“The Dawn Wall,” “Free Solo,” “Hal,” “Into the Okavango,” “RBG,” “Three Identical Strangers” and “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” have been nominated as the best produced documentaries of 2018 by the Producers Guild of America, the PGA announced on Tuesday.
The winner will be announced on Jan. 19 at the 2019 Producers Guild Awards at the Beverly Hilton in Los Angeles.
“RBG,” “Three Identical Strangers” and “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” are the three top-grossing docs of 2018 and three of the top 30 nonfiction films of all time. “RBG” is about Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, “Three Identical Strangers” is about triplets who were separated at birth and reunited as adults and “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” is about the television host Mr. Rogers.
The last of those films has now been nominated for virtually every major documentary award this year, with nominations from the IDA Documentary Awards, the Cinema Eye Honors, the Gotham Awards and the Film Independent Spirit Awards, along with a nomination and win at the Critics’ Choice Documentary Awards.
“Free Solo” and “The Dawn Wall” are both chronicles of attempts to climb the El Capitan peak at Yosemite, with the former film being one of the year’s most honored docs. “Hal” tells the story of iconoclastic film director Hal Ashby, while “Into the Okavango,” by far the least known of the nominees and the only one not eligible for the documentary-feature Oscar, tells of the attempts to save the Okavango Delta in Africa.
The Producers Guild will announce nominees in additional categories in the coming weeks.