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National Post 4 Feb 11
In 2007, when the journalists Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington set out to make a documentary following a military unit in Afghanistan, they had no awards aspirations.
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC The documentary Restrepo, about U.S. soliders in Afghanistan, is nominated for an Oscar.
“Don’t get hurt, don’t get killed doing this — that was our first order of business,” Junger said. The documentary, Restrepo, about a remote base in the Korangal Valley, led them to embed with the Second Platoon of Battle Company of the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team for more than a year, and they did get hurt. A Humvee Junger was in drove over an improvised explosive device, rattling those on board, and he later tore his Achilles’ tendon jumping out of the line of a firefight. Hetherington broke his leg on a mission and had to walk four hours down a mountain on it, humping his gear, to get back to camp. Their personal ordeals, complete with some level of post-traumatic stress and difficulty returning to civilian life, mirrored those of the soldiers they followed. Restrepo won a grand jury prize for best domestic documentary at the Sundance Film Festival last year and went on to play at theatres and on military bases around the country.
Now it is one of the five Oscar documentary hopefuls, in a category that was among the few with major surprises when nominations were announced last week. Waiting for Superman, an early favourite, was left off the list, as was The Tillman Story, another harrowing film about Afghanistan; Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer, from the Oscarwinner Alex Gibney, also got no love. Instead the contenders are mostly smaller films from lesser-known filmmakers: Waste Land, set against the backdrop of a massive garbage dump in Rio de Janeiro; Gasland, which examines the dangers of natural-gas drilling; and the oddball of the group, Exit Through the Gift Shop, Banksy’s subversive story of a street artist run amok. The presumed front-runner is Inside Job, Charles Ferguson’s well-liked dissection of the economic crisis. But with most of the feature film and acting categories apparently sewn up, thanks to the consensus voting of industry groups, the documentaries are one area where there is still some drama.
“This is tough year, a really tough year,” Gibney, who is on the executive committee of the documentary branch at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, said at a screening for his movie at the start of this awards season.
Ferguson, the only repeat nominee (he was a contender with No End in Sight in 2008), has as an agent now, but he was still bewildered by the whole prize process. “This is totally not my department,” he said.
And Junger, a veteran war correspondent but first-time filmmaker, said he wished The Tillman Story had been included. “The nominating procedure is a mystery even for people in the business,” he said.
Lucy Walker, the director of Waste Land, agreed. “It’s a small community,” she said, “but you don’t get to peek behind the curtain.” At this year’s Sundance festival, where she was a juror, Walker met an Academy member who told her he had voted to nominate her film but didn’t know how to vote for her to win. (The documentary branch requires its members to have seen all the films to vote.) “He was saying, like: ‘Do I have to see the movies all over again? I’ve seen them all already, but I think I have to go see it again, and I don’t think I can vote for you because I’m leaving town,’ ” she recounted. (No repeat viewings were necessary if he had already seen it at the nominations level, according to Leslie Unger, an Academy spokeswoman; if he hadn’t, it had to be seen at a theatre, not on a screener.)
“I’ve been asking for copies of the rules of the voting,” Walker said. “It seems quite arcane.”
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