‘Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues’ Provides Truer, Fuller Picture Of An Entertainment Icon – Contenders Documentary

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.

“All That Breathes,” “Descendant,” “Fire of Love,” “Navalny,” “Nothing Compares,” “Retrograde” and “The Territory” have been nominated by the Producers Guild of America in the Outstanding Producer of Documentary Motion Pictures category, the PGA announced on Monday.  The winner will be announced at the 34th annual Producers Guild of America Awards ceremony on Saturday, Feb.

If they’re good, music documentaries can serve as a time machine — an immersive experience that transports the viewer back to the magic of another era, where the soundtrack envelops you, and an artist who has left this mortal coil returns for 90 minutes or so to validate their superstar status — a mic drop straight from the heavens. If the films are very good, they leave even hardcore fans learning a thing or two about their beloved icons. And if the films are very, very good, they completely upend public perception and, by extension, rewrite an artist’s legacy in a meaningful way.

Shaunak Sen’s All That Breathes won the top prize at the 38th IDA Documentary Awards in Hollywood tonight, cementing its status as an Oscar frontrunner.

EXCLUSIVE: Lane 4 Entertainment has officially announced Stretched, a feature documentary that provides a revealing look at controversial billionaire Lululemon founder Chip Wilson. Stretched is directed and produced by Trish Neufeld (Dancing With Mom, Save Space Nugget) and executive produced by John Ritchie (65_RedRoses, The Love Crimes Of Gillan Guess) and Graem Luis (Day Of The Dead, The Amazing Race Canada). The film is currently in post-production.

EXCLUSIVE: Canadian streamer Crave has inked a long-term deal with Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE), taking first window rights to blockbuster films following their theatrical and home entertainment runs.

Deadline on Wednesday launched its streaming site for Contenders Film: Documentary, the award-season showcase that took place Sunday with creatives from 20 of the year’s buzziest non-fiction movies.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.