The Cinema Eye Honors for Nonfiction Filmmaking have
unveiled the five nominees for its fourth annual Cinema Eye Heterodox Award,
honoring a narrative film that imaginatively incorporates nonfiction
strategies, content and/or modes of production.
The 2014 Heterodox Awards will be presented at the 7th
Annual Cinema Eye Honors for Nonfiction Filmmaking on January 8, 2014, at the
Museum of the Moving Image in New York.
The Five Nominees for the 2013 Cinema Eye Heterodox Award:
Computer Chess
Directed by Andrew Bujalski
Masterfully evoking the nerdy world of artificial
intelligence engineers at a weekend computer chess convention, Andrew
Bujalski’s 1980-set feature feels like a low-fi emissary from a pre-networked
age. Shot in black-and-white on vintage video cameras, Computer Chess’s
near-anthropological recreation is enormously witty — a loopy commentary on
social ritual mediated by technology.
Escape From Tomorrow
Directed by Randy Moore
The copyrighted images of the Walt Disney Corporation are
deliciously appropriated by Randy Moore for his comic fantasia, Escape from
Tomorrow. Shot secretly using consumer DSLRs and a stealth crew at real Disney
theme parks, the film is both a hilarious psychosexual comedy and, with its
legal provocation, a demonstration of how our childhood memories are the stuff
of intellectual property disputes.
Interior. Leather Bar.
Directed by James Franco and Travis Matthews
Some 40 minutes of gay S&M footage was purportedly
deleted from William Friedkin’s 1980 feature Cruising, and it is this lost
material that inspires Travis Matthews and James Franco’s Interior. Leather
Bar. What initially feels like a behind-the-scenes documentary about the
recreation of these scenes turns into something very different as the film
plumbs issues of sexual anxiety, the cinematic history of gay representation
and the power of celebrity.
Neighboring Sounds
Directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho
The social strata of a Brazilian seaside high-rise are
depicted with a hallucinatory tension in Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Neighboring
Sounds. When a wealthy apartment complex — the director’s own — is hit by a
series of crimes, a private security firm creates its own unease in a film that
cooly captures a society amidst economic and cultural transformation.
Post Tenebras Lux
Directed by Carlos Reygadas
Boundaries between documentary and fiction, myth and
autobiography are elided in Post Tenebras Lux, a seductively mysterious feature
from Carlos Reygadas. A rich family moving to a mountainside home in a poor
Mexican village face a series of psychic disruptions in this visually
ravishing, deeply experimental work.
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