The prestigious Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival in Arkansas gets underway Friday, just as Oscar season is kicking into high gear. North America’s longest running festival dedicated to nonfiction cinema – now in its 34th year – will not lack for Academy Award hopefuls.
Among them: The Tale of Silyan, the documentary directed by Oscar-nominated filmmaker Tamara Kotevska (Honeyland) that was recently acquired by National Geographic after premiering at the Venice Film Festival. The film, selected by North Macedonia to compete for Best International Film at the Oscars, centers on a farmer burdened by economic hardship who finds succor caring for an injured white stork.
‘The Tale of Silyan’
National Geographic
“The Tale of Silyan is one of those rare films that exists on the edge of hybrid documentary,” observes Ken Jacobson, executive director of the Hot Springs Documentary Film Institute who is overseeing his third edition of the festival. “I think it very much feels like a fictional film in some ways in terms of the narrative arc and the characterization and almost the Disney-like quality of the birds in the film, and how they connect with the main character and that sort of symbiotic relationship. It’s a gorgeous film.”
Filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl
Kino Lorber
Fellow Oscar contenders receiving berths at the festival include Riefenstahl, Andres Veiel’s startling examination of German director Leni Reifenstahl, who was known as Hitler’s favorite filmmaker.
- The Dating Game, directed by Violet Du Feng, about men in China working on their wooing skills as they seek wives in a country where males greatly outnumber females.
- Seeds, Brittany Shyne’s Sundance-winning film about Black farmers in the South who have cultivated family-owned land for generations.
- Cover-Up, the documentary directed by Oscar winner Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus that was recently acquired by Netflix. It examines the career of investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, the man who broke the My Lai Massacre story, the Abu Ghraib scandal along with many other vital exposes.
- Come See Me in the Good Light, Ryan White’s poignant exploration of the love story of poets Andrea Gibson and Megan Falley.
- Cutting Through Rocks, directed by Mohammadreza Eyni and Sara Khaki, tells the story of a woman elected to serve on a town council in rural Iran who uses her position to challenge “patriarchal traditions once thought untouchable.”
- Yanuni, directed by Richard Ladkani, a film documenting “Juma Xipaia, the first female chief of the Xipaya people in the Brazilian Amazon, and the fight to protect her ancestral land.”
‘Holding Liat’
Meridian Hill Pictures
The extraordinary slate of Oscar contenders doesn’t end there. HSDFF will also screen Holding Liat, directed by Brandon Kramer and produced by his brother, Lance Kramer; Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, directed by Sepideh Farsi; The Librarians, directed by Kim A. Snyder; Life After, directed by Reid Davenport; Natchez, directed by Suzannah Herbert.
Geeta Gandbhir, director of one of this year’s top Academy Award prospects in The Perfect Neighbor, will receive the festival’s Impact Award, recognizing the tremendous emotional force of her film. It tells the horribly tragic story of Ajike Owens, a Black woman and mom of four in Ocala, FL who was killed by a white neighbor – a woman who had harassed neighborhood children of color for years.
‘The Perfect Neighbor’
Netflix
“The film premiered at Sundance and [Gandbhir] won the directing award in the U.S. Documentary category, a film that everyone kind of immediately recognized was going to be one of the top films of the year,” Jacobson comments. “Netflix acquired it after Sundance, and it is a directing tour to force. It relies almost exclusively on police body cam footage… Geeta, I think, just puts herself in that kind of upper echelon of filmmakers with this film.”
The festival will also screen a short documentary that Gandbhir directed with Christalyn Hampton, The Devil Is Busy. Two films Gandbhir executive produced are also in the HSDFF lineup: the short Teaching America, and the feature The Gas Station Attendant.
Among discoveries at the festival, Jacobson points to Welded Together, a feature directed by Anastasiya Miroshnichenko.
‘Welded Together’
HSDFF
“She is an incredible filmmaker,” Jacobson raves, adding the film crafts “a portrait of a young woman named Katya who is a welder in Belarus, and much of the film is following her on the rounds as she does her work in this totally male-dominated profession. It contrasts the hard scrabble life that she has making a living as a welder against the backdrop of Belarus, with a very fraught family life. She is caught in between her mother who’s an alcoholic and her sister, who is someone she desperately wants to protect.”
Hot Springs Documentary Film Institute Executive Director Ken Jacobson
HSDFF
The festival unfolds at a particularly tenuous time for the documentary field, which for the past several years has faced a feeble acquisition market. Multiplying that misery, the Trump administration has taken direct aim at PBS, for decades the foremost platform for documentary film. In July, Pres. Trump signed the Rescissions Act, which clawed back over a billion dollars of funding that had already been allocated for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which supports PBS and NPR.
Addressing the crisis facing documentary makers, the festival will convene its third Filmmaker Forum, an event (ironically) supported by CPB.
“We’ve got some great people coming from public media, whether it’s PBS or local public television stations — primarily from the South, but from other places as well,” Jacobson tells Deadline. “We have plenty of filmmakers coming to discuss these issues. We have funders like MacArthur Foundation coming, Sundance Institute Fund is coming, so it’s going to be a very robust conference with a lot of hard questions asked.
“[It’s] a really key opportunity for people to just be in the same place together, to talk to each other in person, figure out how they can continue to work together and solve problems that affect this entire field and beyond. It’s definitely shaping up to be a really special event.”
Registration is still open for the forum, which is very reasonably priced for attendees. Click here to register.
Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival
Matt Carey/Deadline
The Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival takes place in the historic spa town in Central Arkansas, west of Little Rock. Bathhouses dating back a century or more stand within steps of the Hot Springs National Park. Appropriately, given how closely associated Hot Springs is with a national park, the festival will open Friday night with Lost Wolves of Yellowstone, a film about the reintroduction of wolves into another famed national park.
“We were the first federal [reservation] set aside by the U.S. government,” Jacobson says of the Hot Springs park. “And then of course Yellowstone ended up being the first national park. So, there’s this historical connection, kind of mythical link between the two.”
‘Diamond Diplomacy’
HSDFF
Hot Springs possesses something of a mythical link to America’s pastime. Those who know their baseball history will recall it as a site of MLB’s spring training many decades ago. The Bambino, Babe Ruth himself, came for spring training beginning around 1915 and credited the natural hot springs baths with having a salubrious effect on him. In another smart tie-in by HSDFF, the festival will screen Diamond Diplomacy, a documentary about how the common love of baseball helped forge a relationship between the U.S. and Japan. Attending from that film will be director Yuriko Gamo Romer, producer Loi Ameera Almeron, and a special guest from the film — Masanori “Mashi” Murakami.
“He’s he first Japanese player to be hired to play in the Major Leagues,” Jacobson says of Murakami. “He played for the San Francisco Giants. Mashi will be here.”
For those whose favorite pastime is documentary film, Hot Springs — running October 10-18 — boasts an outstanding starting lineup.
