Oscar and BAFTA Nominated Documentary ‘Collective’ Emboldens Whistleblowers, Filmmaker Says

No matter which film takes home Best Picture Sunday night, that title will be the lowest grossing ever in Oscar history.

EXCLUSIVE: Triple Oscar nominee Tomm Moore has joined the creative team of The Inventor, the feature animation being helmed by Ratatouille writer Jim Capobianco.

Alexander Nanau, the Romanian director of Collective which is heading into the Oscars with both best documentary and best international feature nominations, is set to executive produce the newly-announced feature doc Klarsfeld, about French Nazi hunters Beate and Serge Klarsfeld.

BUCHAREST -- Seeing the day that her life changed forever played out on a big screen was an emotional moment for Tedy Ursuleanu.“I watched the film for the first time in this cinema," the 34-year-old told The Associated Press in an interview at Bucharest’s Elvire Popesco cinema. "The fire scenes at the beginning of the film when the pillar next to the stage starts burning — I felt the same intensity from the night I was there.

In his 92 years, African-American businessman Horace Bowers Sr.—one of the two main subjects of the Oscar-nominated short documentary A Concerto Is a Conversation—has faced many obstacles in his path. He’s always found a way around them.

When Judy Heumann—one of the main subjects of the Oscar-nominated documentary Crip Camp—was five years old in the early 1950s, her mother tried to register her for kindergarten in New York City. The staff took one look at Judy, who used a wheelchair as a result of polio, and denied her.

In the months after the death of George Floyd, the country started to take a hard look in the mirror. We asked: Was this a nation built on white supremacy? Do we police African-Americans differently? Were we excluding people from opportunities based on the color of their skin? Protestors hit the streets, athletes boycotted games, and we demanded accountability from our politicians.

Darius Marder’s Sound of Metal went into 2019’s Toronto International Film Festival without a distributor. Now, a year-and-a-half on, it’s a six-time Oscar nominee and perhaps the most hard-fought of all of this year’s crop of Best Picture candidates. Joe Utichi meets Marder and stars Riz Ahmed and Paul Raci to take stock of a film that transformed its key players in ways they hadn’t expected.

Also Read: Why 'My Octopus Teacher' Directors Brought in an 'Octopus Psychologist' for Their DocumentaryBradley explained that in the case of “Time,” her work with prison reform activist Fox Rich began as a short film, having agreed together on their reasons for telling the story of Rich’s fight to get her husband released from a 60-year sentence.

EXCLUSIVE: Following its Oscar nomination, Elvira Lind’s short film The Letter Room has been racking up the sales. The movie, which stars Oscar Isaac and Alia Shawkat, has sold to France and Germany (ARTE France), Spain (Telefonica), Denmark (TV2), Russia (Shot TV), Poland (New Europe Film Sales), Airlines (JetBlue) as well as an international deal with Kanopy for the educational circuit.

Despite previous outrage that streaming service Netflix could have films nominated for Oscar Awards, this year the site has proven once again that its movies can play with the big boys.

The Oscar-nominated filmmaking team behind the documentary Time are looking forward to a reunion at Union Station in Los Angeles, the main venue for this year’s Academy Awards. Director-producer Garrett Bradley and producers Lauren Domino and Kellen Quinn haven’t seen each other in person for a while, because of Covid-19.

NOMINATIONS AND WINNERS 2021

Following the devastating 2015 fire at the Colectiv nightclub in Romania, Collective director Alexander Nanau set out to undercover why the victims of the fire were dying at alarming rates months after the incident. What he uncovered was a deep network of corruption.

Fremantle has acquired international distribution rights to Oscar Peterson: Black and White, the feature-length documentary about the iconic jazz pianist being directed by Barry Avrich. The deal is for overseas rights excluding Canada on the film, which is underway on production. A fall 2021 release is planned.

EXCLUSIVE: WME has signed James Reed, the co-writer and director behind My Octopus Teacher, Netflix’s first original documentary from South Africa that is up for the Best Documentary Feature Oscar. It follows Foster as he free-dives in a cold underwater kelp forest in South Africa and develops a relationship with a wild common octopus and documents a year in the unusual friendship.

After being branded as “the enemy of the people” in recent years, both here and in some other countries, journalists may be surprised to find themselves portrayed as heroes in a number of recent documentaries, including an Oscar-contending film.

In the Oscar-nominated documentary short A Concerto Is a Conversation, acclaimed composer Kris Bowers traces a line from his family history to the premiere performance of his original concerto "For a Younger Self" at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in 2019. Following that line is Horace Bowers Jr., Kris Bowers' 91-year-old grandfather, who sits down with his grandson to tell the story of his journey out of the Jim Crow-era South in the pursuit of his American Dream.

Brent Lang Executive Editor of Film and MediaCatalin Tolontan wasn’t ready for his close-up.The Romanian sports journalist whose investigative work provides the spine of the Oscar-nominated documentary “Collective,” initially turned down director Alexander Nanau’s offer to capture him at work as he sought to expose widespread fraud and corruption.

One of the biggest takeaways from this year’s BAFTA nominations — aside from arguably the most diverse list in the awards’ history —was a clear dividing line between the British Academy and the Oscars. For the first time in years, it seemed that the array of BAFTA nominees weren’t simply a mirror image of those across the Atlantic.