Three Oscar nominees including Kirby Dick (The Invisible War), Malik Bendjelloul (Searching for Sugar Man) and David France (How to Survive a Plague) are among the five nominees for the Directors Guild of America's "Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Documentary" award.
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Fifteen docs advanced to the final stages for Oscar consideration Monday. While the films making the cut are, of course, notable, some others that did not are also. Today's winner of the New York Film Critics Circle for Best Non-Fiction film of 2012, Central Park Five, which made headlines recently because New York City officials attempted to gain access to the film's outtakes related to a pending civil suit, did not make the cut. Other high profile docs also left out were Toronto's West of Memphis and Sundance's Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present as well as Magnolia's The Queen of Versailles. While distributor IFC Films will likely be disappointed by the CP5 omission by the Academy, it will celebrate the inclusion of How To Survive a Plague, an AIDS doc that opened quietly, but to acclaim for its bravery. The distributor also had its Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry in the list.
[Related: Movieline's Central Park Five coverage]
Tribeca's Bully, which opened to controversy for its R-rating from the MPAA to pushback from distributor The Weinstein Company, also made the cut.
The 15 films are listed below in alphabetical order by title, with their production companies (information provided by AMPAS):
Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, Never Sorry LLC
Bully, The Bully Project LLC
Chasing Ice, Exposure
Detropia, Loki Films
Ethel, Moxie Firecracker Films
5 Broken Cameras, Guy DVD Films
The Gatekeepers, Les Films du Poisson, Dror Moreh Productions, Cinephil
The House I Live In, Charlotte Street Films, LLC
How to Survive a Plague, How to Survive a Plague LLC
The Imposter, Imposter Pictures Ltd.
The Invisible War, Chain Camera Pictures
Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God, Jigsaw Productions in association with
Wider Film Projects and Below the Radar Films
Searching for Sugar Man, Red Box Films
This Is Not a Film, Wide Management
The Waiting Room, Open'hood, Inc.
The New York Film Critics Circle Association certainly livened up the Oscar race today by choosing Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty as the Best Picture of 2012 and picking two real surprises in the Best Actress and Best Supporting Actor categories: respectively, Rachel Weisz for The Deep Blue Sea and Matthew McConaughey for two movies, Magic Mike and Bernie. more »
Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom won Best Feature tonight at the IFP Gotham Independent Film Awards tonight in New York, while David France's How to Survive a Plague took Best Director. Benh Zeitlin's Beasts of the Southern Wild, meanwhile won two awards including the Breakthrough Director prize and the inaugural Bingham Ray award. more »
How to Survive a Plague turned on the water-works and other outpourings of emotion when it debuted at Sundance earlier this year. Its subjects, the driving-forces behind AIDS activist groups ACT-Up (the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power) and TAG (Treatment Action Group), took matters into their own hands against a massive tide of fear, discrimination and government failure to deal with the disease that ravaged the gay community in the '80s and '90s. Director David France profiles the heroes of the movement who moved the needle in forging treatment and official recognition against extraordinary odds, and today Movieline has your first look at the official poster.
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Park City did indeed turn out to be a robust marketplace this year, with buyers snapping up over two dozen features and docs out of Sundance 2012. Ranging from genre pleasers to indie charmers to potential future Oscar picks and beyond – and veering from critical fest duds to overwhelming crowd favorites – the class of Sundance ’12 is an intriguingly mixed-but-mostly-promising bag of films that will be dotting the cinematic landscape in the year or so to come. Here’s an updated comprehensive look at what sold and which films you should be looking forward to.
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