The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences' Documentary Branch Nominating Committee has shortlisted fifteen films for consideration for the 2008 Oscar for Best Documentary Feature. Five will make it to the voting ballot. One will win the golden statuette.
'Man On Wire'
Discovery Films
In Man On Wire, director James Marsh recreates the magic moment in which famous French tightrope walker Philippe Petit stepped off the top of one of the World Trade Center twin towers, onto a wire, and walked across space, to the other tower. It was August 7, 1974. Petit was 1350 feet above the ground. Thousands of awestruck people watched from the streets below, news cameras filmed and broadcast the event from helicopters that buzzed through the surrounding airspace, and people around the world were mesmerized by the amazing stunt.
'Pray The Devil Back To Hell'
Balcony Releasing
Pray The Devil Back To Hell celebrates the courageous women of Liberia who organized politically, successfully ousted the corrupt and cruel Nigerian tyrant Charles Taylor, ended the civil war that had ravaged their country for decades, and inducted their country's first female head of state.
'Standard Operating Procedure'
It's unclear just why American soldiers in charge of interrogating suspected terrorists at Abu Ghraib decided to take photos of some of their harsher techniques, but when their pictures of shackled, naked men forced into humiliating and terrifying behavior became public, they instigated an investigation that eventually brought criminal indictment of the soldiers, incarceration and dishonorable discharges from their military careers. Filmmaker Errol Morris looks beyond the infamous photographs to discover that the bad behavior shown was typical and known to their superior officers--who were never punished.
'They Killed Sister Dorothy'
Just Film
In 2005, Sister Dorothy Stang, a 75 year old nun from Dayton, Ohio, was shot six times and left to die on a muddy road in the Brazilian Amazon. They Killed Sister Dorothy is the poignant and alarming story of her murder, and a thorough investigation of who killed her and why.
'Trouble the Water'
Zeitgeist Films
The defining moment in Tia Lessen and Carl Deal’s post-Katrina documentary, Trouble The Water, comes at the beginning of the film, when the filmmakers, in New Orleans to record the disaster's aftermath, meet Kimberly Roberts, who’d survived the hurricane and shares her compelling story--and the harrowing video she'd shot of the calamitous event that put her Ninth Ward home and everything around it under water.
