The nominations for the 97th Academy Awards have been announced. These include the nominees for Best Documentary Feature and Best Documentary Short Film. From a recent report by Deadline, both categories span stories from around the globe.
Each of the Best Documentary Feature nominees centers around international stories. These include Black Box Diaries, a Japanese documentary in which the director investigates her own sexual assault by a prominent Japanese television journalist, and Porcelain War, about artists producing art during the War in Ukraine. Other nominees detailing global stories include Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, which explores the fate of Congo’s first democratically elected leader, and Sugarcane, which explores the systemic abuse at an Indian Residential School in British Columbia.
However, the most notable Best Documentary Feature nominee is No Other Land. The documentary condemns Isreal’s rule over the Occupied West Bank by offering a ground-level view of the lives of Palestinian villagers in the West Bank villages of Masafer Yatta, as they face the constant threat of expulsion from their homes by Isreal Defense Forces, who claim the land for Military Defense Training purposes. What’s so notable about No Other Land’s nomination is that not only does the film currently have no U.S. distributor aside from a very limited release via Michael Tuckman Media and Cenetic Media, but the nomination comes only days after a ceasefire took hold in occupied Gaza, which is not far from the documentary’s central location.
Compared to its feature-length counterpart, the Best Documentary Short Film category includes far more local stories. Four of the five nominees tell stories within the U.S. The Only Girl in the Orchestra centers around Orin O’Brien, the first woman to become a full-time member of the New York Philharmonic. I am Ready, Warden is about Texas Death Row prisoner John Henry Ramirez. Death By Numbers centers around a survivor of a school shooting in Parkland, Florida, as she confronts her assailant. Incident explores the 2018 police killing of a male African American in Chicago. The only nominee to center around a topic outside the U.S. is Instruments of a Beating Heart, which explores lessons learned by Japanese schoolchildren.
The winners of both categories will be announced at the 97th Academy Awards, which will be held on March 7th at the Dolby Theater in Los Angeles, California. The awards will be aired live on ABC and streamed live on Hulu.
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