From Streamers to Newspapers, Nonfiction Shorts Offer Awards and Audience Recognition
29.01.2022 - 01:44
/ variety.com
Addie Morfoot ContributorBack in the 1980s, former HBO Documentary Films president Sheila Nevins saw an opportunity in the nonfiction short format.“I was watching the Academy Awards one night and there was this category called best docu short and the people who made them were getting Oscars,” Nevins says. “At the Emmys, docus were kept hidden and given out on a special day.
Docs were all by themselves in a corner at the Emmys, but at the Oscars doc filmmakers went up on the stage and they won. So, when I learned that we could qualify for this thing called a short and play with the big boys, I did it.”In March 1989 HBO garnered its third Academy Award for “You Don’t Have to Die” — a 27-minute doc about 11-year-old Jason Gaes’ successful bout with cancer.
It would be the first of 15 Oscars HBO nabbed in the documentary short nonfiction category during Nevins’ 38-year tenure at HBO. If there had not been an Oscar category for short nonfiction content, Nevins says she would not have invested in them.“It was a form to capitalize on,” says Nevins.
“Certainly not share. I didn’t mean to share it.”At HBO and in her new role as head of MTV Documentary Films, Nevins has had to “share” the Oscar category with numerous media platforms that see the opportunity the doc maven saw in short form content more than 20 years ago.
Those platforms include Netflix, Disney Plus, MSNBC Films, the New York Times, the Guardian, the Los Angeles Times, the New Yorker, A&E and ESPN.Traditionally, doc shorts are made by up-and-coming directors looking to get their foot in the nonfiction filmmaking door. But the proliferation of platforms that are distributing short subject films has drawn established documentary feature helmers including Errol
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