Cinema Eye today announced the five nominees for its annual Heterodox Award. The Heterodox Award honors a narrative fiction film that imaginatively incorporates nonfiction strategies, content and/or modes of production.
The five films nominated this year for the Cinema Eye Heterodox Award are:
Arabian Nights: Volume One (The Restless One) directed by Miguel Gomes
God Bless the Child directed by Robert Machoian and Rodrigo Ojeda-Beck
Tangerine directed by Sean Baker
Taxi directed by Jafar Panahi
The Tribe directed by Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy
Celebrating the increasingly blurry line between documenting real lives/situations and creative, fictional storytelling, these films show how today’s fiction filmmakers are using tools from the traditional documentary toolbox to convey their visions. This marks the sixth year for the Heterodox Award at Cinema Eye. Previous winners of the award were Matt Porterfield’s Putty Hill (2011), Mike Mills’ Beginners (2012), Jem Cohen’s Museum Hours (2013), Carlos Reygados’s Post Tenebras Lux (2014) and Richard Linklater’s Boyhood (2015).
With the announcement of this year’s Heterodox nominees, all of this year’s Cinema Eye nominated films and filmmakers have been revealed. Nonfiction film nominees were announced last week at CPH:DOX in Copenhagen.
The Heterodox prize will be presented on Tuesday, January 12th in New York City at the 2nd annual Honors Lunch during Cinema Eye Week. This year’s Legacy Award, which will be announced soon, and this year’s Influential Films and Unforgettable Subjects (which were announced in October) will also be saluted at the luncheon.
Ten finalists for the Heterodox Award were selected in voting by the Cinema Eye Honors Nominations Committee, made up of more than 25 international programmers who specialize in nonfiction film. The ten finalists were then viewed and five nominees were selected by a second round committee, composed of 8 nonfiction programmers and journalists. The second round included Committee Chair Scott Macaulay (Editor in Chief, Filmmaker Magazine), Hadrian Belove (Executive Director, Cinefamily), Tine Fischer (Festival Director, CPH:DOX), Eric Hynes (Associate Curator of Film, Museum of the Moving Image), Doug Jones (Executive Director, Images Cinema), Mads Mikkelsen (Programmer, CPH:DOX), Dan Nuxoll (Program Director, Rooftop Films), Rachel Rosen (Director of Programming, San Francisco Film Society) and Alison Willmore (Film Critic, Buzzfeed).