Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker Laura Nix was supposed to board a flight to Copenhagen today, en route to the CPH:DOX festival to pitch her latest project. But the COVID-19 pandemic abruptly forced that event to shift online only, one of countless ways the coronavirus emergency is impacting the documentary…

In the wake of theaters’ planned shutdown into May, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is pondering a change to their qualification rules for the upcoming 2021 ceremony. Films typically have to play in-theaters to qualify for the Oscars. Also, couple in the fact that most film festivals have shuttered for…

Former President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama, whose production company Higher Ground backed the documentary American Factory, congratulated the film's directors after their Oscar win Sunday in Documentary Feature. "Congrats to Julia [Reichert] and Steven [Bognar], the filmmakers behind American Factory…

The rustbelt rebound story American Factory won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature tonight, earning gold for the first collaboration between Netflix and Barack and Michelle Obama's production company Higher Ground, which produced with Participant Media. Directors Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert and producer Jeff…

Exactly one year ago the filmmakers behind Honeyland were fresh from victory at Sundance, where they earned the festival's top prizes for international documentary—the grand jury and audience awards. The year since has brought more honors around the world, leading up to an unprecedented double Oscar nomination: one…

EXCLUSIVE: Dr. Amani Ballour, the courageous subject of the Oscar-nominated documentary The Cave, has been granted a visa to enter the United States in time for the Academy Awards, Deadline has learned. Amani, whose efforts to run a subterranean hospital in the besieged Syrian city of Eastern Ghouta are documented in…

The sinking of the Sewol ferry has left a scar on the psyche of South Korea, more than five years after the devastating tragedy occurred. On the morning of April 16, 2014 the passenger ship with 476 people on board, including hundreds of school kids, began listing dangerously. Relatively quickly the vessel tipped over…

When the 2020 Oscar nominations were announced, critics immediately seized upon the glaring lack of women recognized in the Best Director competition. But on the nonfiction side, it's a completely different story. In the Best Documentary Feature category, four of the five nominated films are directed or co-directed by…

Syria's brutal civil war has cost the lives of tens of thousands of civilians—men, women and children. It would have cost even more were it not for the life-saving efforts of Dr. Amani Ballour, the heroine of Feras Fayyad's Oscar-nominated documentary The Cave. Dr. Amani, who trained as a pediatrician, ran a…

The Sundance Film Festival has launched the careers of some extraordinary directors—among them, Steven Soderbergh in 1989 with Sex, Lies and Videotape, Quentin Tarantino in 1992 with Reservoir Dogs, and Darren Aronofsky in 1998 with Pi. Aronofsky returned to Sundance this year as producer of Some Kind of Heaven, a…

Director Petra Costa and producer Joanna Natasegara didn't expect their acclaimed documentary The Edge of Democracy to earn an Oscar nomination. But when they tuned in for the announcement, watching from different points on the globe, they were in for a welcome shock. "We were both screaming and I am not ashamed to…

When the Oscar nominations were announced earlier this month, two documentaries about Syria made it through: Feras Fayyad's The Cave, about a courageous woman doctor running a subterranean hospital outside Damascus, and For Sama, directed by Waad Al-Kateab and Edward Watts, the story of Al-Kateab's effort to raise her…