BEST NARRATIVE FEATURE

(It should be noted that I missed approximately everything.) 

1. Before Midnight
2. Lily
3. Hide Your Smiling Faces
4. The Rocket

5. Michael H. – Profession: Director

Jim Fouratt

BEST NARRATIVE FEATURE

1. Floating Skyscrapers – Against an Antonioni-like landscape, the truth of attraction vs societal demands is revelatory.
2. Sunlight Jr. – Not since Alison Anders’ Things Behind the Sun has the tension poverty places on emotional relationships been so nuanced. Director/writer Laurie Collier, as she did in Sherrybaby, does not sugar coat the emotional bombshell scraping to pay the rent hangs over everything, waiting to be ignited by the slightest unexpected turn of events. Watts and Dillon have magnetic resonance and she has never been more authentic in a role.
3. Odayaka – New Yorkers wil recognize the tension between The Mayor and the President telling us to “go shopping.” The air is clean right after the buildings fell on 9/11 and four very different women in Tokyo after an earthquake and Tsunami caused a nuclear reactor meltdown. In this documentary-like narrative, director Nonuteru Uchida explores the relationship between fear and truth and action.
4. Broken Circle Breakdown
5. Six Acts

BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE
1. Oxyana
2. Bridegroom

3. Killing Team
4. Teenage
5. Big Joy: The Adventures of James Broughton

BEST DIRECTOR

1. Sean Dunne, Oxyana
2. Tomasz Wasilewski, Floating Skyscrapers
3. Matt Wolf, Teenage
4. Dan Krauss, The Kill Team
5. Felix Van Greningen, The Broken Circle Breakdown

BEST LEAD PERFORMANCE

1. Naomi Watts, Sunlight, Jr.
2. Golshifteh Farahani, The Patience Stone
3. Gloria Pires, Reaching for the Moon
4. Emmanuelle Devos, Just A Sigh
5. Veerle Baetens, The Broken Circle Breakdown

BEST SUPPORTING PERFORMANCE

1. Kim Dickens, At Any Price

BEST ENSEMBLE

1. The Reluctant Fundamentalist
2. Greetings From Tim Buckley
3. What Richard Did
4. Byzantium
5. Some Velvet Morning

BEST FIRST FEATURE

1. Emir Baigazin, Harmony Lessons
2. Jonathan Gurfinkle, Six Acts
3. Daniel Patrick Carbone, Hide Your Smiling Faces
4. Chiemi Karasawa, Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me
5. Matt Creed, Lily

MOST ANTICIPATED (BUT MISSED IT AT TRIBECA)

1. The Rocket
2. Wadjda
3. Taboor
4. Whitewash
5. Stand Clear of the Closing Doors

BEST SCENE
1. The Kill Team: When the marine dad of the accused soldier killer realizes that no one in the military or government cares what is true. They simply want to sweep it under the carpet.

2. GASLAND Part 2: When director Josh Fox is handcuffed and removed from a public hearing because he wants to video the actual hearing. No other journalist is present. It’s his wake up call that the political system has failed him because it has been completely kidnapped by lobbyist money.
3. Let the Fire Burn: When we see the “bomb” dropped from a police helicopter explode and a house with 7 people inside become engulfed in flames and then spread to the working class neighborhood full of black-owned homes as the black Mayor takes responsibility for ordering this drastic measure to remove the MOVE collective from their communal home.
4. The Genius of Marian: Not one scene but many that reveals how Alzheimer’s is pitting the brain of the filmmaker’s mother. Reminiscent in style and emotional impact of Jonathan Caouette’s “Walk Away Renee.” The storytelling quietly and relentlessly keeps the slow disappearance of reality in focus and the impact on both the family and the viewer.
5. Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia: The choice of opening the film with a graveyard visit to look at the tombstone that has his long time companion’s name carved in it, where he awaits the remains of Gore Vidal to be placed next to him. Finally honored in death for a life of companionship – always kept silent and hid by Gore from public discussion in their 40-year-plus relationship.

BIGGEST SURPRISE

1. Bridegroom: Had passed on it and only went when I was turned away from Adult World and it was was just starting. Though it was to be one more same-sex civil marriage advocacy doc – I get it, I support it, but really there’s more to same sex romance than marriage – I found myself deeply engaged in a love story of two small town, midwest gay men who find each other and true love in, of all places, Hollywood. One is an actor/jock/musician and the other a smartypants fem boy with balls, One dies …and not from AIDS (Oh my) in an accident and that is where life would have been different for the surviving partner if they had been allowed to marry. Two very different families of origin spice the story. Well surprise, surprise: it completely engaged me as a love story so universal that gender and sexual orientation became secondary. Yes, changing laws is necessary, but changing culture is the real battle. Linda Bloodworth Thomason has made a film for every American who does not know a gay person and does not understand the power, joy and strength of same sex love and the devastation learned in crisis of second class citizenship,
2. In God We Trust: The moment I realized this was an advocacy doc about not greed from any side, but the erasure of the role that greed had played in the “victim” turning their head and not wanting to know how they thought they were getting wealthy, while all most all other investors were getting a much lower return own their money.
3. The Project: Seeing Blackwater founder Eric Prince imaged as a hero in a pro-private mercenary army solution to security issues in Nation states was chilling. The fact that most of the white mercenaries were in fact South African Afrikaans and this was only known because of their accents.
4. The Trails of Muhammad Ali: Seeing how nothing would persuade Ali to move away from his convictions about the Vietnam War despite the political fall-out including his losing his title of World Champion and seeing Martin Luther King embrace him, despite the difference in religion and politics.