JANUARY 15, 2010 – (New York) The Cinema Eye Honors, celebrating artistic achievement in nonfiction film in 12 categories, were presented tonight at the Times Center in New York City where Louie Psihoyos’ THE COVE – the acclaimed undercover investigation into secret dolphin hunting in Taijii, Japan – was the night’s big winner, receiving three Cinema Eye Honors for Outstanding Nonfiction Feature, Outstanding Production and Outstanding Cinematography.

The third annual event drew a packed house of documentary filmmakers, with presenters including Albert Maysles, Academy Award winners Barbara Kopple and Peter Davis, Ellen Kuras, Amir Bar-Lev and Bill Plympton.  The event was hosted by Cinema Eye co-chairs Esther Robinson and AJ Schnack.

Legendary French filmmaker Agnès Varda was awarded the Cinema Eye for Outstanding Direction for THE BEACHES OF AGNES.  Her longtime production designer, Franckie Diago, accepted the award on Varda’s behalf.

Anders Østergaard’s BURMA VJ received two awards, Outstanding International Feature and Outstanding Achievement in Editing, as did Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher’s OCTOBER COUNTRY, which was named Outstanding Debut and received the award for Original Music Score.

RJ Cutler’s behind-the-scenes look at Vogue Magazine, THE SEPTEMBER ISSUE, took the Audience Choice Prize.  Jessica Oreck received the first Cinema Eye Spotlight Award for her debut feature, BEETLE QUEEN CONQUERS TOKYO.  The Spotlight Award is intended to showcase a film that has not yet received proper attention in the United States.

[Full list of winners below.]

Ross McElwee’s 1986 documentary classic SHERMAN’S MARCH was presented with the first Cinema Eye Legacy Award.  McElwee received his award from two-time Oscar winner Kopple and then discussed the film and his work on stage with Thom Powers, chair of the Cinema Eye Honors Nominations Committee and Documentary Programmer for the Toronto International Film Festival.

The process for selecting the awards began with a list nearly 100 feature length nonfiction films eligible in 2009. The nominees were selected by a panel of documentary programmers from 14 different film festivals in North America and Europe.  More than 150 members of the documentary community – filmmakers, distributors, programmers and critics – voted for this year’s Cinema Eye winners.  Two categories – Original Music Score and the Spotlight Award – were voted on by a select jury.

http://www.cinemaeyehonors.com

2010 Cinema Eye Honorees

Outstanding Achievement in Nonfiction Feature Filmmaking

THE COVE
Directed by Louie Psihoyos
Produced by Paula DuPré Pesman and Fisher Stevens

Outstanding Achievement in Direction

Agnès Varda
THE BEACHES OF AGNES

Outstanding Achievement in International Feature Filmmaking

BURMA VJ
Directed by Anders Østergaard
Produced by Lise-Lense Møller

Outstanding Achievement in Debut Feature Filmmaking

OCTOBER COUNTRY
Directed by Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher

Outstanding Achievement in Production

Paula DuPré Pesman and Fisher Stevens
THE COVE

Outstanding Achievement in Cinematography

Brook Aitken
THE COVE

Outstanding Achievement in Editing

Janus Billeskov-Jansen and Thomas Papapetros
BURMA VJ

Outstanding Achievement in Original Music Score

Danny Grody, Donal Mosher, Michael Palmieri, Ted Savarese and Kenric Taylor
OCTOBER COUNTRY

Original Music Score Jury: Natalia Almada, Laurie Anderson, Brendan Canty, T. Griffin and Craig Wedren

Outstanding Achievement in Graphic Design and Animation (tie)

Bigstar
FOOD, INC.
and
Francis Hanneman, Darren Pasemko, Kent Hugo, Omar Majeed, Brett Gaylor + The Open Source Cinema Community
RIP: A REMIX MANIFESTO

Spotlight Award

BEETLE QUEEN CONQUERS TOKYO
Directed by Jessica Oreck

Spotlight Jury: Pernille Rose Gronkjær, Jason Kohn, David Polonsky and Jennifer Venditti

Audience Choice Prize

THE SEPTEMBER ISSUE
Directed by RJ Cutler

Legacy Award

SHERMAN’S MARCH
Directed by Ross McElwee

2010 Cinema Eye Honorees Press Release

The Cinema Eye Honors for Nonfiction Filmmaking is proud to announce that Ross McElwee’s 1986 classic SHERMAN’S MARCH has been named as the first recipient of the Cinema Eye Legacy Award.  The award will be presented at the 2010 Cinema Eye Honors in New York City on Friday, January 15 at TheTimesCenter with McElwee scheduled to attend and accept the award on behalf of the film.

The Legacy Award is given to a film that embodies the Cinema Eye mission statement of recognizing and honoring exemplary craft and innovation in nonfiction film as well as being a film that has inspired a new generation of filmmakers to create art in the nonfiction realm.

In presenting SHERMAN’S MARCH with the Legacy Award, the Cinema Eye Honors recognize the film’s distinctive place in the history of American nonfiction filmmaking and the lasting influence of McElwee’s singular, first-person epic on a host of filmmakers who have chronicled their own stories.

Download the full press release.

Voting is now open for the 2010 Cinema Eye Audience Choice Prize where you can vote for your favorite nonfiction film of 2009 from a list of some of the year’s most loved, most talked about documentaries.

This year’s nominees are:

• ANVIL! THE STORY OF ANVIL
• THE COVE
• EVERY LITTLE STEP
• FOOD, INC.
• GOOD HAIR
• THE SEPTEMBER ISSUE
• TYSON
• VALENTINO: THE LAST EMPEROR

Voting closes on January 8th and the winner will be announced at the 3rd annual Cinema Eye Honors on January 15, 2010 in New York City.

Go here to vote now!

“In SHERMAN’S MARCH, Mr. McElwee more or less follows Sherman’s trail in that he visits Atlanta, Savannah and Columbia, S.C. Occasionally he even stops off at a Civil War battlefield, fort or monument. Primarily, though, he’s picking up pretty, oddball young women or looking up old girlfriends, most of whom are now committed to other people. Quite early, he confides that the movie really is ”a meditation on the possibility of romantic love in the South today.” Or, to put it another way, is romantic love possible in an age of supermarkets, fast food, nuclear arms and the sort of lightweight camera and sound equipment that allows anybody to film his own life?…

“Though Mr. McElwee’s timing with women is awful, he’s a film maker-anthropologist with a rare appreciation for the eccentric details of our edgy civilization.”

- Vincent Canby, The New York Times, September 5, 1986

“Though documentary filmmaker Ross McElwee had been making quirkily personal essay films for over a decade before bringing SHERMAN’S MARCH to Park City, something about the film’s combination of Cold War anxiety, relationship woes, and McElwee’s conflicted feelings about his Southern origins clicked with a wider audience, dragging McElwee (and, arguably, Sundance) out of the “regional film” ghetto and into multiple festival appearances and PBS airings for the next couple of years. SHERMAN’S MARCH won the Grand Jury Prize in the documentary category in 1987, setting the stage for the likes of Michael Moore and every other first-person filmmaker who, in years to come, would use the Sundance forum to turn the camera on themselves and express their concerns—though usually with little of McElwee’s wit or deftness.”

- Scott Tobias and Noel Murray, AV Club, “10 Sundance Sensations That Changed Filmmaking”, January 14, 2008

The South Pole has lured scientists, adventurers and eccentrics like a magnet, ever since Ernest Shackleton ventured there a century ago. It seems inevitable that Werner Herzog should make his own South Pole exploration. In documentaries such as Grizzly Man, Little Dieter Needs to Fly, Lessons of Darkness and many others, Herzog has proven to be our cinematic poet laureate of men (and occasionally women) living in extremes. In Encounters at the End of the World, Herzog travels to the Antarctic community of McMurdo Station, on Ross Island, the headquarters for the National Science Foundation and home to eleven hundred people during the austral summer (October to February.) Beyond the settlement, he ventures through a science-fiction landscape, from the under-ice depths of the Ross Sea, to the brink of the Mount Erebus volcano.

-David Courier, Sundance Film Festival

August 7, 1974 – a young Frenchman named Philippe Petit steps out on a wire suspended 1,350 feet above ground between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. He dances on the wire with no safety net for almost an hour, crossing it eight times before he is arrested for what becomes known as ‘the artistic crime of the century.”

In the months leading up to his clandestine walk, Petit assembles a team of accomplices to plan and execute his “coup” in the most intricate detail. How do they pull it off? Moving between New York and his secret training camp in rural France, Petit and his team plot every detail. Like a band of professional bank robbers the tasks they face seem virtually insurmountable. But Petit is a man possessed; nothing will thwart his mission to conquer the world’s tallest buildings.

Unfolding like a delicious heist film, Man On Wire brings Petit’s extraordinary adventure back to life with visceral immediacy ripened with post-9/11 nostalgia. In candid interviews, Petit and all the key participants relish this chance to tell their story. Buoyed with eye-catching archival footage, clever dramatizations, and delightful visual effects, filmmaker James Marsh, like his daring subject, pulls off an astonishing coup.

-David Courier, Sundance Film Festival

Ari Folman’s animated documentary Waltz with Bashir is a seminal entry into the canon of war films. Told from the very personal point of view of Folman himself, it is a ferociously honest exploration of the reliability of memory and the long-term impacts of violence on young soldiers.

In 1982, having sustained constant attacks from its neighbour, Israel invaded Lebanon. Soon after, Israeli soldiers, including Folman’s brigade, allowed Christian Phalangist militiamen to invade the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. Thousands of men, women and children were slaughtered. While not directly responsible for these heinous acts, the Israelis (mostly teenaged soldiers like Folman himself) tacitly assisted by sending up flares to illuminate the night sky and, many feel, by standing by and allowing them to occur.

The film’s opening sequence follows twenty-six wild and angry dogs as they run though a town, stopping to bay with rage under a man’s window. This scene is the recurring nightmare of one of Folman’s army comrades, and it is his dream that inspires Folman to search into his own past. While he knows that he participated in the war, Folman has virtually no memory of the events. He goes in search of his fellow soldiers, hoping that by collecting their memories he will be able to recreate his own. Twenty-five years after the conflict, Folman’s new recollections elicit unsettling residual feelings and perspectives, including an uncomfortable parallel between the massacre at the refugee camp and the Holocaust.

Folman has elevated the film’s impact by securing the extraordinary involvement of Yoni Goodman, who created astonishing animations of images originally shot on film. This visual approach elevates Waltz with Bashir beyond our jaded impressions of ever-present news footage and into the surreal terrain of image and memory. Folman does not delve into the politics of the conflict, choosing instead to subjectively explore a dark chapter in his (and Israel’s) life. His conclusion, made in the last few shocking moments of the film, is a tribute to the filmmaker’s own moral honesty and to generations of young people scarred by ungodly acts of war.

- Jane Schoettle, Toronto International Film Festival