Doc Awards: "Semper Fi" "Being Elmo" and "You've Been Trumped" Among Recent Festival Winners. "Restrepo" and "Food, Inc." Win Emmys
Here's a roundup of honors bestowed to documentaries in the past few days, including international festival prizes and Emmy Awards:
Woodstock Film Festival had double love for Rachel Libert and Tony Hardmon's "Semper Fi: Always Faithful," which presents a retired marine's investigation into a military base water contamination cover-up after his young daughter died of Leukemia. The film was named Best Documentary by both jury and audience, earning the acclaimed work two more prizes.
Aspen Filmfest had a tie for its documentary Audience Award. The prize is shared by Constance Marks' "Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey," the enormously popular profile on Elmo vocalist and puppeteer Kevin Clash, and Alexandra Dawson and Greg Gricus's "Wild Horse, Wild Ride," a crowd-pleasing competition doc involving horse taming.
Arizona Underground Film Festival awarded its documentary prizes to Susan Marks' feature "Of Dolls & Murder," which explores the pre-forensics practice of using crime scene dioramas for investigations (sounds like CSI meets "Marwencol"), and Ilana Rein's (relatively long) short "We Are All Cylons," which tackles grand ideas and questions related to the TV series "Battlestar Galactica." Also, Greg Stuetze and Alex Stickroth's online-gaming doc "/AFK - Away From Keyboard" picked up the fest's overall Audience Award.
Edindocs Documentary Film in Edinburgh awarded Anthony Baxter's "You've Been Trumped" the Scottish Screen Archive Prize for Best Feature Documentary. The film, which explores "the Donald"'s attempt to build "the greatest golf course in the world" in Aberdeenshire, has been considered an important historical work and will now be forever archived and preserved by the National Film Board of Scotland. Piotr Zlotorowicz's "Smolarze," about charcoal burners, took the fest's short documentary honor.
San Sebastian International Film Festival jury gave its top prize, The Golden Shell, to Isaki Lacuesta's "The Double Steps," a Spanish film that mixes fiction and documentary to focus on an intriguing work by French artist François Augiéras. Lacuesta's straight documentary companion piece, "The Clay Diaries," also screened at the festival.
Fantastic Fest doesn't have a documentary prize, but I'd like to salute it here anyway for at least being a primarily genre movie-based festival and still having time for a couple docs each year. So kudos to "Knuckle" and "Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan's Hope" for being unofficial winners in that regard.
Emmy Awards for News & Documentary categories were handed out Monday night with specific film titles earning statues for special programs like PBS' POV and Independent Lens. Robert Kenner's Oscar-nominated "Food, Inc." made up for the loss from the film Academy by winning both Best Documentary and Outstanding Informational Programming - Long Form categories. Another Oscar nominee, Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger's "Restrepo" was named Outstanding Continuing Coverage of a News Story - Long Form. Other Emmy awards went to Roberto Hernandez and Geoffrey Smith's "Presumed Guilty" (Outstanding Investigative Journalism - Long Form), Landon Van Soest's "Good Fortune" (Outstanding Business and Economic Programming - Long Form), Doug Pray's "Art & Copy" (Outstanding Arts and Culture Programming) and Zipppi Brand Frank's "Google Baby" (Outstanding Science and Technology Programming). Previously handed out 2011 Emmy Awards for documentary were reported last week.
