For single feature-length productions—60 minutes or longer—such as documentaries or docudramas that deal with historical events, people, or issues.
Shortlisted
The White House Effect
Director:
Jon Shenk / Bonni Cohen / Pedro Kos
Producer(s):
Josh Penn / Noah Stahl / Justine Nagan
Footage Archive Researcher:
Yael Chanoff / Elijah Stevens / Sierra Pettengill / Gerard Nijssen / Nathalie Barton / Andrew Seber
Footage Archive Producer:
Gideon C. Kennedy / Rich Remsberg
Archival Sources:
George HW Bush Presidential Library / NCAR / NOAA / NASA / NARA / Exposure Labs / Nederlands Instituut voor Beeld & Geluid / Briscoe Center for American History
Production Company:
Actual Films / Department of Motion Pictures / Impact Partners
Country of Production:
United States
Original Release:
2024
Synopsis
THE WHITE HOUSE EFFECT explores the gripping drama that unfolded inside the George H.W. Bush White House after scientists warned the country for the first time that global warming was real and underway. Bush, who in 1988 ran as an environmental candidate, finds himself caught in the middle when his chief of staff John Sununu locks horns with EPA chief Bill Reilly over how to respond to the public’s growing environmental concerns. Ideological conservatives and industry power brokers line up behind Sununu as the forward-minded Reilly looks increasingly isolated. Meanwhile Bush faces mounting pressure to make a decision that will change the course of history. Using only archival materials, the film tells a harrowing political story about the consequences of presidential power and its impact on how we deal with the climate crisis today.
Riefenstahl
Director:
Andres Veiel
Producer(s):
Sandra Maischberger / Enzo Maass
Footage Archive Researcher:
Christiane Caemmerer
Footage Archive Producer:
Monika Preischl / Mona El Bira
Archival Sources:
Private Estate of Leni Riefenstahl / Deutsche Kinemathek – Museum Für Film und Fernsehen / Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz (Ethnologisches Museum / Fotomuseum / Kunstbibliothek) / Bundesarchiv / Multiple private collections and TV archives (ARD, BBC, CBC, etc...)
Production Company:
Vincent Productions GmbH
Country of Production:
Germany
Original Release:
2024
Synopsis
Leni Riefenstahl is considered one of the most controversial women of the 20th century. Her iconographic imagery of “Triumph of the Will” and “Olympia” stands for perfectly staged body worship, for the celebration of the superior and victorious. The aesthetics of their images seem more present than ever – and with them their message?
The film pursues this question using new documents from Riefenstahl’s estate – private films and photos, an unpublished making-of shoot, drafts of her memoirs, recorded telephone conversations with close companions, personal letters. The materials are questioned as to what they tell and what they conceal and are thus placed in an expanded context of history and the present.
Eye Filmmuseum / Bundesarchiv / Cinecitta / British Pathé / NFSA National Film and Sound Archive of Australia
Production Company:
Drygas Production / Fixafilm / Era Film / Eye Filmmuseum / Telewizja Polska TVP
Country of Production:
France / Poland / Lithuania / Netherlands
Synopsis
“Trains” is a found-footage documentary composed entirely of archive footage and sound design that creates a collective portrait of people in 20th-century Europe, capturing their hopes, desires, dramas and tragedies.
A train compartment is a place where people are taken out of their everyday context for a while. Sometimes the journey is accompanied by the hope that something will change in our lives upon reaching the destination, or conversely, by a stark absence of hope. And yet the history of the 20th century unfolds in railway carriages in a repetitive refrain. Every few years, hauntingly similar scenes play out in railway stations around the world: carriages full of men leaving for war, only to return wounded or as casualties. This cycle is followed by an exodus of civilians, evacuees mingling with prisoners of war returning from camps, and soldiers of victorious armies leading the defeated, until ordinary passengers reappear at stations.
Sound and Vision / Eye Filmmuseum / City Archives Amsterdam / Jewish Museum, Amsterdam / United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Production Company:
Family Affair Films
Country of Production:
Netherlands
Original Release:
2024
Synopsis
NESHOMA is set in Amsterdam between the two World Wars, when one in ten residents of the city was Jewish. Seventeen-year-old Rusha lives in the Jewish quarter with her family. Her older brother Max has emigrated to the Dutch East Indies. In her letters to Max, Rusha recounts daily life in the city, creating a vivid portrait of Amsterdam from the perspective of the Jewish community.
The film begins shortly after World War I, a period full of confidence in the future. The combination of Rusha’s letters and archival footage paints a colorful picture of proud diamond cutters, market traders, cabaret artists, and city officials committed to social housing, along with entrepreneurs behind the luxury Bijenkorf department store and Amstel Hotel.
The initial optimism is gradually tested by economic depression and the rise of fascism, leading to the occupation of the Netherlands. In these times of adversity, humor and zest for life, the “lechajim,” provide comfort to the Jewish community. Rusha matures from a young girl into an independent woman. The outbreak of World War II presents her with an impossible choice.
NESHOMA is not only about those who are no longer here, but also what they left behind: the
Using previously unpublished interviews, family films and propaganda films, ‘The Propagandist’ tells the story of the rise and fall of Dutch filmmaker Jan Teunissen (1898-1975). As head of the Department of Film of the Dutch Nazi Party and SS, he became the most powerful man in the Dutch film industry during World War II. Teunissen, nicknamed the ‘Film Czar’ and the ‘Dutch Leni Riefenstahl’ was a well-known filmmaker before the war. What drove him to become part of the Nazi regime? The Propagandist questions the boundaries between documentary and propaganda and the role of propagandists - how they spread images, narratives, misinformation and ideology. A documentary about boundless ambition and the manipulative power of film.
