News

November 30, 2009 - [ indieWIRE ]

The 19th Annual Gotham Independent Film Awards has announced its winners at Cipriani Wall Street in Lower Manhattan. A full list of winners is below:


Best Feature 


The Hurt Locker Kathryn Bigelow, director; Kathryn Bigelow, Mark Boal, Nicolas Chartier, Greg Shapiro, producers (Summit Entertainment)


Best Documentary 


Food, Inc. Robert Kenner, director; Robert Kenner, Elise Pearlstein, producers (Magnolia Pictures)


Best Ensemble Performance


The Hurt Locker


Breakthrough Director 


Robert Siegel for Big Fan


Breakthrough Actor 


Catalina Saavedra in The Maid


Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You 


You Won’t Miss Me; Ry Russo-Young, director
 

November 30, 2009 - [ Barron's ]

With money tight, top philanthropists insist on more bang for the buck. Meet the 25 most effective givers.
 


THE NAME OF THE GAME IN PHILANTHROPY this year is to make your dollars go far -- very far. With the recession squeezing donors and charities alike, it's more important than ever to make sure your giving really makes a difference.
 


Ideally, each dollar you give will transform itself into $3 or $4 of benefits for your chosen causes -- from improving local schools to easing world poverty. That's high-impact giving, and some philanthropists are raising it to a high form of art.
 


The best of the best are ranked and profiled on the following pages. Barron's developed the listing in collaboration with consulting firm Global Philanthropy Group. While rankings in other publications highlight those who give the most money, we chose to focus on those who are getting the results.
 

November 30, 2009 - [ Daily Variety ]

The Weinstein Co.'s "Nine" scored a leading 11 Satellite Award nominations, including best picture in the comedy or musical category. 
Directed by Rob Marshall, the bigscreen adaptation of the Broadway tuner also scored acting nods for stars Penelope Cruz, Marion Cotillard and Daniel Day-Lewis, as well as best ensemble. Marshall also scored a nom for best director. 
 


John Woo's historical epic “Red Cliff"came in second with seven nods.
 


In the best actor field, noms were handed out to Jeff Bridges (“Crazy Heart"), Hugh Dancy (“Adam"), Johnny Depp (“Public Enemies"), Colin Firth (“A Single Man"), Jeremy Renner (“The Hurt Locker") and Michael Sheen (“The Damned United"). 
 


Shohreh Aghdashloo (“The Stoning of Soraya M."), Emily Blunt (“The Young Victoria"), Abbie Cornish (“Bright Star") Penelope Cruz (“Broken Embraces"), Carey Mulligan (“An Education") and Catalina Saavedra (“The Maid") head up the actress category.
 


For top drama film, “Bright Star,"“An Education,"“The Hurt Locker,"“The Messenger,"“Precious"and “The Stoning of Soraya M.” were nominated.
 


Besides “Nine,"other comedy-musical noms were “The Informant,"“Julie and Julia,"“It's Complicated,"“A Serious Man"and “Up in the Air."
 


On the TV side, Fox's “Glee"topped the list of noms with five nods, including best comedy, actress (Jane Lynch) and actor (Matthew Morrison). 
 
The Satellite Awards are given by the International Press Academy. Winners will be announced on Dec. 20.

November 18, 2009 - [ Participant Media ]

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences today announced that 15 films in the Documentary Feature category will advance in the voting process for the 82nd Academy Awards®. Eighty-nine pictures had originally qualified in the category.
 
 

November 13, 2009 - [ IDA Awards ]

The nominees for the International Documentary Association’s 2009 IDA Documentary Awards competition were announced today, including many of the year’s most buzzed-about titles and festival favorites. Winners will be feted on December 4th at the Directors Guild in Los Angeles, in a ceremony hosted by This American Life’s Ira Glass.
 
“As the boundaries of documentary film continue to be fearlessly shattered by the creativity of nonfiction filmmaking, IDA is proud to be honoring not only the best films of the year, but also many of those who have led the way,” said IDA Executive Director Michael Lumpkin. “The future of nonfiction storytelling could not be better represented by our outstanding host, Ira Glass, who continues to inspire and entertain across a number of media platforms.”

November 5, 2009 - [ Indiewire ]

Louie Psihoyos’ “The Cove,” received a record-tying seven Cinema Eye Honors nominations today when they were announced at the Sheffield International Documentary Festival in the UK. The film - about dolphin hunts in Japan - won dozens of prizes on the festival circuit this year, include Sundance’s Audience Award. The Cinema Eye Honors followed suit handing “The Cove” nods for Production, Cinematography, Editing, Original Score, Debut Feature and the top prize, Outstanding Achievement in Nonfiction Feature Filmmaking.
 


For the top prize, “The Cove” was joined by Anders Ostergaard’s “Burma VJ,” Robert Kenner’s “Food, Inc.,” Darius Marder’s “Loot,” and Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher’s “October Country.” “Burma” and “October” each grabbed four additional nominations, tying for the second most nods after “The Cove,” while “October Country”‘s Michael Palmieri, in co-directing, co-producing, photographing and co-scoring the film, became the first individual nominated for five Cinema Eye Honors in a single year.  Last year, Ari Folman set the previous high mark of four nominations for “Waltz With Bashir,” a number matched this year by Palmieri’s co-director Donal Mosher.

November 5, 2009 - [ Huffington Post ]

When we set out to make Food, Inc. I was hoping to create a film that would raise questions, open eyes and prompt people around the country to think about how our food system operates.
 


Industrial food companies don't want us thinking about how our food is produced. They spend billions of dollars maintaining the myth of small family farms with white picket fences and cows on green pastures. In reality our food is produced on massive factory farms.

October 30, 2009 - [ AERA Magazine ]

Issues raised in the film 'The Cove' have been reinforced by a recent article in AERA Magazine, published weekly by the Asahi Shimbun newspaper in Japan. The article contains unsettling results from ongoing mercury testing of residents of Taiji, Japan. The southern town has come under international scrutiny following the release of the multi award winning film 'The Cove', which exposes the secret dolphin slaughter that takes place in Taiji annually and the consequences of eating the mercury laden dolphin meat.

FOOD, INC. IS A FINALIST FOR THE IDA AWARDS UPDATE

October 28, 2009 - [ IDA ]

Food, Inc. is actually a finalist for IDA’s Pare Lorentz Award. 

October 26, 2009 - [ WonderWall ]

October 19, 2009 - [ Gotham ]

Best Documentary
 
Food, Inc.
Robert Kenner, director; Robert Kenner, Elise Pearlstein, producers
 
Good Hair
Jeff Stilson, director; Chris Rock, Kevin O’Donnell, Nelson George Jenny Hunter, producers
 
My Neighbor My Killer
Anne Aghion, director/producer
 
Paradise
Michael Almereyda, director; Michael Almereyda, Laurie Butler, producers
 
Tyson
James Toback, director; James Toback, Damon Bingham, producers

October 15, 2009 - [ ]

LONDON (October 15, 2009) – The Japanese town of Taiji is testing its residents' mercury levels for the first time. The issue of mercury-laden dolphin meat being sold in Taiji and across Japan, often as mislabeled whale meat, was exposed through the release of the film The Cove. The multi award-winning documentary reveals the connection between the capture of dolphins in Taiji and the poisoning of those that eat the toxic dolphin meat.

October 12, 2009 - [ Variety ]


ABU DHABI -- Abu Dhabi's $1 billion production arm Imagenation can't stop making deals.
In addition to the $10 million development pact with Walter Parkes and Laurie Macdonald that was announced Oct. 9, the deep-pocketed shingle has heightened its partnership with Participant Media, with whom it inked a $250 million joint fund last September.
 


Imagenation will co-finance Participant's Jodie Foster-helmed, Mel Gibson starring "The Beaver," along with Summit Entertainment, which will distribute the film in the U.S. and most international territories.
 


The two companies also are exploring ways in which a new-media distribution operation could be employed in the Middle East. The region has yet to maximize the revenues for pics released there due to a fragmented distribution network, censorship in some countries and high levels of piracy in many.
 


"You've got more than 300 million people in this region, with 60% under the age of 26. That's a lot of people who are online, on Facebook, twittering and on MySpace," Participant Media chief exec Jim Berk told Daily Variety. "We want to engage them and activate them and get them to respond to our films."

October 2, 2009 - [ Participant Media ]

September 16, 2009 - [ Time.com ]

September heralds the six-month dolphin-hunting season in Taiji, a small seaside town in Japan's southwestern Wakayama prefecture. And residents are sensing the attack on them has also begun. The Cove — a U.S. documentary with the air of a spy thriller that has been called "advocacy filmmaking at its best" since its release on July 31 — depicts Taiji's centuries-old tradition of killing dolphins with an unflinching eye on the sometimes gruesome process. The documentarians, led by photographer turned director Louie Psihoyos and dolphin trainer turned activist Richard O'Barry, have stirred both international outcry and acclaim at film festivals from Sundance to Seattle with their footage of the slaughter that takes place every year in a remote cove in Taiji.

Earlier this week, the town decided to release 70 of the roughly 100 dolphins from the previous week's catch. But Taiji fishermen aren't the only ones bowing to international pressure. Tokyo International Film Festival (TIFF) chairman Tom Yoda announced on Sept. 16 that the festival will screen the film, after previously rejecting it for TIFF's official selection (the festival starts next month). Having come under fire for initially rejecting the documentary, Yoda said the reasons for rejecting or accepting films aren't generally discussed, as the festival receives more than 700 entries each year. No film festival has a moral obligation to accept a film, but TIFF's slogan of "Action! For Earth" raised more than a few eyebrows when the widely lauded eco-documentary didn't make the cut. In the end, Yoda said, the festival "decided to take The Cove due to international attention worldwide."

September 10, 2009 - [ Associated Press ]

The western Japanese town of Taiji will sell some of the animals to aquariums as it does every year, but the remainder of the 100 bottlenose dolphins that were caught early Wednesday in the first catch of the season are to be released. In the past, they were killed and sold for meat.

An official at the Taiji fisheries association, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the town abhors the publicity its dolphin-killing has drawn, said Thursday that the decision was made partly in response to the international outcry created by "The Cove."

September 7, 2009 - [ Variety ]

The wacky little brother of "Erin Brockovich," "The Informant!" goofs around lightheartedly while still doing some justice to the true-life story of a zealous but wildly delusional corporate whistle-blower. A larky outing for director Steven Soderbergh after the somber rigors of "Che" and "The Girlfriend Experience," the pic showcases an excellent performance by a chubbed-out Matt Damon as a Midwestern executive who's so smart he's dumb. Amusingly eccentric rather than outright funny, this Warner Bros. release will have to rely mostly on Damon for its B.O., which looks to be modest.

August 21, 2009 - [ Stanford Social Innovation Review ]

Actionable knowledge is not limited to compiling and analyzing data. Jeff Skoll, first president of eBay Inc. and founder of the Skoll Foundation, created a for-profit film production company, Participant Media, in 2004 to produce major movies that could inform and engage the public on social issues. With projects such as Syriana, An Inconvenient Truth, and Good Night, and Good Luck—Participant has been a commercial and artistic success, producing enviable box office revenues and multiple Academy Award nominations. Participant partners with nonprofits to create social action campaigns for each film that it releases, such as benefit screenings and educational curricula for schools. The social action campaign for An Inconvenient Truth, one of the highest grossing documentaries of all time, led directly to more than 106,000 tons of CO2 off sets, nine countries incorporating the film into their curriculum for high school students, and four bills on climate change introduced in Congress.

August 19, 2009 - [ Time Magazine ]

“Some Americans are heeding such warnings and working to transform the way the country eats — ranchers and farmers who are raising sustainable food in ways that don't bankrupt the earth. Documentaries like the scathing Food Inc. and the work of investigative journalists like Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan are reprising Sinclair's work, awakening a sleeping public to the uncomfortable realities of how we eat. “

August 4, 2009 - [ Funny or Die ]

If you're a criminal, the last thing you want to do is run into a Bad Ass Dolphin. Ever.
Dolphins Are Gangsta, our viral video for The Cove, is on the homepage of Funny or Die today.

Please send this link to as many people as possible and tell them to vote “Funny” ( as opposed to “die”) so we can stay on the homepage as long as possible.