We the Animals

Cutting his teeth in the docu and short form, Jeremiah Zagar (Emmy-nominated for 2014’s Captivated: The Trials of Pamela Smart) shot We the Animals in summer of 2016 and benefitted from a slew of support in Sundance Institute’s Feature Film Creative Producing Labs, Sundance Directing & Screenwriting Labs, post-prod coin (Sffs) and support from Cinereach, this is a true first foray into fiction filmmaking.

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Emmy-nominated Jeremiah Zagar last introduced Sundance auds to his 2014 docu look into a prosecution from the masses in Captivated: The Trials of Pamela Smart (U.S.

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Whoopsy. I forgot to share this list... Herewith the films that could be up for Best Documentary Feature this year. We'll get a finalist of 15 at some point next month followed by 5 nominees in January "until we crown A Winnah!" If we've reviewed the titles, you'll notice their pretty color which you can then click on to read about them. The magic of the internet. You can also see the animated and documentary Oscar charts here.

The 134 Semi-Finalists

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Afternoon of a Faun: Tanaquil Le Clercq, Ai Weiwei: The Fake Case, Algorithms, Alive Inside, All You Need Is Love, Altina, America: Imagine the World without Her, American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs, Anita, Antarctica: A Year on Ice, Art and Craft, Awake: The Life of Yogananda, The Barefoot Artist, The Battered Bastards of Baseball, Before You Know It, Bitter Honey, Born to Fly: Elizabeth Streb vs. Gravity, Botso The Teacher from Tbilisi,...

One hundred thirty-four features have been submitted for consideration in the Documentary Feature category for the 87th Academy Awards. A shortlist of 15 films will be announced in December.

The submitted features, listed in alphabetical order, are:

“Afternoon of a Faun: Tanaquil Le Clercq”

“Ai Weiwei: The Fake Case”

“Algorithms”

“Alive Inside”

“All You Need Is Love”

“Altina”

“America: Imagine the World without Her”

“American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs”

“Anita”

“Antarctica: A Year on Ice”

“Art and Craft”

“Awake: The Life of Yogananda”

“The Barefoot Artist”

“The Battered Bastards of Baseball”

“Before You Know It”

“Bitter Honey”

“Born to Fly: Elizabeth Streb vs. Gravity”

“Botso The Teacher from Tbilisi”

“Captivated The Trials of Pamela Smart”

“The Case against 8”

“Cesar’s Last Fast”

“Citizen Koch”

“CitizenFour”

“Code Black”

“Concerning Violence”

“The Culture High”

“Cyber-Seniors”

“DamNation”

“Dancing in Jaffa”

“Death Metal Angola”

“The Decent One”

“Dinosaur 13”

“Do You Know What My Name Is?...

Citizenfour, Life Itself, Red Army, Warsaw Uprising among long-list contenters for the 87th Academy Awards.

The Salt Of The Earth, Happy Valley, Jodorowsky’s Dune, Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me, Food Chains and Point And Shoot are also named.

The submitted features, listed in alphabetical order, are:

20,000 Days On Earth

Afternoon Of A Faun: Tanaquil Le Clercq

Ai Weiwei: The Fake Case

Algorithms

Alive Inside

All You Need Is Love

Altina

America: Imagine The World Without Her

American Revolutionary: The Evolution Of Grace Lee Boggs

Anita

Antarctica: A Year On Ice

Art And Craft

Awake: The Life Of Yogananda

The Barefoot Artist

The Battered Bastards Of Baseball

Before You Know It

Bitter Honey

Born To Fly: Elizabeth Streb vs. Gravity

Botso The Teacher From Tbilisi

Captivated The Trials Of Pamela Smart

The Case Against 8

Cesar’s Last Fast

Citizen Koch

Citizenfour

Code Black

Concerning Violence

The Culture High

Cyber-Seniors

Damnation

Dancing In Jaffa

Death Metal Angola

The...

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has released its list of 134 film vying for the Best Feature Documentary Oscar at the 87th Annual Academy Awards in February. A number of the nonfic hopefuls have yet to get their required Los Angeles and New York qualifying releases. Those that don’t will be cut from the contention. A shortlist of 15 films will be announced in December. Oscar noms will be revealed January 15, and ABC will broadcast Hollywood’s Big Night live on February 22 from the Dolby Theatre.

Here are the docu feature submissions:

Afternoon of a Faun: Tanaquil Le Clercq

Ai Weiwei: The Fake Case

Algorithms

Alive Inside

All You Need Is Love

Altina

America: Imagine the World without Her

American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs

Anita

Antarctica: A Year on Ice

Art and Craft

Awake: The Life of Yogananda

The Barefoot Artist

The Battered Bastards of Baseball...

One hundred thirty-four features have been submitted for consideration in the Documentary Feature category for the 87th Academy Awards®. Several of the films have not yet had their required Los Angeles and New York qualifying releases. Submitted features must fulfill the theatrical release requirements and comply with all of the category's other qualifying rules in order to advance in the voting process. A shortlist of 15 films will be announced in December. Films submitted in the Documentary Feature category also may qualify for Academy Awards in other categories, including Best Picture, provided they meet the requirements for those categories. The 87th Academy Awards nominations will be announced live on Thursday, January 15, 2015, at 5:30 a.m. Pt in the Academy's Samuel Goldwyn Theater. The Oscars® will be held on Sunday, February 22, 2015, at the Dolby Theatre® at Hollywood & Highland Center® in Hollywood, and will be televised live by the ABC Television Network. The Oscar...

Wednesday morning, the International Documentary Association announced its nominees and select winners for the 2014 Ida Awards, an annual tribute to the best-of-the-best of non-fiction film and television. Pertinent to award season are the Best Feature contenders, including Lara Poitras’ recent hit “Citizenfour” “Point and Shoot,” an American filmmaker’s look inside Libyan prisons, “Finding Vivian Maier,” a portrait of the posthumously legendary photographer, Wim Wenders and Juliano Ribeiro Salgado's artist profile “The Salt of the Earth,” and Nick Broomfield’s verite serial killer investigation, “Tales of the Grim Sleeper.” Unlike years past, all five films look like viable Best Documentary candidates come Oscar time, making the Ida Awards even more influential. Past winners include “The Square” (2013), “Searching for Sugar Man” (2012), “Nostalgia for Light” (2011), and “Waste Land” (2010). For his work founding the Sundance Institute and producing documentaries through Sundance Productions, the Ida Awards will honor Robert Redford with its career achievement award.

The International Documentary Association (Ida) announced nominations for the 2014 Ida Documentary Awards today, with awards being bestowed December 5th at the Paramount Theatre on the studio lot. The top films nominated in the best feature category include the critically-acclaimed Citizenfour from filmmaker Laura Poitras about Edward Snowden and the state of surveillance of civilians post 9/11 which has been enjoying a theatrical run and Nick Broomfield’s Tales Of The Grim Sleeper about the serial killer who terrorized South Central Los Angeles over 25 years. In the limited series category is Playtone’s CNN doc The Sixties, among others. Best episodic include Oprah Winfrey’s Master Class and HBO’s Vice exec produced by Bill Maher (and others). In addition, Robert Redford will receive the Career Achievement award from the Ida.

Winners in the Best Feature and Best Short categories are selected by Ida’s international membership. Screening committees of industry professionals based in New York City,...

If you’ve already binge-watched every critically acclaimed show out there and are wondering what to do next, TV critic Melissa Maerz has a few suggestions. Her column, “What I’m Watching Now,” is devoted to the best underhyped series on television (or Amazon, or Netflix, or whatever iDevice you’re using), whether they’re just premiering or have been lingering on your friends’ season pass queues for years.

Why do we love to watch pretty girls suffer?

I thought about that question a lot while watching Captivated: The Trials of Pamela Smart, a fascinating documentary that airs August 18 on HBO.

Maybe you think you know what Woody Allen did or didn't do in that summerhouse all those years ago. Maybe you look at his history -- shacking up with a Stuyvesant high school girl in the late '70s; marrying his longtime partner's adopted daughter in the '90s -- and simply know, deep down, that the man who would commit these skeevy but consensual acts with young women must also be capable of committing the vilest of all nonconsensual ones with girls far younger still. Or maybe you know the opposite: Because he's the smart, funny dude who made Annie Hall he couldn't possibly have done it. If you're certain of anything but the impossibility of knowing for sure, you really should watch Jeremiah Zagar's Captivated, a fascinating and unsettli...

Post-O.J. Simpson, we know that mass media coverage of a case can seriously affect its outcome. But in 1990, when attractive young Pamela Smart was on trial for persuading three teen boys to shoot her husband, and her case became the first televised trial in history, this was all unmined territory.Is there such a thing as “innocent before proven guilty” when a scandalous case has been splashed all over tabloids and television screens -- before it even reaches trial? As filmmaker Jeremiah Zagar points out in his incisive documentary “Captivated: The Trials of Pamela Smart,” which premiered January 17 at Sundance, Smart’s case had a sinfully delicious narrative that an entire nation couldn’t help but be, well, captivated by: The gorgeous woman who seduces innocent younger men into a nefarious plot. As author Joyce Maynard says in the film (Maynard fictionalized Smart’s tale into the novel “To Die For,...

It’s that time again. The biggest American film festival is upon us, and this year the Ioncinema crew will be descending on Park City with eight feet on the ground and eight eyes on Park City’s various and plentiful screens. Eric Lavallee, Nicholas Bell, Caitlin Coder and I will be covering just about every inch of this year’s festival here at Ioncinema.com, as well as on that ever increasingly vibrant instanews network – Twitter. Be sure to follow @ioncinema and, as stated above, my personal handle @Rectangular_Eye, as we’ll be tweeting throughout the festival with breaking news, reviews, and sightings, all the while trying to keep up with the massive amount of content sure to be coming from this year’s Sundance filmmakers themselves, most of which have their own Twitter accounts and are listed at length below (minus the world & short programs). Whether you...

Part two in this year’s Sundance Twitterverse series, we are bringing you direct contact with most of next year’s Oscar short list. No one on this list is repped more than the No No: A Dockumentary (@dockumentary) crew, who are all sporting profile pics from the film on their feeds.

U.S. Documentary Competition

Alive Inside: A Story of Music & Memory – @AliveInsideFilm

Editor Manuel Tsingaris – @MTsingaris

Composer Itall Shur – @ItaalShur

All the Beautiful Things – @ATBThingsMovie

Director John Harkrider – @pathetic100

Captivated The Trials of Pamela Smart

Cinematographer Naiti Gámez – @naitigamez

The Case Against 8 – @TheCaseAgainst8

Co-Director Ben Cotner – @bcotner

Producer Rebekah Fergusson – @R_Films

Composer Blake Neely – @cowonthewall

Cesar’s Last Fast – @CesarsLastFast

Co-Director Richard Ray Perez – @BraveNewRick

Producer Molly O’Brien – @mobworks

Editor Lewis Erskine – @EditorSavant

Editor Carla Gutierrez – @CarlitaGu

Cinematographer James Chressanthis – @NoSubtitles

E-team - @ETeamFilm

Subject: Human Rights Watch – @hrw

Co-Director Katy Chevigny – @mightychevs

Co-Director...

Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Film selected Ryan Koo, The Summer of Flying Fish director Marcella Said (right ont pic above) and Jordana Spiro (who we sang the praises for with her short 2013 Sundance-preemed Skin) are among the twelve plus participants for the upcoming 2014 Feature Screenwriters Lab (which takes place one week before the actual festival).

At this point, the lab have probably easily broke the one hundred project count (with a good percentage of them panning out into an eventual feature film – see Ryan Coogler’s Fruitvale Station, Andrew Dosunmu’s Mother of George, David Lowery’s Ain’t Them Bodies Saints and Andrew Renzi’s Franny as recent examples). The international class of January ’14 (read project descriptions and bios below) will be coached by no other than: Dustin Lance Black, Naomi Foner, John Gatins, Michael Goldenberg, Erik Jendresen, Patty Jenkins and Spaghetti Western fanboy and former lab attendee Quentin Tarantino.

The Sundance Film Festival has unveiled its 2014 Competition lineup, made up of several categories. The 30th edition of the event will take place between January 16th-26th in the new year.

U.S. Dramatic Competition

Camp X-Ray (Peter Sattler)

Cold in July (Jim Mickle)

Dear White People (Justin Simien)

Fishing Without Nets (Cutter Hodierne)

John's Pocket (John Slattery)

Happy Christmas (Joe Swanberg)

Hellion (Kat Candler)

Infinitely Polar Bear (Maya Forbes)

Jamie Marks is Dead (Carter Smith)

Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter (David Zellner)

Life After Beth (Jeff Baena)

Low Down (Joe Preiss)

The Skeleton Twins (Craig Johnson)

The Sleepwalker (Mona Fastvold)

Song One (Kate Barker-Froyland)

Whiplash (Damien Chazelle)

U.S. Documentary Competition

Alive Inside: A Story of Music & Memory (Michael Rossato-Bennett)

All the Beautiful Things (John Harkrider)

Captivated: The Trials of Pamela Smart (Jeremiah Zagar)

The Case Against 8 (Ben Cotner, Ryan White)

Cesar's Last Fast (Richard Ray Perez, Lorena Parlee...

The 2014 Sundance Film Festival is right around the corner, and the Sundance Institute has released the full line-up for the competition films that will be premiering!

This year there were 12,218 total submissions, and 117 films were accepted from 37 countries around the world. It looks like there's a lot of good selection of films this year.

The Sundance Film Festival 2014 runs from January 16th to the 26th, and the GeekTyrant team will be there to cover as many movies as we possibly can.

U.S. Dramatic Competition

The 16 films in this section are world premieres and, unless otherwise noted, are from the U.S.

“Camp X-Ray” — Directed and written by Peter Sattler. A young female guard at Guantanamo Bay forms an unlikely friendship with one of the detainees. Cast: Kristen Stewart, Payman Maadi, Lane Garrison, J.J. Soria, John Carroll Lynch.

“Cold in July” — Directed by Jim Mickle, written by Nick Damici.

Of the sixteen titles that are listed here there are at least more than half that will be talked about throughout the calendar year up until award season in 2015. It speaks volumes about the quality offerings from American Documentarian filmmakers, but it also says a lot about Sundance programming team David Courier, Caroline Libresco et al. exquisite taste for the form. As is the norm for the Sundance doc-comp, there is plenty of socially conscious films on offer, from Andrew Rossi’s film on the insurmountable rise of student debt, Ivory Tower, to government backed food campaigns that have resulted in massive amounts of American health problems in Stephanie Soechtig’s Fed Up, with plenty of diversity within the program as a whole.

Though our non-fiction guesses have never been stellar, the films themselves look auspicious as all get out. Of this year’s promising batch of American docs, we...