A huge congratulations to everyone who won last night at the 2010 Cinema Eye Honors for Nonfiction Filmmaking but more importantly, congratulations to everyone who had a film nominated and to all those who have made and supported docs over the past year. The nominee line-up was pretty darn great and included films I have really loved: Loot, Episode 3 Enjoy Poverty, The Way We Get By and Mugabe and the White African for example. As co-chair AJ Schnack said,…

One of the lessons of 2009 for me: the worse things get, the better people get, or rather the more I realize how important all the people I work with and play with are to me and to the life I want to live. The past few months have been a strange mixture of 3am panics about the state of the world and moments of sheer joy, and most of these moments of joy have been documentary-related (watching Obama’s inauguration…

Awards are a bit like weddings. You sort of wish that everyone would just get together and throw a party and pay attention to each other just because it’s a nice thing to do but you really have to add a little something extra into the mix to get people to rent hotel rooms and buy toasters and china and, well, I guess my point is that sometimes, although the competition aspect of film award events doesn’t sit so well…

Jason Kohn gave a great speech when he won the Outstanding Achievement in Nonfiction Filmmaking at the Cinema Eye Honors last week. He spoke about making Manda Bala “out of anger” after watching Marshall Curry’s Streetfight play to an empty theater at a festival in Sao Paulo. “I was so god damn mad. . . because when these movies don’t get seen you feel like you’re fucking losing, you feel like somebody else is winning and that person is no…