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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It's hard to know exactly how to review something like The Invisible War, how to step back and look at it as a movie through the steady barrage of emotional devastation it presents. The stranger sitting next to me at my screening spent the latter half of the runtime sobbing into a fistful of tissues, and I couldn't blame her — the film, the latest documentary from the Oscar-nominated Kirby Dick (Outrage, This Film Is Not Yet Rated) presents a sickening chorus of accounts not just of rape but of institutional betrayal, of a system that's utterly failed to protect or serve those who've joined it.
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The Invisible War by director Kirby Dick and producer Amy Ziering is simply shocking. In this doc, which won the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival in January and screened at the recent Provincetown International Film Festival (where it also picked up an audience prize) the filmmaking duo expose a long-brewing scandal in the U.S. military. Sexual assault against both women and men has run rampant throughout the various branches of the military and even up the chain of command. It is, in fact, the chain of command that has, in part, allowed rape and other sexual assault to remain virtually hidden despite its ubiquity. The Invisible War blows the cover off this decades-old (or older) crisis with an emotional and devastating look at the victims of sexual assault and how it can be fixed.
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Critic faves Beasts of the Southern Wild and The House I Live In took top Grand Jury Prize honors tonight at the Sundance Film Festival, where the John Hawkes Oscar hopeful The Surrogate and Kirby Dick's The Invisible War nabbed this year's audience awards. Also earning Sundance 2012 kudos were the music doc Searching for Sugar Man, Mike Birbiglia's Sleepwalk With Me, and the Aubrey Plaza starrer Safety Not Guaranteed.
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Park City was eerily peaceful early this morning with nobody around and last night’s dusting of snow on the ground. Soon enough – by this afternoon, or this evening, or certainly tonight – that will all change as filmmakers, press and industry folks roll in and the dreaded promoters (“leveragers,” Sundance founder Robert Redford called them in his inaugural address today) pimp out this snowy mountain town like a toddler in a tiara. Appropriately, Redford pointed to the current hardships for filmmakers, and the world at large. “Times are hard and grim,” he acknowledged, later offering optimism. “Independent film is healthy. That doesn’t mean it’s easy.”
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