The Academy’s Documentary Branch has been one of the fastest-growing in recent years, and one of the most international. Its global makeup is reflected in its nominations almost every year, with this year’s crop telling stories from China to India, Afghanistan to Denmark. (There are also two nominations set closer to home: one in New York City in the late ’60s, the other in New York state in the early ’70s.) And while shocks have come to be expected from the doc branch voters, as when they failed to nominate presumed frontrunners Won’t You Be My Neighbor? and Apollo 11, this year they threw in only mild surprises from a very deep field full of strong contenders.
Ascension
Jessica Kingdon’s elegant look at contemporary China flows without pause from a luxury hotel to a cryptocurrency mine to a bodyguard training school to a factory for sex dolls. “Some of the most striking locations were the easiest to get into, because we were clear about our intentions: We were making a documentary about China’s economic rise,” Kingdon said. “So it was very easy to film at the bodyguard school and the sex doll factory.” But, she cautioned, Ascension is looking beyond a single country. “The film isn’t strictly an indictment of China’s systems. It’s asking larger questions.”
Attica
Stanley Nelson and Traci Curry’s film about the Attica prison uprising in 1971 is both a troubling history lesson and an urgent and timely look at law enforcement brutality. It dispenses with historians and academics to focus on people who were on the ground at Attica and builds to a relentless sequence set to a recording of the state police’s eight-minute barrage of gunfire aimed at prisoners. “In that scene in particular, we bring to bear all of the tools we have as filmmakers to make that resonate with audiences and make them feel unsettled and disturbed by this orgy of violence,” said Nelson.
Flee
While most of Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s Flee is animated, including its interviews with an Afghan refugee who Rasmussen has known since the two were teenagers, some of it uses powerful archival material. That includes news footage of a decrepit house in Sweden where hundreds of refugees were forced to stay for months upon arriving in the country. “It was important for me to have these reminders that this is still a real horror that happened for so many people, that this is a true story,” Rasmussen said. “I spent so much time on YouTube looking up the history of the civil war, and I saw so many clips that I knew had to be in the film.”
Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)
When Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson began watching 40 hours of concert footage of the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival to make what has become the year’s most awarded documentary, he said he was looking for one thing: goosebump moments. “I thought, with 30 goosebump moments, I have something to start with,” he said. “But we couldn’t use 30—my first cut was three hours and 25 minutes long, and I was saying, ‘Can we make this a series?’ I was begging, but (the producers) told me it had to be two hours. ‘Don’t bore us, get to the chorus.’”
Writing With Fire
Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh’s film finds crusading journalists in the heart of rural India, where a newspaper staffed by women from the lowest caste fights prejudice, sexism and entrenched power. “The region is rife with violence against women and the minority community,” Thomas said. “For this group of women to be deeply rooted there doing the work they do makes them a cactus in the desert.”
Steve’s Perspective
If the early favorite in this category doesn’t get an early elimination the way Won’t You Be My Neighbor? did in 2019, it usually wins—which is good news for Summer of Soul, which has been on a roll ever since it premiered at Sundance, won the audience and jury prizes and landed a record deal for a Sundance doc. This category is the best chance for Flee to win one of its three nominations, and things can change quickly in this category (hey, My Octopus Teacher came out of nowhere last year), but Questlove has a pretty good shot at taking us back to the early 2010s, when three music docs won in a four-year stretch.
