The International Documentary Association’s DocuWeeks series in Los Angeles and New York, which kicked off Thursday night with an HBO-sponsored screening and party at the Arclight in Hollywood, is a three-week showcase that can have a huge impact on the Oscar race.
In the Documentary Feature category, for instance, 17 films will qualify for Academy Awards consideration over the three weeks. That number that could represent as much as 20 percent of the entire field.
And that’s one of the points of DocuWeeks. “The idea was to give documentaries the opportunity for a real showcase in great theaters, and to do it in line with current Academy rules,” says Eddie Schmidt, president of the IDA’s board of directors and an Oscar-nominated documentarian whose films include his two collaborations with Kirby Dick, “Twist of Faith” and “This Film Is Not Yet Rated.”
The DocuWeeks showcase operates as an Oscar qualifier by splitting up its field of 17 features and one shorts program into three separate sections, and then running each group of films twice daily for one week. By doing so, the films meet the Academy’s rules for one-week theatrical engagements in Los Angeles and New York.
Over its 13-year history, DocuWeeks has qualified more than 160 films, and landed 17 Oscar nominations and seven wins, including the Iraq feature “Taxi to the Dark Side.”
Last year it led to a different honor: the Australian short documentary “Salt,” a lyrical meditation on loneliness and isolation that should have been recognized by the Academy, instead won the IDA Award for Best Short Documentary.
“The genesis was to give documentaries that theatrical showcase for the Academy,” says Schmidt. “But because this is a curated program, it does help usher in other awards, including ours.”
The films, the first six of which run from July 30 through August 5 at the Arclight and at the IFC Center in New York, are chosen by IDA screening committees from entries sent in by filmmakers around the world.
Once selected, filmmakers must pay to be included in the showcase. “It’s comparable to what you would pay if you had to do it yourself and four-wall your film in a theater,” says Schmidt. “But we do some of the work for you, and you have the full advantage of our staff and the publicity we generate.”
This year’s showcase kicked off, as usual, with an HBO documentary that was otherwise not part of the program: “12th and Delaware” (photo above), a look at two facilities – an abortion clinic and a crisis pregnancy center run by pro-life group and devoted to persuading women not to get abortions – that sit across the street from each other in a Florida town.
The film from “Jesus Camp” filmmakers Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady will debut Monday, August 2 on HBO – but in a DocuWeeks tradition, the cable channel, an enormous force in the documentary community and a longtime supporter and sponsor of the IDA, hosted the opening-night screening and party.
