USA: The Academy Awards gets political with the 2008 nominees for best feature documentary films

Record ID: 477599

  • Title: USA: The Academy Awards gets political with the 2008 nominees for best feature documentary films
  • Date: 26th February 2008
  • Summary: BEVERLY HILLS, CALIFORNIA, UNITED STATES (FEBRUARY 20, 2008) (REUTERS) (SOUNDBITE) (English) CHARLES FERGUSON, SAYING: "There were many things that shocked me, not all of which could be put in the film simply for reasons of time -- twelve million dollars in hundred dollar bills airlifted to Iraq with no accounting controls, an Iraqi defence minister personally stealing a
  • Embargoed: 12th March 2008 12:00
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  • Location: Usa
  • Country: USA
  • Reuters ID: LVA5645SD1JD6VQPWCXJYQ2F9CLQ
  • Story Text: The Academy Award nominated documentary films and their directors are honoured at a gala event held by the International Documentary Association in Beverly Hills. Nominees for this year's best documentary feature films are mostly political, with three of them about different aspects of the war in Iraq, and another directed by a filmmaker famous for his political views, Michael Moore.
    The filmmakers nominated for the 2008 Academy Award for best documentary feature film gathered in Beverly Hills on Wednesday (February 20) for an annual gala event held by the International Documentary Association (IDA). Unlike last year, when "An Inconvenient Truth" about Al Gore's slide show on global warming was the favourite and duly won, there is no front-runner for who will take home the coveted prize at Sunday's Oscar telecast. There is one theme that carries through most of the films this year, which is indicative of the times, with wars taking place in Iraq and Afghanistan and the 2008 presidential election well under way, and politics seemed to be the talk of the evening at the IDA gala.

    "Highly political -- hot social issues, obviously the war, out of the five features, three have to do with the Iraq war, and one of the shorts is not about the war but it happens to take place in Iraq, and be one of the subjects from his previous film, 'Iraq in Fragments.' It's the issues that are troubling our times right now, the major issues, and ones that sometimes we don't want to deal with, but they do," says Sandra Ruch, Executive Director of the IDA.
    Attending the event was previous Academy Award-winner Michael Moore, whose film "Sicko" looks at the failure of the United States to provide health care to millions. Moore is well known for his political views, with his acceptance speech during the 2003 Oscar telecast making him famous world-wide, and his 2004 film "Fahrenheit 9/11," which took a highly critical view of the Bush administration and the war in Iraq.

    "Not much shocks me anymore, not in this country," says Moore when asked whether he found anything he unearthed during filming "Sicko" to be particularly shocking, "the level of my disappointment is so profound, I don't know how we're going to crawl out of the hole we've dug ourselves in. I'm hoping we can do that -- a lot of good people in this country, and I've got to believe that we'll find our way."
    Alex Gibney's "Taxi to the Dark Side" laments America's use of torture in prisoner interrogations at Guantanamo Bay prison camp and in Iraq and Afghanistan following the September 11 attacks. The film, which has just been released, came at an opportune time with public debate raging over "waterboarding" -- a simulated drowning technique the CIA admits to having used during interrogations since 2001.

    "But I will tell you that actually, there were far worse images that we didn't show, and we had to go through a very difficult process in the cutting room, where we would see this brutality day in and day out, and I think it's a kind of a vivisection of the corruption of the American character that I think is haunting, whether we recognize it now or we look back at this film five years from now, and see at a moment in time where we let ourselves go over to this dark side," says Gibney, on the photos shown of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in "Taxi to the Dark Side."
    Charles Ferguson's "No End in Sight" documents how the military strategy of a few powerful men led to a deepening conflict, and how the US occupation in Iraq was poorly handled from the beginning.

    "There were many things that shocked me, not all of which could be put in the film simply for reasons of time -- twelve million dollars in hundred dollar bills airlifted to Iraq with no accounting controls, an Iraqi defence minister personally stealing a million and a quarter of it, the members of the occupation, the people running the occupation, most of them not having telephones or email for the first three months of the occupation, it's hard to choose what the most shocking thing is," says Ferguson.

    "No End in Sight" is second at the box office among nominees, grossing 1.4 million US dollars, with "Sicko" being the most successful of the nominated documentaries at U.S. box offices, grossing 25 million US dollars, the third largest ever for a documentary of its kind.
    As is often the case in documentaries, normal people -- not stars -- get a platform to make themselves heard, like the soldiers in Richard Robbins' "Operation Homecoming," based on a writing project by the National Endowment for the Arts.

    "Our generation, as opposed to my grandparents' generation, is very disconnected from what it actually means to have to serve in a war, to actually be a soldier. And we talk a lot about this war in very abstract terms that almost never seem to cross over to the real human, flesh and blood experience of living through this, and these are our countrymen, they're going to come back and be our friends and neighbours, and I think we've come a long way since Vietnam in terms of not blaming the warrior for the war, but I don't know how much progress we've made in really being open to understanding what these experiences are," says Robbins.
    The Academy Award for best documentary film will be announced Sunday, February 26.
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