Moore finishes his 2003 Oscar speech

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Politics dominates Critics’ Choice Documentary Awards

Days after the White House press secretary shared doctored footage to justify restricting a journalist’s access, the annual Critics’ Choice Documentary Awards took on a more charged tenor than usual.

“Remember truth? That little thing that’s the foundation of civilization?” Robert De Niro asked wistfully, drawing laughs from the audience who’d gathered at the BRIC in Brooklyn on Saturday for the gala.

“We live in a time of fiction and lies, so that makes this all the more important. People who make documentary films – it’s a critical job that needs to be done,” Michael Moore, whom De Niro presented with the Critics’ Choice Lifetime Achievement Award, told Variety ahead of the event. “I think we all have to be focused on removing what’s going on in Washington DC and fixing the country right now. I know that’s my personal commitment as a citizen and a filmmaker.”

Unsurprisingly, others on the carpet shared his passion for fact-based filmmaking. “I’ve always felt like the best stories are non-fiction, and I love the idea of being able to shape a narrative with the fundamentals of reality and truth,” Rashida Jones, who won best music documentary with her co-director Alan Hicks for “Quincy” (a doc about her father Quincy Jones), told Variety. “What’s great about documentaries is even if you know nothing about the subject matter, if it’s a great film, you will care about the subject, whether it’s a person or an event or a moment in history – it forces you to care.”

That quality is particularly important to Jones in the current political climate. “We have a bit of a two-story narrative happening in this country, and it’s really about access to the truth and what your truth is and the fact that it’s slightly subjective at the moment,” she explained. “I’m hoping that as we start to see stories and hear the voices of more people, it will allow people who don’t have access to those stories to feel empathy and consideration and tolerance for people who are not them,” she said.

Morgan Neville was similarly inspired by the subjects of both of his recent documentaries, Fred Rogers in “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” and Orson Welles in “They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead”. Working on the two projects “was vastly different – and they’re vastly different characters,” he told Variety. “But the similarity is they’re both people who didn’t care what was popular or what other people thought was important. So, they’re mavericks in their own way. And they were both heroes of mine at different times in my life.”

Though Neville idolized Welles as a filmmaker, Rogers’ ideology was the one that felt most urgent to him in 2018. “The Fred Rogers film was just me trying to connect with a message that I felt was absent from our culture today, which is how we actually are going to move forward as a community, as a society, which is essentially what he’s talking about on that show.”

Idea

In his work and in life, Neville keeps coming back to the idea of civil discourse: “I think we’ve built our culture in a way that actually incentivizes incivility. It’s how we get votes, it’s how we get eyeballs – by demonizing others and fear-mongering. And I think that toxicity is ultimately gonna kill us unless we do something about it.”

For Neville, winning both best documentary and best director on the same night as Moore received the Lifetime Achievement Award carried special significance. “’Roger and Me’ opened in the fall of 1989. I was working as a journalist in San Francisco, and it opened on two screens – one in New York and one in LA,” he explained. “And my roommate and I so wanted to see it, we got into a car, drove to LA, saw a matinee, and drove home. It was a 12-hour round trip to see the film, and it meant a huge deal to me.” That screening of Moore’s first feature set Neville on the path to becoming an Academy Award-winning documentarian in his own right.

The evening was also a full circle moment for Moore himself: he took the opportunity to finish his 2003 Oscars acceptance speech for “Bowling for Columbine”, for which he was famously booed off stage after criticizing president George W. Bush and declaring that “we live in fictitious times … where we have fictitious election results that elect a fictitious president.”

Fifteen years later, he was able to reveal how the speech was supposed to end:

“So, before I close, I want to say a few words about nonfiction and how to use it as a cure for the many lies we are being told and as a nonviolent weapon of revolution and change. I have read over the years that my first movie, ‘Roger and Me’, kicked open the doors for documentary films – the first documentary to be widely distributed to shopping mall cinemas and multiplexes of America. The Academy, though, has not let me in as a member for 13 long years, not until just last month. I had heard all the reasons why. ‘Roger and Me’, it’s not a documentary. ‘Roger and Me’, documentaries are not supposed to be entertainment. You’re using your frivolous humor, and it lessens the seriousness and the impact of what you’re trying to say. Those of us from the now-dead factory towns of the Rust Belt, who, like me, have just a high school education – we from the working class immediately know the class-based tone of those who speak to us, those who went to the finer schools or even any school at all. I encourage anyone watching at home tonight in the Gary, Indianas of America, in the Camden, New Jerseys, in the San Ysidros, in the East St Louises, and yes, the Flints and Detroits and the Pontiacs and the Dearborns, to pick up a camera and fight the power. Make your voice heard and stop this senseless war.”

Moore felt strongly that the call to action was just as relevant today. “We are not only still at war, but we have a president who has declared war on our democracy and war on us,” he said. “Keep picking up those cameras, everyone here in this room, because the people gathered here tonight, you may be America’s last line of defense – and hopefully the first line of rebuilding this country that he is currently destroying.” (RTRS)

By Alex Barasch

This news has been read 11060 times!

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