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Clayton Davis Senior Awards Editor Awards Circuit Column: It’s not just about “Barbenheimer” and biographical dramas. Awards voters need to look beyond the shiniest Oscar contenders to find under-heralded gems. From documentaries about musical greats to coming-of-age stories that brilliantly tap into the tribulations of being a tween, several movies deserve to be in the conversation for top prizes.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Variety is premiering the trailer (below) for feature documentary “Transition,” which follows Australian filmmaker Jordan Bryon, a trans man, as he embeds with a Taliban unit as they retake control of Afghanistan. The film, directed by Monica Villamizar and Bryon, will be released in the U.S. on March 26 by Gravitas Ventures.

The list of feature documentaries still in contention for the Oscars has been cut to 15 finalists, a brutal culling from a contingent of 167 qualifiers. The annual shortlist announcement leaves a handful of filmmakers celebrating, many more disappointed, and documentary watchers with much to debate. 

American Symphony, the Obamas-executive produced documentary about Grammy-winning musician Jon Batiste, scored a remarkable hat trick today as the Oscar shortlists were revealed, but a couple of documentary icons were left on the bench.

Michelle Obama made a surprise appearance at the New Orleans premiere of the documentary American Symphony to support the film she executive produced with husband Barack Obama!

Jamie Dornan is helping support his friend Matthew Heineman!

In 2020, musician and composer Jon Batiste won an Academy Award, a Golden Globe, a Grammy, and a BAFTA Film Award for co-composing Pixar’s “Soul.” Not to rest on his laurels in 2022, he dominated the Grammy Awards entirely with 11 nominations, the most of the year. The day the nominations were announced, however, Batiste’s partner, writer Suleika Jaoaud, went through her first round of chemotherapy.

SFFilm’s 9th Annual Doc Stories festival is getting underway, featuring a distinguished lineup of Oscar-contending nonfiction films.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor “Tinder Swindler” studio AGC Unwritten has sold U.S. rights to Monica Villamizar and Jordan Bryon’s feature documentary “Transition” to Gravitas Ventures. The film follows Australian filmmaker Jordan Bryon, a trans man, as he embeds with a Taliban unit as they retake control of Afghanistan.

The International Documentary Association announced its shortlists of features and shorts in the running for the 39th IDA Documentary Awards, a list as notable for what was left out as for what films made the cut.

Oscar-nominated director Matthew Heineman and late filmmaker Nancy Buirski will be honored at the Hamptons Doc Fest in New York next month.

Matthew Heineman’s documentary profiling Grammy and Oscar winning musician Jon Batiste and the medical struggles for his wife that have marked trying times in their marriage leads the pack of nominees for the 8th Annual Critics Choice Documentary Awards with six. The inspiring docu from Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground was picked up by Netflix after premiering and winning acclaim at the Telluride Film Festival last month. Not far behind are a trio of docus each with 5 mentions including 20 Days In Mariupol, Kokomo City, and Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie. And not to be ignored, this weekend’s boxoffice champ, Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour which landed a nomination as Best Music Documentary. The CCDA nod marks the first awards recognition for the film (however it is not eligible for a Documentary Oscar) which only just had its first premiere screening on Wednesday of last week and came in just under the eligibility wire.

Clayton Davis Senior Awards Editor Netflix’s “American Symphony,” which follows Grammy and Oscar winner Jon Batiste as he prepares for his performance at Carnegie Hall, leads the 2023 Critics Choice Documentary Award nominations with six, including best documentary feature and directing for Matthew Heineman. PBS’ “20 Days in Mariupol,” Magnolia Pictures’ “Kokomo City” and Apple Original Films’ “Still: A Michael J.

Clayton Davis Senior Awards Editor Matthew Heineman’s moving documentary feature “American Symphony” was recently acquired by Netflix after its debut at the Telluride Film Festival, cementing itself as one of the early frontrunners for the Oscars. Its main subject, “Soul” Oscar winner Jon Batiste, will now be in the race for best original song with the track “It Never Went Away.” Batiste sings the emotional number, which he co-wrote with Grammy-winning songwriter and producer Dan Wilson. Read: Variety’s Awards Circuit for the latest Oscars predictions in all categories.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic “Be kind, because everyone you meet is fighting a great battle” — that popular maxim (or some variation thereof) is often brought up in the context of remembering to have some sympathy for jerks. But it could also be applied to people whose lives seem too charmed to be true.

Addie Morfoot Contributor In his latest documentary, “American Symphony,” Oscar-nominated director Matthew Heineman delivers a portrait of two artists — Grammy winner and former “Late Show With Stephen Colbert” bandleader Jon Batiste and his wife, author Suleika Jaouad. Heineman is known for putting his life on the line to make documentaries about the Mexican drug wars (“Cartel Land”), the initial explosion of COVID-19 in the U.S.

Earlier this year, folks were obsessed over the Apple TV+ ads featuring Timothee Chalamet, which basically feature the actor lamenting over the fact that nearly every A-list actor has a project in the works for the streamer except him. Well, poor Timmy isn’t going to be happy to learn that Jessica Chastain is the latest to get an Apple TV+ project.

Fresh from playing country music star Tammy Wynette, Jessica Chastain is swapping the microphone for a laptop.

The PGA Awards announced its nominees for Outstanding Producer of Documentary Motion Pictures today, a list noted for a number of snubs and surprises. 

In military parlance, the term retrograde can mean several things, among them withdrawal from a war zone, “where all or part of a deployed force voluntarily disengages from the enemy.”

What narrative war films struggle to comprehend is the perspective of the veterans on the front line. The terror, the anxieties, and the bonds of brotherhood along the way.

Laura Poitras’s documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed appears to be on more solid ground as a possible Oscar frontrunner, after the release of DOC NYC’s influential shortlist of the year’s top nonfiction films.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic In early 2021, while Americans were focused on the transfer of power back home, daredevil director Matthew Heineman (“Cartel Land,” “City of Ghosts”) assembled a crew and flew to Afghanistan to check in on the status of America’s longest war. At that point, Osama bin Laden had been dead a decade, the Taliban was weakened but not defeated, and the U.S.-trained Afghan Army was holding its own fairly well — and yet, nearly 20 years in, there was still no end in sight for American involvement. That changed almost as soon as Heineman arrived, as the Biden administration made plans to pull out. In that moment, what might have been another business-as-usual desert war doc — with routine patrols, precisely targeted drone strikes and soldiers expressing their ennui — shifted to something audiences hadn’t seen before. The title, “Retrograde,” refers to the process by which military forces extricate themselves from conflict, removing or otherwise rendering useless the equipment they’d used to engage the enemy. For Heineman, that meant capturing all kinds of cinematic sights: A brawny soldier smashes a heap of computer monitors, helicopters airlift vehicles out, and things go boom as a team tosses all remaining ammo into a trench, douses it in gasoline and lights the pile with a well-aimed rocket. The Taliban won’t be using these bullets.

Matthew Heineman’s latest documentary, “Retrograde,” opens with a pan from left to right across the mountain ranges of Afghanistan. Audio clips overlay soundbites from four generations of Presidents discussing the American invasion of the Middle East, from the purposeful threat-neutralizing of the Dubya years to Obama-era fatigue to the wavering defeatism of Trump to Biden’s resolution for withdrawal.

ARMAGEDDON TIME (d. James Gray, U.S., 2022) BARDO, FALSE CHRONICLE OF A HANDFUL OF TRUTHS (d. Alejandro González Iñárritu, Mexico-U.S., 2022) BOBI WINE, GHETTO PRESIDENT (d.

FILM CATEGORIESOutstanding Nonfiction Feature: “Flee,” directed by Jonas Poher Rasmussen, produced by Monica Hellström and Signe Byrge Sorensen Outstanding Direction: “Procession,” Robert GreeneOutstanding Editing: “Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised),” Joshua PearsonOutstanding Production: “The First Wave,” Matthew Heineman, Jenna Millman and Leslie NorvilleOutstanding Cinematography: “Ascension,” Jessica Kingdon and Nathan TruesdellOutstanding Original Score: “Ascension,” Dan DeaconOutstanding Sound Design: “The Velvet Underground,” Leslie Shatz and Jahn SoodOutstanding Graphic Design/Animation: “Flee,” Kenneth LadekjærOutstanding Debut: “Ascension,” directed by Jessica KingdonOutstanding Nonfiction Short: “Three Songs for Benazir,” directed by Elizabeth Mirzaei and Gulistan MirzaeiAudience Choice Prize: “The Rescue,” directed by E.

When New York City became the epicenter of the country’s Covid outbreak in 2020, many residents—those of means, anyway—fled to second homes or other points far from the city. But not New York-based filmmaker Matthew Heineman. He suited up in PPE on the frontlines of the Covid battle.

Deadline has launched the streaming site for Contenders Film: Documentary, featuring all 25 panels from our Sunday event showcasing the filmmakers behind the buzziest nonfiction feature films of the awards season.

The First Wave director Matthew Heineman said his Covid documentary was both frightening and inspiring. Heineman followed medical personnel at Long Island Jewish Medical Center in the Queens borough of New York for four months in 2020. He spoke with Deadline’s Matthew Carey about the experience.

When the pandemic really hit the US hard in March 2020, people had no idea COVID would be a daily issue more than a year-and-a-half later. But here we are, still dealing with the very deadly illness long after the events documented in the new film “The First Wave” happened.

Tomris Laffly With his breathless, soul-piercing “The First Wave,” director Matthew Heineman makes a tough cinematic proposition.

Eiza González , the Mexican actress and producer, is now preparing for one for the most complex acting challenges of her career. González will play Mexican icon María Félix in a biopic directed by Matthew Heineman.

HamptonsFilm, the presenting organization of the Hamptons International Film Festival, said the festival’s 29th edition will return to in-person events and screenings in October.

EXCLUSIVE:  Baby Driver and Hobbs & Shaw actress Eiza González and Oscar nominated, Emmy winning director Matthew Heineman and Linden Entertainment have partnered with the Estate of iconic Mexican film star, Maria Felix, to bring her story to life. The team are currently looking for a Latin American writer to adapt Felix’s life for the screen.

If you don’t know the work of Academy Award®-nominated and Emmy-winning filmmaker Matthew Heineman (“Cartel Land,” “City Of Ghosts“), you really outta change that. A cameraman and cinematographer on top of being a documentarian, Heineman’s work is always super cinematic, super intimate, and seems even to blur the lines of fact and fiction; he gets into such personal spaces, it seems impossible that moments aren’t staged, but they aren’t.

Antonio Ferme editorNational Geographic Documentary Films has acquired Oscar-nominated director Matthew Heineman’s documentary “The First Wave,” which will be released theatrically by Neon later this year.Produced by Participant and Heineman’s Our Time Projects, the documentary will present a ground-level view inside a New York hospital amid the initial explosion of COVID-19.