For its eleventh year, the Docs to Watch roundtable was back at the SCAD Savannah Film Festival, bringing together the top documentary directors of the year for a candid discussion about the films and their craft.
This year’s panelists included Brendan Bellomo (Porcelain War), Julian Brave NoiseCat (Sugarcane), Peter Ettedgui, (Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story), Josh Greenbaum (Will & Harper), Shiori Ito (Black Box Diaries), Stephen Maing (Union), Ibrahim Nash’at (Hollywoodgate), Morgan Neville (Piece by Piece), Angela Patton (Daughters) and Matt Tyrnauer (Carville: Winning is Everything, Stupid!).
As The Hollywood Reporter notes, 21 of the 97 docs that have been featured at the roundtable over the years have gone on to nab nominations for the Best Documentary Feature Oscar. Eight of those 21 have won.
Tyrnauer told the audience about how his film, which is on the life of Democratic political operative James Carville, told a story that was still playing out in real-time as the 2024 presidential election was days away.
“I was making a film about someone tilting windmills for the better part of the year,” he said. “And I locked the day of the Trump-Biden debate. I actually screened that cut for a test audience as counter-programming it against the debate. We started the film right when the debate started and 10 minutes into the test screening, my phone went up and it was James Carville texting me. The text said, ‘I just took two gummies and I’m listening to country music.’ Without having to tune into the debate, I turned to the editor sitting next to me. I said, we’re re-cutting the film, which we did, and it did Telluride a little less than a month later, and it’s out now. I felt I had to get out before the election. Carville, he’s not the most modest person I’ve ever met, but he didn’t do a victory lap. But the film is a lightning-in-the-bottle film where you see someone who sees around the corners and is famous for doing that very almost impossible thing. And he’s now an evangelist for the Harris campaign trying to help save this country from, I think, a really bad thing.”
NoiseCat spoke about how his co-director, Emily Kassen, courted him to the film and he was unsure about doing it when she first reached out to him. But then, it turned out that he had a direct connection that the project (which focuses on abuse and missing children at an Indigenous residential school in Canada) she was about to make that sealed the deal for him to be a part of it.
“She [Kassen] went off and found a First Nation that was about to begin a search at the school nearest to them, and she sent the chief of that First Nation a cold email,” NoiseCat explained. “And the next day, the chief got back to her. He said, that creator’s always had great timing and that just yesterday our council had a conversation [and] we agreed that it was essential that this search is documented. And so, Em packed her bags, got tickets to the place that the First Nation is from, which is called Williams Lake, And she was about ready to go when I gave her a call back finally.”
The activist and journalist was ready to take on the project before even knowing the mind-blowing news he was about to find out.
He continued, “I said, ‘Hey, I really slept on it and thought about that documentary that you mentioned. I think I’d be ready to take it on with you.’ And that’s when Em told me that she’d identified this First Nation that was leading a search. That search was happening near St. Joseph’s Mission near Williams Lake, British Columbia. When she said that, I was completely floored because that was the school that my family was sent to and where, to the best of my knowledge at the time, my father was born. So out of 139, federally funded Indian residential schools across Canada…and she choose to focus her documentary, and what became our first feature documentary, on the one school that my family was taken away to and where my father’s life began. I didn’t know what to make of that at the time, but I think now that we’ve made the film, I think I had to come to terms with it. I do have a sense that there was something else leading us to this story. I’m incredibly grateful to Em for being a catalyst.”
Similarly, Patton gave kudos to her co-director, Natalie Rae, and spoke about how the documentary couldn’t have been made without her. More importantly, she noted how out of all the offers she had to make a film about her work, Rae’s was the one that aligned with her the most because they both knew the story that they didn’t want Daughters to be.
“We understood immediately it would not be a jail story. We were going to hit you with a love story…one about these girls and how they understood forgiveness, how they understood that they could embrace their anger [and] their despair, but [to] also leave you with hopefulness,” said Patton. “Natalie and I were able to collaborate on something very special, and she gave me an opportunity to have a debut film that went through a lot of ups and downs, challenges and uphill battles. But what we did collaboratively was that we understood our mission. We understood that we were doing something that would be solution-driven, and we both understood our strengths. I was a storyteller anyway, and now I have an opportunity to put it on a screen and show more people about the power and the brilliance of Black girls. This gave me an opportunity to make sure that any story that you have heard or you have seen about Black girls that have adultified them, that have stereotyped them, it’s the wrong story.”
And Neville, one of the most acclaimed documentarians of time, had no idea that his next film would not only be about Pharrell, but would also be animated and involve Legos. Both the subject and the format that the musician wanted to take intrigued Neville and made him want to be a part of it.
“Five and a half years ago, I’d just finished the Mr. Rogers film and film I’d done about Orson Wells, and I think I was kind of wanting to try something different,” he said. “I’ve made a lot of films about creativity in my career, and I felt like I needed to go somewhere new. And I got this call saying, ‘Pharrell wants to meet you.’ And he gave me this pitch. He said, ‘I love your films. And I had this idea that we could make a film in Lego.’ And at that moment, I was not looking to make a music film again. In fact, I specifically did not want to make a music film. But when he said Lego, I thought, ‘Hell yeah.’ I didn’t know what that was going to mean, but it seemed like such a crazy idea that I wanted to figure out what that was. The film, it’s a musical, biopic, animated feature and part-documentary. But it was figuring out a new way of telling stories and that it wasn’t just about creativity, it was itself an act of creativity that was something that was really important to me to figure out new ways of moving nonfiction storytelling ahead in a way.”
