Documentary DVD Discussion Revised Edn: Includes Guide to Academy Award Docs (1 Viewer)

[GregoryMesh]

Scottsboro: An American Tragedy is available on DVD on PBS website.

Another nominated documentary Troublesome Creek: A Midwestern will be released on DVD from Wellspring on February 14. Available for pre-order on Amazon.

 

[TimJS]

UPDATE for December 24, 2005

Massive update below:

Added
Academy Award Winner Marjoe (1972) & Noms Twist Of Faith (2004) & Unfinished Business (1986)

Note: Previously announced DGA winner Looking For Richard (1996) has been delayed and will now street 2/21/2006.

Note: Post 19 below reports Point of Order as a Home Vision Ent release (like In The Year Of The Pig). Ultimately, New Yorker films released this title instead.

Updated Post #4 with this year’s IDA winners (more on noms & winners below), National Board of Review Award winners, & LA Film Critics Award winners.

I started a thread in Movies about this year’s Academy Award eligible films. On Native Soil looks incredible, but won’t hit theaters until Spring ’06.

The IDFA (International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam) best long documentary award went to My Grandmother's House by Adán Aliaga (Spain, 2005) & Special Jury Award went to
Our Daily Bread by Nikolaus Geyrhalter (Austria, 2005). It will be interesting to see if these films are released on DVD in any region…

Full Frame Documentary Film Winners:
Shape of the Moon (Stand van de maan)
The 3 Rooms of Melancholia (Melancholian 3 huonetta)
Murderball see below in Releases of Note


Recent (as in, after my last update) Releases of Note:

America's Lost Landscape: The Tallgrass Prairie
IDA Pare Lorentz Winner – DVD available here .

America's Lost Landscape: The Tallgrass Prairie is a sixty minute documentary film designed for national broadcast on public television. The film tells the story of one of the world's great ecosystems and its transformation from natural landscape to farmland. The tallgrass prairie was once a prominent feature of the North American continent that was reduced, in less than a hundred years, to the vanishing point. The goal of this film is to inform and enlighten the general public about the historical, cultural and environmental aspects of the tallgrass prairie landscape, and to address questions about the future of agriculture in the former tallgrass prairie states of America. The story of America's tallgrass prairie is rich and complex. At the time of Euro-American settlement in the 1830s, the nearly 240 million acres of tallgrass prairie was a major landscape feature of North America. Eighty percent of Iowa alone, the heart of the prairie, was blanketed by an ocean of tallgrass that covered 28 million acres. In one of the most astonishing alterations of nature in human history, most of the tallgrass prairie was converted to cropland in less than eighty years. The alteration of the landscape has been so drastic, that the cultural imprint of the Native population that once lived on the prairie has been reduced to a grid of non-English place-names that appear on the map. Rows of corn and soybeans, cultivated by modern machinery, stand where a sea of tallgrass, inhabited by bison and elk, once stretched to the horizon. For the most part, present day Americans have no idea what the Midwest was like one hundred-fifty years ago, and the biological legacy of the tallgrass, the corn belts rich black soil, is under appreciated and often taken for granted. In an effort to convey to the audience the vital significance of this once vast area, this film examines the human and biological legacies of the tallgrass prairie.

Granito de Arena (Grain of Sand)
IDA Pare Lorentz Nom - DVD available here .

For over 20 years, global economic forces have been dismantling public education in Mexico, but always in the constant shadow of
popular resistance...

Granito de Arena is the story of that resistance – the story of hundreds of thousands of public schoolteachers whose grassroots, non-violent movement took Mexico by surprise, and who have endured brutal repression in their 25-year struggle
to defend public education.

Award-winning Seattle filmmaker, Jill Freidberg (This is What Democracy Looks Like, 2000), spent two years in southern Mexico documenting the efforts of over 100,000 teachers, parents, and students fighting to defend the country’s public education system. Freidberg combines footage of strikes and direct actions with 25 years worth of never-before-seen archival images to deliver a compelling and unsettling story of resistance, repression, commitment, and solidarity.

A sixty-minute documentary, Granito de Arena places the Mexican teachers’ struggle in a global context, clearly spelling out the relationship between economic globalization and the worldwide public education crisis.

Featuring a driving soundtrack by DJ Food, Slowrider, PlanB,
and Los Mocosos, Granito de Arena fuels indignation, inspires action, and raises important questions about democracy, sovereignty,
and the universal right to public education.

Grizzly Man
LA Film Critic’s winner, National Board Of Review nom - Amazon

A docudrama that centers on amateur grizzly bear expert Timothy Treadwell. He periodically journeyed to Alaska to study and live with the bears. He was killed, along with his his girlfriend, Amie Huguenard, by a rogue bear in October 2003. The films explores their compassionate lives as they found solace among these endangered animals.
DVD Features:
Available Audio Tracks: English (Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround)
"In the Edges: The Grizzly Man Session," a 50-minute documentary on the making of the film's music

The Last Campaign
One Man’s Long Journey Fighting The Corporate Takeover Of American Politics: A Film By Wayne Ewing
IDA Nom - DVD available here .

"The Last Campaign" - a sequel to Ewing's legendary first film in 1972, "If Elected…" - covers the 2004 campaign of Justice Warren McGraw for the re-election to the West Virginia Supreme Court, dubbed the 'nastiest' judicial race, if not the most expensive in the nation. Scenes from "If Elected…" -which covered Warren McGraw’s 1972 race for the West Virginia State Senate and was originally broadcast by Bill Moyers in 1973 - are interspersed with the story of McGraw’s 2004 Supreme Court race to create a unique, cinema verite portrait of American politics over a 32 year span.
One man’s struggle to resist corporate interference in the electoral process is the continuing theme. In 2004, the US Chamber of Commerce is suspected, of funneling millions of dollars from multi-national corporations into West Virginia in the primary and general election in a successful effort to defeat Justice Warren McGraw as a part of what Forbes Magazine described as a "secret war" against judges in America. The Chamber’s shadowy efforts were joined in the general election by a group calling itself "For the Sake of the Kids" which spent millions, supplied from a coal company executive to wage a smear campaign against McGraw alleging that he let a sexual predator loose to work in a school. That same coal company executive has a pending 50 million dollar judgment against his company on appeal before the West Virginia State Supreme Court.

The Last Cowboy
IDA Nom – DVD available
here .

Shot in Porcupine, South Dakota over a period of 24 years, THE LAST COWBOY collapses a remarkable slice of American history into a single film.

Every week in the United States, 250 farms and ranches go out of business. Over 312,000 have become insolvent since THE LAST COWBOY began shooting. One of the last holdouts is Vern Sager, one of a dying breed , a real American cowboy.

The Sagers own a ranch on the Pine Ridge Indian Reserve in the middle of the poorest county in America. Unemployment runs to 80%. In recent years, the "big city" of Gordon, Nebraska (population 2,175) has drawn most of Porcupine's youth away from the ranch life with the promise of jobs, mini-marts, and paved sidewalks. 20 years ago, 90% of the Sager clan earned their living off the land. Today, only 5% are still at it. Last of all will be Vern.

THE LAST COWBOY documents the Sager family's battle to maintain their dawn-to-dark cowboy way of life. Capturing the inner landscape of the last cowboy's character, courage, and stubbornness and the outer landscape of his South Dakota home, THE LAST COWBOY is a testament to the debt Americans owe to the land they live in and those who still steward it.

Mad Hot Ballroom
Academy Award eligible, Satellite Best Doc winner & Best Doc DVD winner, National Board Of Review nom, IDA Nom - Amazon

Eleven-year-old New York City public school kids journey into the world of ballroom dancing and reveal pieces of themselves and their world along the way. Told from their candid, sometimes hilarious perspectives, these kids are transformed, from reluctant participants to determined competitors, from typical urban kids to "ladies and gentlemen," on their way to try to compete in the final citywide competition. Providing unique insight into the incredible cultural diversity that is New York City, this film profiles several kids from three schools (out of 60) at this dynamic age, when becoming that "cool" teenager vies for position with familiar innocence, while they learn the merengue, rumba, tango, the foxtrot and swing.


March Of The Penguins
Academy Award eligible, National Board Of Review nom, IDA Pare Lorentz Nom - Amazon

A look at the annual journey of Emperor penguins as they march -- single file -- to their traditional breeding ground.
DVD Features:
Available Subtitles: English, Spanish, French
Available Audio Tracks: English (Dolby Digital 5.1), Spanish (Dolby Digital 5.1)
Crittercam: Emperor Penguins--penguin diving and feeding
Of Penguins and Men: The incredible filmmaking process of the movie
"8 Ball Bunny": A classic WB animated short with Bugs Bunny and a penguin
Theatrical trailer

Mission Accomplished
IDA Nom – DVD available here.

This film comes out of the Cinema Libre movement, which promotes socially conscious and politically-minded filmmaking. Tackling the subject of the second Gulf war, the documentary Mission Accomplished was filmed on the battlegrounds of Iraq. The film takes a critical look at the US involvement in the war, but also tries to accurately represent several points of view. By spending time with US soldiers who are risking their lives overseas, the filmmakers attempt to capture the experience of being young and at war. Meanwhile, the film also takes special care to show the other side of the story, from the perspective of those Iraqi people who have become the war's biggest victims.

Murderball
Academy Award eligible, Fullframe Best Doc winner, National Board Of Review nom, IDA Nom - Amazon

A film about quadriplegics who play full-contact rugby in Mad Max-style wheelchairs - overcoming unimaginable obstacles to compete in the Paralympic Games in Athens, Greece.
DVD Features:
Murderball Special featuring Johnny Knoxville and Steve-O from MTV's Jackass and Mark Zupan
CNN Larry King Live Exclusive Interview
Featurette: Murderball: Behind the Game
Joe Soares Interview Update
Deleted Scenes
Filmmaker Commentary (Featuring Dana Adam Shapiro, Henry-Alex Rubin and Jeff Mandel)
Player Commentary (Featuring Mark Zupan, Scott Hoggsett and Andy Cohn)
NYC Premiere - Keith Gets His Chair
THINK MTV Outreach Page

Rize
Academy Award eligible -
Amazon

Reveals a groundbreaking dance phenomenon that's exploding on the streets of South Central, Los Angeles. Taking advantage of unprecedented access, this documentary film bring to first light a revolutionary form of artistic expression borne from oppression. The aggressive and visually stunning dance modernizes moves indigenous to African tribal rituals and features mind-blowing, athletic movement sped up to impossible speeds. We meet Tommy Johnson (Tommy the Clown), who first created the style as a response to the 1992 Rodney King riots and named it Clowning, as well as the kids who developed the movement into what they now call Krumping. The kids use dance as an alternative to gangs and hustling: they form their own troupe and paint their faces like warriors, meeting to outperform rival gangs of dancers or just to hone their skills. For the dancers, Krumping becomes a way of life--and, because it's authentic expression (in complete opposition to the bling-bling hip-hop culture), the dance becomes a vital part of who they are.

Strange Days On Planet Earth
IDA Pare Lorentz Honorable Mention -
Amazon

Around the globe, scientists are racing to solve a series of mysteries. Unsettling transformations are sweeping across the planet, and clue by clue, investigators around the world are assembling a new picture of Earth, discovering ways that seemingly disparate events are connected. Crumbling houses in New Orleans are linked to voracious creatures from southern China. Vanishing forests in Yellowstone are linked to the disappearance of wolves. An asthma epidemic in the Caribbean is linked to dust storms in Africa. Scientists suspect we have entered a time of global change swifter than any human being has ever witnessed. Where are we headed? What can we do to alter this course of events? National Geographic's Strange Days on Planet Earth, premiering in Spring 2005 on PBS, explores these questions. Drawing upon research being generated by a new discipline, Earth System Science (ESS), the series aims to create an innovative type of environmental awareness. By revealing a cause and effect relationship between what we as humans do to the Earth and what that in turn does to our environment and ecosystems, the series creates a new sense of environmental urgency. Award-winning actor, writer and director Edward Norton (Primal Fear, American History X, Italian Job) hosts the series. A dedicated environmental activist, Norton has a special interest in providing solar energy to low income families. Each of the four one-hour episodes is constructed as a high-tech detective story, with the fate of the planet at stake.

Street Fight
IDA Nom – DVD available here .

Street Fight chronicles the bare-knuckles race for Mayor of Newark, N.J. between Cory Booker, a 32-year-old Rhodes Scholar/Yale Law School grad, and Sharpe James, the four-term incumbent and undisputed champion of New Jersey politics.

Fought in Newark's neighborhoods and housing projects, the battle pits Booker against an old style political machine that uses any means necessary to crush its opponents: city workers who do not support the mayor are demoted; "disloyal" businesses are targeted by code enforcement; a campaigner is detained and accused of terrorism; and disks of voter data are burglarized in the night.

Even the filmmaker is dragged into the slugfest, and by election day, the climate becomes so heated that the Federal government is forced to send in observers to watch for cheating and violence.

The battle sheds light on important American questions about democracy, power and -- in a surprising twist -- race. Both Booker and James are African-American Democrats, but when the mayor accuses the Ivy League educated Booker of not being "really black" it forces voters to examine both how we define race in this country. "We tell our children to get educated," one Newarker says, "and when they do, we call them white. What kind of a message does that send?"

Street Fight tells a gripping story of the underbelly of democracy where elections are not about spin-doctors, media consultants, or photo ops. In Newark, we discover, elections are won and lost in the streets.

Why We Fight (2005)
IDA nom, Full-Frame & Sundance Winner - Amazon

WHY WE FIGHT, the new film by Eugene Jarecki which won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival, is an unflinching look at the anatomy of the American war machine, weaving unforgettable personal stories with commentary by a “who’s who” of military and beltway insiders. Featuring John McCain, Gore Vidal, William Kristol, Chalmers Johnson, Richard Perle and others, WHY WE FIGHT launches a bipartisan inquiry into the workings of the military industrial complex and the rise of the American Empire.


Forthcoming releases of note:

Enron: The Smartest Guys in The Room (2005)
Academy Award eligible, IDA nom, & LA Film Critic’s runner-up, streets Jan 17, 2006 - Amazon

One of the greatest scandals in American corporate history is chronicled in the riveting documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. Based on the bestselling book by Fortune magazine reporters Bethany McLean and Peter Elkin, and directed by Alex Gibney (who also produced The Trials of Henry Kissinger), the film is an epic morality tale, drawing upon a wealth of insider interviews and archival material to show how Enron, once the nation's seventh largest corporate entity, essentially faked its bookkeeping to report profits that never existed. The corrupt and closely-guarded mismanagement by Enron executives (including Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, later placed on criminal trial) is revealed through such heinous concepts as "Hypothetical Future Value" (a way of reaping fortunes based on false profit projections) and the use of offshore "shell" companies to hide the massive losses that eventually toppled the company (along with the venerable Arthur Anderson accounting firm) and left 20,000 employees jobless. As a maddening portrait of hubris and white-collar crime, Enron transcends political and corporate boundaries by showing how smart and powerful men grew blinded by greed and brought ruin upon themselves, along with thousands of otherwise innocent victims. For better and worse, it's a perfect double-feature with eye-opening 2004 documentary The Corporation.
DVD features:
Commentary by: writer-director Alex Gibney
Deleted scenes
"The Making of Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" featuring research footage and exclusive interviews with writer-director Alex Gibney and investigative journalist Bethany McLean
Enron company skits
Enron commercial
Where are they now?: updates on the executives, traders, and whistleblowers
A gallery of Enron cartoons
The original Fortune magazine articles


Ballets Russes NBR nom will be released 2nd half of 2006 by Zeitgeist.

Unearthing a treasure trove of archival footage, filmmakers Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine have fashioned a dazzlingly entrancing ode to the revolutionary twentieth-century dance troupe known as the Ballets Russes. What began as a group of Russian refugees who never danced in Russia became not one but two rival dance troupes who fought the infamous “ballet battles” that consumed London society before World War II.

BALLETS RUSSES maps the company’s Diaghilev-era beginnings in turn-of-the-century Paris--when artists such as Nijinsky, Balanchine, Picasso, Miró, Matisse, and Stravinsky united in an unparalleled collaboration--to its halcyon days of the 1930s and ’40s, when the Ballets Russes toured America, astonishing audiences schooled in vaudeville with artistry never before seen, to its demise in the 1950s and ’60s when rising costs, rocketing egos, outside competition, and internal mismanagement ultimately brought this revered company to its knees.

Directed with consummate invention and infused with juicy anecdotal interviews from many of the company’s glamorous stars, BALLETS RUSSES treats modern audiences to a rare glimpse of the singularly remarkable merger of Russian, American, European, and Latin American dancers, choreographers, composers, and designers that transformed the face of ballet for generations to come. — Sundance Film Festival, 2005

The Wild Parrots Of Telegraph Hill
Streets 12/26 - Amazon

An "engrossing, delightful film" (The Washington Post), THE WILD PARROTS OF TELEGRAPH HILL is the bonafide sleeper theatrical hit of the year.

The film's endearing guide is Mark Bittner, an aging bohemian, but the supporting cast members, a rambunctious flock of urban parrots, are the true stars, and their surprisingly humanlike behavior makes for a wondrous and rare experience. The film follows the ups-and-downs of these wild birds within the green niches of San Francisco as Bittner befriends, feeds, and names the members of the flock. Along the way, we meet many unforgettable characters: among them Connor, the grouchy yet lovable outcast of the flock, crying for a mate but luckless in his pursuits, and "the lovers," Picasso and Sophie, inseparable until Sophie is forced into mourning when Picasso disappears. More than a mere birdwatcher, Bittner finds solace in his immersion with these strikingly beautiful creatures - but how will he cope when he's evicted from his sanctuary and forced to live away from the parrots?

Packed with romance, comedy and a surprise ending that "makes you feel like you could fly out of the theater" (San Jose Mercury News), THE WILD PARROTS OF TELEGRAPH HILL shows just how wondrously similar the human and animal worlds really can be.

DVD Features: Origins of the Flock; Urban Legends; Update: Mingus at the Oasis; Parrots Music Video; Mark Bittner's Home Movies; Flock Updates; Deleted Scenes; Theatrical Trailer; Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround; California Quail Bonus Short; Interactive Menus; Scene Selection

As you have noticed, a number of film-makers are direct marketing their DVDs. One Academy Award eligible film, Occupation: Dreamland , features a sign up for the exclusive Limited edn. DVD at their site

Occupation: Dreamland is an unflinchingly candid portrait of a squad of American soldiers deployed in the doomed Iraq city of Falluja during the winter of 2004. A collective study of the soldiers unfolds as they patrol an environment of low-intensity conflict creeping steadily towards catastrophe. Through the squads activities Occupation: Dreamland provides a vital glimpse into the last days of Falluja. The film documents the citys waning stability before a final series of military assaults began in the spring of 2004 that effectively destroyed it.

Filmmakers Garrett Scott and Ian Olds were given access to all operations of the Armys 82nd Airborne. They lived with the unit 24/7, giving voice to soldiers held under a strict code of authority as they cope with an ambiguous, often lethal environment. The result is a revealing, sometimes surprising look at Army life, operations and the complexity of American war in the 21st century.



Tim

 

[TimJS]

UPDATE for January 31, 2006

Added
DGA Winner Grizzly Man (1972) & Academy Awards Noms Scottsboro Boys, & Troublesome Creek & 2005 noms.

The Big News is that Harlan County, U.S.A. is coming as a 2 - disker from Criterion on 5/23. Will update with specs when available and update the IDA top 20 docs post once Amazon posts.

Only other new release of note is The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till coming on 2/28/2006. This NBR award winning doc comes with a director's commentary.


Tim

 

[GregoryMesh]

New Video is releasing several documentaries on June 26.
Legacy (2000-2001 nominee) - Amazon
Broken Rainbow (1985-1986 winner) - Amazon
Doing Time: Life Inside the Big House (1991-1992 nominee) - Amazon

On the same day they will also release a 2004-2005 nominated documentary short Sister Rose's Passion, but I don't think you list those.
There's a Canadian DVD of Darwin's Nightmare available at Amazon.ca