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Yahoo
01-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Albie Awards To Honor Oscar-Contending Documentaries From Raoul Peck, Geeta Gandbhir, and Brittany Shyne
Harlem's Maysles Documentary Center is giving recognition to three of this year's top nonfiction films with Oscar potential – Orwell: 2+2=5 from director Raoul Peck, The Perfect Neighbor directed by Geeta Gandbhir, and Sundance winner Seeds, directed by Britanny Shyne. The center will honor the films at the 6th annual Albie Awards dinner on September 24 at Ginny's Supper Club @ Red Rooster in New York City. More from Deadline 'Pee-Wee As Himself' Director Matt Wolf On His Emmy Noms, Battle With Paul Reubens, And Upcoming 'The Bold And The Beautiful' Doc Snubbed By Oscars, 'Will & Harper,' 'Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story' Score Multiple Emmy Nominations Doc Talk Podcast Debates Early Oscar Contenders: Who's Leading The Best Documentary Charge And Who Belongs In Contention 'To date the Albies have been an early predictor of top contenders for the Academy Awards and other significant honors,' notes Kazembe Balagun, executive director of Mayles Documentary Center. 'This year, we are excited to honor Raoul Peck's Orwell: 2+2=5, Geeta Gandbhir's The Perfect Neighbor, and Brittany Shyne's Seeds.' Peck's documentary, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May, examines the life and work of author George Orwell, with particular emphasis on the prescient quality of Orwell's dystopian masterpiece, 1984, published in 1949. The Perfect Neighbor, winner of the directing award for U.S. documentary at Sundance, uses police dash cam and bodycam footage to present the shocking case of Ajike Owens, an African American mother of four who was gunned down by her neighbor, a white woman named Susan Lorincz, in Ocala, FL in 2023. Shyne's Seeds won the Grand Jury Prize for U.S. Documentary at Sundance in January, and has gone on to earn honors at the San Francisco International Film Festival, Seattle International Film Festival, as well as Provincetown and RiverRun festivals. Using black and white cinematography, the director explores the experience of African American farmers in the South who cultivate land held by their families for generations. 'This year, with the chaotic state of security in the world, we focus on the crucial role of the arts celebrating the values that bring us together in community and the forces that divide us,' Balagun explains. 'The Albies this year look at a variety of timely topics: generational black farmers and the significance of owning land, how Stand Your Ground laws divide us and incite violence, and how our current times function in a playbook of global totalitarianism.' The Maysles Documentary Center, founded by legendary filmmaker Albert Maysles (1926-2015), 'fosters documentary film for a more equitable world.' Maysles' classic documentary, Grey Gardens — which he directed with his brother David Maysles, Ellen Hovde, and Muffie Meyer – is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. More on this year's honorees: ORWELL: 2+2=5. Academy award nominated filmmaker Raoul Peck's Orwell: 2+2=5 details the life of famed author George Orwell and uses Orwell's writings to draw lessons in our current political climate. The film premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival and is one of the very few political documentaries addressing our current moment that will get a substantial theatrical release this fall. Peck's I Am Not Your Negro screened at the Maysles Documentary Center in Harlem as part of its acclaimed Oscar-nominated run. Time magazine said 'ORWELL: 2+2=5 feels like the boldest documentary anyone could make right now' and called the film 'exhilarating.' 'Poignant and galvanizing' wrote The Hollywood Reporter. With echoes of Orwell's classic novel, 1984, the film illustrates the power of truth-twisting doublethink of media and government in totalitarian regimes. THE PERFECT NEIGHBOR. Winner of the Directing Award for U.S. Documentary at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival and coming to Netflix in the fall, The Perfect Neighbor explores the 2023 killing of Ajike Owens, a black woman, by her white neighbor in Florida, after a seemingly minor dispute. Using bodycam footage from dozens of police visits, the film bears witness to a tight-knit community navigating one neighbor's relentless harassment. But her hostility takes a sinister turn when it escalates into a fatal crime. The film explores the vulnerability and impact of the controversial Stand Your Ground gun laws when individuals feel emboldened by the law to act on their fear and prejudice. Roger Ebert wrote, 'I don't think there was a documentary in the Sundance program this year more buzzed about than Geeta Gandbhir's excellent The Perfect Neighbor.' SEEDS. Winner of the Grand Jury Award at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, Seeds is director Brittany Shyne's moving portrait of centennial farmers in the geographical south. Using lyrical black and white imagery, this meditative film examines the decline of generational black farmers and the significance of owning land. Through these inter-generational stories, we see the cycles of inequity and embedded racism that persist to this present day, and the signs of hope and renewal with younger generations of farmers. 'A languid, loving portrait of Black farmers in the South, Seeds is a mixture of celebration and lament,' wrote Variety. Best of Deadline 2025 TV Series Renewals: Photo Gallery 2025-26 Awards Season Calendar: Dates For Emmys, Oscars, Grammys & More Everything We Know About The 'Heartstopper' Movie So Far
New York Times
31-01-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
At Sundance, a Sense of Uprooting Onscreen and Off
If a festival can be summed up in one word, then the word for this year's Sundance Film Festival is weird. That was the adjective that drifted through my mind as I circled in and out of screenings, chatted with other attendees and scanned local headlines. Weird could apply to some of the selections in the event, which ends Sunday. But it wasn't so much the lineup that struck many us, it was the festival, the pre-eminent American showcase for U.S. independent cinema and beyond. The vibe felt off, we murmured, the energy muted. For good reason, too. The fires in Los Angeles County were still burning when Sundance opened on Jan. 23. Park City, Utah, is a long way from the Hollywood sign, but Sundance and the mainstream industry have always been codependents, and when the mainstream feels unsettled, you can feel the anxiety in the air. Making matters worse is that the conflagration in California is just the latest crisis facing the movie world, which continues to grapple with the aftershocks of the pandemic and back-to-back strikes, along with its self-inflicted wounds. Adding to this Great Movieland Unsettlement is Sundance's search for a new home. Last year, the festival announced that it was exploring alternatives to Park City, where it has been held for decades. Among the stated reasons is that the event has outgrown the resort town, which has a population of just over 8,200 and an infrastructure that remains ill-equipped to handle such a large annual inundation. Every year, tens of thousands of movie lovers swarm into Park City, straining resources and local patience. Now, after a search, Sundance has settled on three alternatives: Cincinnati; Boulder, Colo.; and Salt Lake City, where the festival already screens movies, with some events remaining in Park City. Questions about where Sundance will land percolated throughout this year's event, which features the usual great and good, bad and blah selections. Among the standouts is Geeta Gandbhir's documentary 'The Perfect Neighbor,' which tracks how friction between a white woman and her multiracial neighbors in Florida turned progressively heated and then horrifyingly lethal. Consisting largely of imagery culled from police body cameras and interrogation interviews, it offers up a horrifying look at everyday racial animus and stand-your-ground laws. It also underscores, as the white woman makes one 911 call after another, that there's nothing funny about the prejudices and pathologies of a so-called Karen. The documentary 'The Alabama Solution,' from Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman, makes similarly effective and sustained use of nontraditional source material. In this case, most of the visuals in 'Alabama' consist of cellphone videos that were surreptitiously shot by inmates documenting the gruesome conditions of Alabama's notoriously deficient prison system, as well as their own gutsy efforts to improve them. Like the body-cam material in 'The Perfect Neighbor,' the cellphone images in 'Alabama' are visually degraded yet prove hauntingly powerful because they're familiar and intimate. When the camera shakes as it scans a blood-slicked floor, it is partly because the inmate capturing this terrible scene is, too. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
