Watch 4 exclusive interviews with Best Documentary Feature Oscar nominees: ‘All That Breathes,’ ‘All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,’ ‘Fire of Love,’ ‘Navalny’
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The final stretch of the 2023 Oscar season has started with voters casting their ballots for the winners of the 95th annual Academy Awards. All season long, Gold Derby has been interviewing dozens of the nominees, including four contenders for Best Documentary Feature. Click on each documentarian’s name below to watch each of these 20-minute interviews.
Shaunak Sen, “All That Breathes”
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“All That Breathes” focuses on brothers Nadeem Shehzad and Mohammed Saud, who with their assistant Salik have dedicated their lives to rehabilitating black kites and other birds in a cramped basement in Delhi. As producer-director Sen describes, he didn’t set out nor did he want to do an environmental film or a nature film or a political film. Rather, it was important to show the interconnectedness of mankind and nature: “When you live in the city of Delhi, the air is such an opaque, gray, heavy, tactile big presence… You’re often thinking about it. It has such a creepy sentience that you’re often cogitating about the air itself. And I was interested also philosophically in human-animal relationships, and in a way I wanted to do something on this abstract triangulation of air, humans, birds.”
Laura Poitras, “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed”
“All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” explores Nan Goldin’s life and work as a visual artist while also chronicling her guerrilla campaign to get art museums to stop taking funding from the Sackler family, who were owners of Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of OxyContin. Poitras says finding the balance between telling the story of Goldin’s life as an artist and the story of her current activism was not an easy thing to find. She was aiming to give the subjects an epic quality to them: “There’s something epic about this sort of decades of Nan’s life and her art and we wanted to cover a lot of time and have it feel big, almost operatic.” Once she finished the rough cut, Poitras and the team brought the film to Goldin herself and “brought her into the process.”
“Fire of Love” explores the work of famous volcanologist couple Maurice Krafft and Katia Krafft through archival footage that they took from the 1970s until their untimely deaths in 1991 during an eruption in Japan. Director Dosa and her team combed through around 200 hours of 16mm footage that the pair shot while studying volcanoes and another 50 hours that cam form them in other people’s footage or television appearances. She describes one particular challenge of the 16mm footage having no sound, saying, “That was, at first, incredibly challenging to work with but then turned into a really inspiring opportunity for us as a team to figure out how to build in soundscapes, particularly bringing out the character of the volcano through our sonic landscape.”
“Navalny” is equal parts documentary and political thriller, a profile of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny that begins with him recovering from an assassination attempt and ends with him being arrested by Russian authorities upon returning to Moscow. Despite fears about chronicling such a high profile political target, director Roher says Navalny’s personal courage helped stave off some of that trepidation: “That reality is very scary for us and it extends to many of Navalny’s supports and colleagues, family members as well… But what I found is that when you get there and you’re standing next to this guy and kibitzing with him… his courage quickly proliferates over the entire crew and you quickly acclimate to the level of danger that you had previously imagined, and you stop thinking about it.”
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