10-part The Last Dance, about Michael Jordan's final season with the Chicago Bulls, competed in tough documentary series category The fifth and final night of the 2020 Creative Arts Emmys came to a close Saturday evening with two more documentary awards presented -- for Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Series and Exceptional Merit in Documentary Filmmaking. ESPN's The Last Dance was something of a surprise winner for series, claiming victory over the favored Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness. Director Jason Hehir accepted the award, thanking his team and Michael Jordan, the NBA Hall of Famer whose decision to allow access to behind the scenes material of his final championship season with the Chicago Bulls made the series possible. "My goal with any documentary is always to de-iconize the subject and to demystify the subject and make them into relatable human beings," Hehir told Nonfictionfilm.com heading into the Emmys. "And there may not be a more mystified or a deified figure, iconized figure than Michael Jordan, so that was always our goal and, hopefully, that's what resonated." The Last Dance became a mega-hit for ESPN, moved up from a planned June debut to April after the network realized fans deprived of live sports in the midst of the COVID-19 lockdown were likely to welcome a series about one of the greatest sports dynasties of all time. The 10-part series averaged six million viewers a night on ESPN. It had an encore run on ABC and has since been airing on Netflix, which co-produced the series. "I'm a sports fan myself, and I know that I was starved for content. There was a dearth of content out there, not just in games, but any new content in the sports universe," Hehir told me. "We were actually still working on the project up until the Thursday before the finale. So, it's just a bizarre time in the universe for this to take hold. It feels like a dream now." The Cave, the searing documentary about a woman running a subterranean hospital in a besieged area of Syria, won the award for Exceptional Merit in Documentary Filmmaking. Copenhagen-based producers Kirstine Barfod and Sigrid Dyekjær shared the prize. Feras Fayyad directed the film, earning an Oscar nomination earlier this year. "We're extremely honored to win this award and very grateful and happy," Dyekjær said in the Emmy press room after the award was announced. "We also see that the competitors that we had this year are incredible competitors; a lot of the other films are outstandingly produced as well." Moonlight Sonata: Deafness in Three Movements, Chasing the Moon, and One Child Nation were the other films nominated in the Exceptional Merit category, the only juried award in the Emmy nonfiction field. I asked the producers if they found it frustrating that the COVID-19 pandemic has essentially knocked Syria completely out of the news in the U.S. "Of course it's frustrating for us that people don't deal with Syria so much anymore," Dyekjær replied. "That means that we are even more happy to receive this award because this award also brings attention to the Syrian situation and it is an award that we want to give out to everybody fighting against dictators and against dictators killing their own people." Dyekjær continued, "[COVID-19] is also a huge danger in Syria right now. So not only is Syria trying to find its feet again in the war conflict that's actually going on still in some areas but they're also fighting against COVID-19 and against hunger. It's a devastating situation... We just hope that people will continue to watch stories coming out of Syria... where now the war night not be happening as increasingly big as it was when we shot The Cave, but still it's a country that is torn and is in conflict and is definitely not in a good situation and not with COVID-19 either. We just hope people will stay and watch and be part of the political discussion which is happening internationally." Bowing to the realities of the coronavirus pandemic, the Creative Arts Emmys were held as a virtual ceremony over five nights. Earlier in the week, Todd Douglas Miller's documentary Apollo 11 won three trophies -- for picture editing, sound editing and sound mixing.
American Factory, winner of the Academy Award in February, won directing honors for Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert. The Apollo, Roger Ross Williams' documentary about the legendary Harlem performing arts theater, won the Emmy for Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Special. Leah Remini: Scientology and the Aftermath won the Emmy for Outstanding Hosted Nonfiction Series or Special. Film by Rachel Leah Jones and Philippe Bellaïche profiles controversial lawyer reknowned for defending Palestinians charged in Israeli courts Attorney Lea Tsemel has made a career doing something very unpopular in her native Israel—defending the rights of Palestinians. Her clients have ranged from the prominent, like Hanan Ashrawi, the Palestinian scholar, activist and former peace negotiator, to the lesser known, like Salah Hamouri, a Palestinian man accused of plotting to kill an Israeli religious leader in 1985. "She's very determined... She's the kind of person who spoke truth to power before the term became trendy, and she'll continue to do so after fear makes it unfashionable," declares filmmaker Rachel Leah Jones. "She's very devoted to her work, to her cause, to her clients." She's a model of what it means to be invested in your society, to work for a larger good. Jones and Philippe Bellaïche directed the documentary Advocate, telling the story of Tsemel's quixotic effort to stick up for those who have dared to oppose the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian Territories. The film, which was shortlisted for the Academy Awards this past year, makes its debut Monday night on the PBS series POV. "Advocate shines a light on a character so steadfast in her conviction and systemic injustice in Israel-Palestine that she is willing to assume a most unenviable role to affect change," states POV executive producer Chris White. "For decades she has challenged the balance of power, questioning how the occupier can judge the occupied. This is a woman who stands for something and we are so proud to bring her story to American audiences on POV." In some ways Tsemel is a quintessential Israeli, "born in 1945 in what was then Palestine before the establishment of the state. So she was three years old when Palestine became Israel, if you will," Jones tells Nonfictionfilm.com. "[She] grew up in a very regular middle-class Ashkenazi family. Father was an architect, mother was a librarian. If she was destined to greatness, she could just as well have been a chief prosecutor or a high court justice." That she became an activist instead owes much to her experience serving in the Israeli army during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. "She saw things during the 1967 war really as the war was playing out that she couldn't really accept, that didn't line up with her understanding of right and wrong, and good and bad," Jones notes. "Once that critical process got propelled, there was no stopping her... She has said, 'I was faced with a choice after the '67 war. I had to choose my patriotism or my humanity, and I chose my humanity.' So I think that, at the end of the day, what people find treacherous is the fact that she doesn't limit her idea of human and civil rights merely to the group that she belongs to, and she sees it in universal terms." One of her early cases, in 1972, came defending a group of Arab and Israeli Jewish militants who fought against the occupation. In the film Tsemel says the defendants were tortured by Israeli authorities. "They all described the shackling, sleep deprivation, deafening music, interrogations day and night, and the beatings," Tsemel recounts. "It clearly was not the whim of a sole interrogator. It was systematic. There were instructions, like a user manual." Most of the clients Tsemel has defended over the years have given confessions obtained through torture, the attorney alleges. A rare exception involved the recent case of a 13-year-old boy accused of attempted murder. Despite harsh tactics by interrogators, he did not crumble under questioning, earning the admiration of Tsemel, who took on his case. "What captivated her almost more than anything else--and this is our interpretation--is how he withstood his interrogation," Jones observes. "Palestinian [defendants] in the Israeli system, be it the military or civilian courts, basically reach trial with a signed confession, whether it's a true or false confession. Meaning that, to a large extent, the trial has been determined in the interrogation room." Much of the documentary focuses on Tsemel's defense of the 13-year-old, and her struggle with whether to accept a plea bargain for a reduced sentence. Even absent a confession, winning freedom for a Palestinian accused of harming an Israeli is almost certainly a losing battle. "She really tries to fight it out each time as if she can have her day in court or they can have their day in court," Jones comments, "despite the fact that she knows better than any of the rest of us that she always loses." For defending Palestinians accused resisting the occupation, many of Tsemel's countrymen have labeled her a traitor. Jones and Bellaïche think there's a better term for her—chutzpahdik. It's sometimes defined as being "impudent or brazen." But the filmmakers define the word this way: "That means somebody ballsy, somebody gutsy," says Jones. "Chutzpah--she has a lot of chutzpah." It took some chutzpah for the filmmakers to direct a movie about Tsemel, who is among the most hated people in Israel. But the film was a big hit when it played in that country, and it earned top documentary awards at the DocAviv Film Festival in Tel Aviv, the Moscow Jewish Film Festival, as well as festivals in Thessaloniki, Greece and Krakow, Poland. Bellaïche and Jones were nominated as outstanding producers at the PGA Awards earlier this year and Advocate also earned Best Director and Best Feature Documentary nominations at the International Documentary Association Awards in Los Angeles last December. I spoke with the filmmakers on the red carpet there about that recognition: Film by Bill and Turner Ross competed at Sundance as a documentary but it straddles line between fiction and nonfiction One of the most remarkable "documentaries" of the year isn't really a documentary at all, at least by traditional standards. Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets, directed by brothers Bill and Turner Ross, takes place in a Las Vegas dive bar called the Roaring 20s. It's closing down forever and on its final day in business, hard-drinking patrons must come to terms with what the place means to them--perhaps the only place where they feel understood or welcome. Here's the thing, though--there is no Roaring 20s bar in Vegas. The film was shot in New Orleans at a bar of that name, and the characters in it were found through a selection process more typical of a Hollywood production. "It's a collection of people that we met throughout our lives, as well as a lot of bar casting," Bill Turner explains in an interview included in press notes for the film. "We went around to I don't know how many bars here in New Orleans." Adds Turner Ross, "We did a dozen casting sessions. We just sat and talked to people and we got about half the bar through that." It can just be a portrait, it can be a hangout movie, it can be an essay on the zeitgeist of contemporary America, it can be a movie about alcoholism, about pipe dreams like The Iceman Cometh. This filmmaking approach wouldn't qualify as out of the ordinary, except the Sundance Film Festival, where Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets premiered, placed the film in U.S. Documentary Competition. The catalogue description written by Sundance programmers offered next to no hint about the nature of the film, short of what appears, in retrospect, as a cryptic reference to its "premise." "In the shadows of the bright lights of Las Vegas, it's last call for a beloved dive bar known as the Roaring 20s," the Sundance program read. "Its regulars, a cross section of American life, form a community—tight-knit yet forged in happenstance, teetering between dignity and debauchery, reckoning with the past as they face an uncertain future. That’s the premise, at least; the reality is as unreal as the world they're escaping from." According to a piece in the LA Times, it wasn't the Ross Brothers' idea to submit the film as a documentary. They were "petitioned" to do it by Sundance programmers. "We said, 'OK, if this is what you want to do, let’s have a conversation about what we actually did here, because we’re not gonna lie about anything. That’s bull---- and gets in the way of what we’re trying to do,'" Turner told the LA Times. Sundance programmer Harry Vaughn explained to the Times why the festival chose to categorize the film as a documentary. “[I]t constructs situations in order to invite a level of chaos and candor that feels more fitting for the nonfiction space," Vaughn is quoted as saying. ”We were fascinated by the boundaries they pushed in ‘Bloody Nose,’ and how they playfully confront and subvert our assumptions of what truth and reality should look like in film... There’s real life, real scenarios happening in ‘Bloody Nose,’ much of it in real time. It simply exists within a constructed setting. It pushes us to consider what the nonfiction sphere can look like in the most unconventional of ways.” Over two weeks ago I asked the Sundance press office for a statement on the decision to program the film as a documentary; I have yet to receive official comment. Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets was released this weekend in virtual theaters (meaning the public can see it), first through Film at Lincoln Center then "followed by BAM, Laemmle, and Nationwide via Alamo Drafthouse and others," according to the film's PR team [more information available at Altavod]. A series of one-day only screenings on July 8 benefitted the United States Bar Guild Foundation's "Bartender Emergency Assistance Program COVID-19 Relief Fund." It would be a shame if the question of whether the film constitutes a work of fiction or nonfiction were to detract from what it certainly is, in my opinion: a stunning cinematic experience. Rarely in film have viewers been exposed to such an intimate and empathetic portrayal of people for whom drinking is a way of life. To me, it evoked Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh, the definitive theatrical exposition of barfly self-delusion. I was therefore amazed at the coincidence, while watching Bloody Nose, to see one of the main characters, Michael, toting around a Library of America copy of O'Neill's collected works. This was before I realized the film was not exactly a documentary. Michael reading O'Neill was no coincidence. "I saw The Iceman Cometh on Broadway when I was nine years old and it has stuck with me my entire life," Turner told me at Sundance. "That's the way we wanted this film to function, on many levels. It can just be a portrait, it can be a hangout movie, it can be an essay on the zeitgeist of contemporary America, it can be a movie about alcoholism, about pipe dreams like The Iceman Cometh. And that's what really fascinated me, seeing that as a child, well here's this adult world that is ostensibly about these people who drink in a bar but there's so much more going on here. Why are they all in here and why can't they get out? What are they representing? That has always stuck with me." Fittingly, sometime actor Michael Martin, a key participant in the film, first came to the attention of the Ross Brothers in another O'Neill production. (In one of the film's most striking lines, Michael informs the bar denizens that he waited to become an alcoholic until after he failed at his career). "I saw him in Long Day's Journey Into Night probably in like 2012 and he stuck with me," Bill recalled. "So when we started discussing this project I immediately thought of him for this. He's a working actor and was willing to go on this ride with us." The "ride" apparently involved presenting cast members with a general scenario and then letting them take it from there. The Ross's described their approach in a conversation with Eric Hynes, curator of the Museum of the Moving Image, a transcript of which was included in the film's press notes. "We actually dressed a bar to be what we wanted it to be. But we also choreographed the space," Turner explained to Hynes. "At 3 o'clock in the afternoon, Jeopardy comes on. I imagine everybody's gonna turn to watch Jeopardy, and yes, they do, and what will they say during it? Or the music, or who's coming [into the bar] when, and why. We were trying to elicit these dynamic reactions. The characters were unaware -- the choreography was hidden and the set was closed. So they're walking into a space just as if they were walking into a bar and they know nothing else, and what happens on the TV happens on the TV." Turner continued, "We created this framework, these interjections of stimuli to try to provoke these interactions, to try to create scenarios that we knew could be dynamic. And then as it builds, we started introducing new characters, two people then tell their story to a third. Three people are then the regulars. It becomes four, it becomes five, six, and seven arrive together. And all of a sudden they have all of these stories and they have their positions and they have a history, even if it's brief. And so as we got further into it, these people take ownership of the space. And it becomes their role that they're creating." The Ross Brothers say they shot the film over three days with a budget of $10,000 (most of which went toward renting the bar). When I spoke with them at Sundance I was unaware the film was anything other than a straightforward vérité documentary, and the brothers probably assumed I was completely up to speed on the nature of the production (I neglected to read the press notes before the interview, an occupational hazard of keeping pace amidst the craziness of Sundance). They told me the main action was filmed in a single, lengthy day, all of it shot by the two brothers. "It was an 18-hour shoot, so, yeah, we were just dancing around the bar," Turner remembered. "[Bill] sat at one end and I sat at the other and if something really interesting was down here we both get down there for it. But really the tough part was not covering it--the tough part was constructing it in the edit, spatially making sense of where were people were at any time, their dramatic threads. The shoot itself it had an energy to it that we just had to follow." Bill added, "We had mikes on just about everybody and then mikes up and down the bar, just tucked away throughout the entire space. I think there were 14 different channels of audio during the shoot and then our poor sound mixer was locked away in a closet in the back.. trying to make sense of all of it. It was a long day for him." The project gestated over the course of a decade.
"We've been thinking about iterations of this since 2009 when we first scouted, shot some stuff in Vegas," Turner noted. "The idea stayed with us but evolved and became less about a street movie in Vegas and became much more about this idea of seeing a world within four walls [in] what is ostensibly an oasis, in the shadow of another oasis [Vegas], which is itself within America, which is this oasis." At the time I spoke with the filmmakers, Bloody Nose didn't have a distribution plan. But the brothers hoped the film would reach a wider audience--a hope that now is being fulfilled. "It is a different type of film but I think it is a film that many different people can respond to," Turner told me back in January. "It's not just for the intellectual, film-literate crowd. I think it is something that can connect to people in a broad sense. We had a man from Switzerland come up to us and say how much this reminded him of home. We had an older woman who said, 'I may not look like it, but I'm one of those people [in that bar] and I've been in that place.' We've had young people respond to it in a way that is surprising to me. Do you know these spaces? What does this represent to you? So I hope we're given the opportunity to allow many different people to see it because I think the response can be myriad and interesting." Exclusive: Watch Clip From Dynamic Slam Poetry Doc 'Don't Be Nice' Ahead of DVD, VOD Debut [Video]7/8/2020 Young poets of color confront systemic racism, police violence, sexuality and gender in timely, powerful film Five young slam poets of color take on some of the most urgent issues of today in the dynamic documentary Don't Be Nice, coming to DVD July 14 and to EST/VOD on July 21. Pre-orders are now being accepted for the film directed by Max Powers and produced by Nikhil Melnechuk and Cora Atkinson. The documentary follows members of New York's Bowery Poetry Club as they compete in the National Poetry Slam, an event that has been held annually since 1990. Under the tutelage of coaches Lauren Whitehead and Jon Sands, the group of African-American, Afro-Hispanic and queer writers transforms their experiences into performance pieces. Joys, traumas, the struggle to survive in a society plagued by system racism and police violence against people of color, are all reflected in their work. The living experience is an archive and we can access it depending on how courageous we are. The documentary was filmed well before the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, but it is haunted by the deaths of other African-American men at the hands of police, including Philando Castile and Freddie Gray. "Last night I went to this party," poet Joël François recites in one piece, "and here I am in this room, all these black people, and it is our music, our celebration, there's so much beauty and so much joy and so much to live for. But also the double consciousness of understanding that outside of these walls there is a world that is trying to choke that life out of us. And I can die in circumstances that I've already played out in my head over and over and over." Nonfictionfilm.com is pleased to exclusively premiere a clip from the documentary. Continue reading below for more on the film. Don't Be Nice won the Socially Relevant Documentary Award earlier this year at Film Threat's Award This! festival. It won Best Documentary at the 2019 Vail Film Festival, along with prizes at the Macon Film Festival, Middlebury New Filmmakers Festival, and Atlanta DocuFest. The documentary boasts compelling characters -- poets Ashley August, Timothy DuWhite, Sean "MEGA" DesVignes, Noel Quiñones and the aforementioned Joël François -- and some remarkable slam poetry performances. In one of them, "Google Black," four members of the Bowery group champion the achievements of Black artists, demanding that they be valued in their own right and not as some sort of "less than" niche within white-dominated culture. Don't Be Nice also features exceptional photography by Peter Eliot Buntaine and music by Khari Mateen. The film will be available on the following digital platforms July 21:
ESPN Makes Strong Bid for Emmy Nominations with Michael Jordan, Lance Armstrong Documentaries7/6/2020 The Last Dance and LANCE were moved up on ESPN schedule to feed sports-starved fans The ESPN series 30 for 30 has become a major player in the documentary space, earning an Academy Award for the 2016 film O.J.: Made in America and an Emmy nomination last year as Outstanding Nonfiction Series. It's a strong contender for Emmy recognition again this year on the strength of acclaimed documentaries about two of the most celebrated athletes of all time, Michael Jordan and Lance Armstrong. The Last Dance, directed by Jason Hehir, looks at the Chicago Bulls' final run at an NBA championship with Jordan as the team's centerpiece; LANCE, directed by Marina Zenovich, goes deep with the disgraced cyclist seven years after he finally publicly admitted to taking performance enhancing drugs. I'm a sports fan myself, and I know that I was starved for content. The Last Dance was supposed to begin airing in June, which would have made it eligible for Emmy consideration next year. But ESPN, recognizing sports fans would respond favorably to some new content in the absence of live sports programming, wisely moved up the airdate to April. The 10-part series became a huge ratings hit. "I'm a sports fan myself, and I know that I was starved for content," Hehir tells Nonfictionfilm.com. "There was a dearth of content out there, not just in games, but any new content in the sports universe." He attributes the series' success to several factors, in addition to the fix for sports lovers. "Michael's name... that resonates with people on the other side of the planet. It's not just on both coasts and in the Midwest and in the South here in the States, it's all over the world," he notes. "And also I think that we were blessed with such a rich array of characters whose stories we told. It's a basketball story, of course, but we tried to make it about a family, a dysfunctional family, that came together to achieve extraordinary things." The series also provided a welcome escape from COVID headlines. "I think that in such a scary time, nostalgia is safe, it's comfortable, it's a warm place to go back to," Hehir observes. "And this documentary is really a celebration of not just the Bulls and the Jordan era, but of nostalgia, and we tried to imbue this as much as we could with '80s and '90s nostalgia, right from watching the fashion that these guys wore off the court to listening to the music that they were listening to... Nostalgia is a warm, safe place, and [The Last Dance] certainly checked the box." Related: |
AuthorMatthew Carey is a documentary filmmaker and journalist. His work has appeared on Deadline.com, CNN, CNN.com, TheWrap.com, NBCNews.com and in Documentary magazine. |