The Cinema Eye Honors for Nonfiction Filmmaking today announced the five nominees for its annual Cinema Eye Heterodox Award, sponsored by Filmmaker Magazine, a publication of IFP. The Cinema Eye 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:
- Boyhood directed by Richard Linklater
- Heaven Knows What directed by Josh and Benny Safdie
- A Spell to Ward off the Darkness directed by Ben Rivers and Ben Russell
- Stop the Pounding Heart directed by Roberto Minervini
- Under the Skin directed by Jonathan Glazer
These films demonstrate the porous boundaries between life’s documentation and creative storytelling, highlighting the ways in which today’s fiction filmmakers are inspired, challenged and provoked by the realities in which their dramatic constructs live. This marks the fifth 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) and Carlos Reygados’s Post Tenebras Lux (2014).
“These nominees prove once again that the blurred lines between fiction/non-fiction, actor/non-actor and verite/script continue to thrill and provoke,” said Esther Robinson, Chair of the Cinema Eye Honors. “Year five of the Heterodox award gives us farmers, loners, aliens, addicts, and adolescents. The films ask thrillingly big questions about childhood, time, utopia, modernity, sexuality and what happens when you drop a come-hither Scarlett Johansson into the Scottish countryside with a hidden camera.”
“In this fifth year of the Heterodox Award,” said Filmmaker Magazine Editor-in-Chief Scott Macaulay, “these nominated filmmakers, using technology as varied as spy cams to old-fashioned 35mm, have created seamless blends of the real and ‘the real.’ Their films, crackling with the rhythms of life, offer inspirations out of the creative cul de sacs found in so much mainstream storytelling.”
Nine 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 nine finalists were then viewed and five nominees selected by the writers and editors of Filmmaker Magazine. A jury of filmmakers and film professionals will watch the five nominees and select a winner. The award will be presented in January during Cinema Eye Week in New York City.
In addition to the Heterodox Award nominees, Cinema Eye announced that voting for the organization’s Audience Choice Prize is now open. The ten contenders for the award were announced last month at CPH:DOX in Copenhagen and the annual list includes many of the most discussed, acclaimed and beloved films of the year. The nominees for the Audience Choice Prize are:
- 20,000 Days on Earth directed by Iain Forsythe and Jane Pollard
- The Case Against 8 directed by Ben Cotner and Ryan White
- Citizenfour directed by Laura Poitras
- Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me directed by Chiemi Karasawa
- Finding Vivian Maier directed by John Maloof and Charlie Siskel
- Jodorowsky’s Dune directed by Frank Pavich
- Keep On Keepin’ On directed by Alan Hicks
- Life Itself directed by Steve James
- Mistaken for Strangers directed by Tom Berninger
- Particle Fever directed by Mark Levinson
Voting for the Audience Choice Prize is open to the public via the Cinema Eye website here. Last year, more than 44,000 people voted for the award, which was won by Dave Grohl’s Sound City. Previous winners of the award are The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (2008), Up the Yangtze (2009), The September Issue (2010), Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work (2011), Buck (2012) and Bully (2013).
Tickets for the 8th Annual Honors Awards Ceremony are now on sale. The event will be held Wednesday, January 7, 2015 at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, New York. Tickets can be purchased here. More information about this year’s Cinema Eye Honors Week, including event details and a list of this year’s sponsors will be announced in the coming days.