintings are stolen from artist Barbora Kysilkova in Oslo, Norway, she encounters one of the suspected thieves in court. Instead of feeling angry at the accused, Karl-Bertil Nordland, he excites her compassion, and an unlikely friendship develops between them.

Attending summer camp is a joyous time for many kids. For filmmaker Jim LeBrecht, it was life-changing.