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.
01.01.2021 - 21:45 / deadline.com
At the age of 83, Sergio Chamy got the opportunity of a long lifetime—the chance to go undercover to sleuth out possible skullduggery at an old folks home in his native Chile. The assignment would take all his observational skills and technical savvy.
There was only one problem.
“He was the worst spy in the world,” declares Maite Alberdi, director of The Mole Agent, a charmer of a film that documents Sergio’s sometimes inept but always earnest attempts to accomplish his secret mission. The Mole
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.
Filmmaker Jeff Orlowski has become known for his environmental documentaries Chasing Ice and Chasing Coral. But with The Social Dilemma he turns his attention to another issue with major implications for humanity: the damaging impact of social media.
To Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk, directors of the Netflix documentary Athlete A, the women who came forward to call out rampant sexual abuse within the USA Gymnastics program are “American heroes.”
Dick Johnson Is Dead director Kirsten Johnson has become all too familiar with the devastating impact of dementia. In 2007, her mother died of Alzheimer’s.
For his documentary The Human Factor, about the elusive quest for a peace agreement between Israelis and Palestinians, director Dror Moreh spent time with American diplomats involved in those negotiations. A lot of time.
Directors Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw didn’t necessarily get much sleep when they were making their Sony Pictures Classics documentary The Truffle Hunters, about superannuated men and their dogs in Italy who search for the subterranean delicacy.
Pete Souza, chief official White House photographer under presidents Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama, was a reluctant star of Dawn Porter’s documentary The Way I See It. “Pete is very private,” Porter says during Deadline’s Contenders Documentary award-season event. “He said ‘no’ multiple times.”
The killers of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi may have hoped his 2018 assassination would quickly fade from memory, but that hasn’t been the case. In fact, his journalistic legacy gets renewed attention in the Showtime documentary Kingdom of Silence.
Director R.J. Cutler was in the early stages of working on his Showtime documentary Belushi, about the late comedian John Belushi, when he experienced a breakthrough. It came courtesy of Judy Belushi-Pisano, John’s widow, who kept an archive of material at her home on Martha’s Vineyard.