With Christmas coming up, many families will be getting back together and some might be looking for things to do.
05.12.2022 - 01:11 / deadline.com
In the semi-documentary film Eami, a word that tellingly means both “forest” and “world” to the indigenous Ayoreo Totobiegosode people of Paraguay, the native’s increasingly shrinking landscape, due to deforestation, serves as a grounded but dreamlike backdrop for a story that blends elements of fiction and nonfiction storytelling.
As Paraguayan filmmaker Paz Encina revealed during Deadline’s Contenders Film: Documentary panel, the inspired approach – which tells the fictionalized story of a 5-year-old girl who, like so many of her people before her, finds herself forced to leave the only home she‘s known as the modern world encroaches – arrived at while attempting to persuade the Ayoreo Totobiegosode to let her tell one of their stories cinematically.
RELATED: Contenders Documentary — Deadline’s Complete Coverage
“I went there looking for a love story in that community,” said Encina, who’d been told of a romantic local mythos. “But it was kind of difficult to get in touch with them. It’s not a very open community, so when I got there, I had to do some work to connect with them. And then they I asked them about the story, and they said they knew about the story, but they were not interested in telling that story. And I was shocked a bit, expecting to know more.”
RELATED: Director Paz Encina Talks Trauma Of Separation From Loved Ones & Climate Crisis In ‘Eami’ – Contenders International
“I asked them ‘What do you think you would be interested in telling?’ And they were very straightforward: They told me that they wanted me to help them tell what happened to them – what happened to them when they had to leave the forest, what happened to them and their ancestors. And then I started doing that project with them. It was a
With Christmas coming up, many families will be getting back together and some might be looking for things to do.
SPOILER ALERT! This story contains details from the first episode of 1923, which dropped at midnight on Paramount+.
Keeping it in the family. When Prince William proposed to Princess Kate while on a trip to Africa in 2010, he did so with his late mother’s sapphire engagement ring.
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.
With the festive spirit setting in across many households, some may want to share their Christmas joy with visitors.
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.
When a woman dies from complications of childbirth, she leaves behind loved ones struggling to deal with the loss. Aftershock, a documentary from Disney’s Onyx Collective, brings attention to the U.S. maternal mortality crisis by focusing on the death of two women and the family members they left behind.
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.
In The Corridors of Power, filmmaker Dror Moreh takes a bracing look at the factors that kept America — the sole remaining superpower in the immediate post-Cold War era — from intervening in global instances involving genocide, war crimes and other large-scale atrocities.
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.
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.
“My only sin is in my skin.” That rhyme is among the lyrics in the 1929 Fats Waller song “(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue,” an eloquent and haunting evocation of the experience of being a Black man in America.
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.
Shortly after Donald Trump became president of the United States in January 2017, he began stacking federal courts with conservative judges. Realizing what was at stake, the team behind HBO Documentary Films’ abortion documentary The Janes began crafting a story to remind the audience what happened 50 years ago when women didn’t have access to safe and legal abortions.
As a musician, David Bowie transcended any traditional definition of a rock star. Through the documentary Moonage Daydream, director and producer Brett Morgen sought to transcend the traditional constraints of a biographical documentary.