Last Night's Cinema Eye Awards, honoring outstanding achievement in documentary filmmaking, developed for and by filmmakers, saw James Marsh's MAN ON WIRE and Ari Folman's WALTZ WITH BASHIR take home most awards. A few Impact Film Festival filmmakers were nominated, including Patrick Creadon's I.O.U.S.A and Carl Deal and Tia Lessin's TROUBLE THE WATER.
Many of the same programmers that graciously helped program the Impact Film Festival at the political conventions this summer were the nominating committee for Cinema Eye: Sundance's Cara Mertes and David Courier, Toronto's Thom Powers, Full Frame's (formerly) Phoebe Brush, Sarasota's Tom Hall, Tribeca's David Kwok, Hampton's David Nugent, Los Angeles Film Festival's Rachel Rosen, and SILVERDOC's Sky Sitney. POV's Yance Ford wasn't on the Cinema Eye nominating committee, but was a major participant in the evening, coming on stage with AJ Schnack in THE ORDER OF MYTHS Mardi Gras King and Queen Garb, mentioning later when announcing an award winner that her arrival was the first time she'd been in a dress.
Doc Luminaries presented the awards: Al Maysles, DA Pennebaker, along with Morgan Spurlock, Jehane Noujaim, Laurie Anderson, and the extraordinary Andrea Meditch.
The winners were:
Outstanding Achievement in Nonfiction Filmmaking, Production and Editing
James Marsh and Simon Chinn's MAN ON WIRE
Outstanding Achievement in Direction, music graphic design and animation and best international feature
Ari Foman's WALTZ WITH BASHIR
Outstanding Achievement in Debut Feature and Audience Choice
Yung Chang's UP THE YANGTZE
Outstanding Achievement in Cinematography
Peter Zeitlinger's ENCOUNTERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD
Congratulations to these and the other nominees who brought us such diverse, extraordinary and impactful filmmaking in 2008, and Bravo to AJ, Thom and their team for such a fun show.
