IDA Shortlists 16 Features, 12 Shorts; Four Films Per Category Advance

The IDA Documentary Awards shortlisted 16 features and 12 shorts on Tuesday, setting the field for the ceremony on December 4 in Los Angeles. Nominations follow on November 17, with member voting closing November 29.

The features list boosts Oscar prospects for a select group, and its omissions matter as much as its inclusions. Five nominees per category will be drawn from these shortlists.

Which features made the cut?

You Can See Everything, the Elizabeth Holmes documentary from A24 that has become a runaway box office hit, leads the field. Directors Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim produced alongside Tatiana Bears, Maggie Ambrose and Jack Davis.

Nuisance Bear, distributed by MUBI and directed by Jack Weisman and Gabriela Osio Vanden, also advanced. So did To Hold a Mountain, the Serbia-Montenegro-France production directed by Biljana Tutorov and Petar Glomazić for Submarine.

Julia Loktev earned a spot with My Undesirable Friends: Part II — Exile, the follow-up to her Oscar-shortlisted Part I — Last Air in Moscow. Two-time Oscar winner Ben Proudfoot made the list with The Eyes of Ghana. Pegah Ahangarani's Rehearsals for a Revolution, winner of the L'Oeil d'or prize at Cannes, also appears.

The remaining features:

• A Fox Under a Pink Moon (Mehrdad Oskouei, co-director Soraya Akhlaghi)
• A Life Illuminated (Tasha Van Zandt)
• Birds of War (Janay Boulos, Abd Alkader Habak)
• Concrete Land (Asmahan Bkerat)
• Do You Love Me (Lana Daher)
• Filthy (Bàrbara Mestanza, Marc Pujolar)
• Nuestra Tierra (Lucrecia Martel)
• One in a Million (Itab Azzam, Jack MacInnes)
• Silver (Natalia Koniarz)
• The Fabulous Time Machine (Eliza Capai)

What got snubbed?

Three absences stand out. Musk, 14th received no nomination. So did two prominent Gaza-themed films, American Doctor and NAZA. Once Upon a Time in Harlem, one of the most honored documentaries of the year, also missed.

The selection committee instead favored comparatively obscure titles. Concrete Land, Filthy, Silver and The Fabulous Time Machine all took slots over better-known competitors — a signal about how the 100-country member voting pool may diverge from Oscar buzz.

Who made the shorts shortlist?

Twelve short documentaries advanced. Oscar winner Laura Poitras and Rachel Lauren Mueller made the list with They're Here, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival and examines the deadly ICE occupation of Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Bill Morrison, Oscar-nominated last year for Incident, returned with Sawyer Avenue, Sunday Afternoon. That film, released through The New Yorker, centers on ICE agents seizing a man "without a warrant on a residential street in Chicago."

Four New York Times Op-Docs films made the shorts list:

• A Wolf in the Suburbs (Amélie Hardy)
• Sanyi Kakas (Sanyi the Rooster) (Lotte Salomons)
• Son (Leona Cauklija)
• Stalin Boys (Bianca Giaever, Ora DeKornfeld)

Yoruba Richen advanced with Free Joan Little, and Oscar-nominated Waad Al-Kateab made the cut with Maybe Tomorrow, co-directed with Wafa Mustafa for Channel 4.

One surprise: two-time Oscar nominee Joshua Oppenheimer missed for his new short, The Revolution Against Death, recently acquired by the New York Times Op-Docs.

The remaining shorts are Fruits of Despair (Nima Nassaj), How to Catch a Butterfly (Kiriko Mechanicus), Lost Songs of Sunduri (Sudarshan Sawant) and The Hotline (Ricki Stern, Jesse Sweet, HBO Max).

How does the voting work?

The mechanics are unusually broad. IDA members from 100 countries will view and vote for the Best Feature and Best Short winners between the November 17 nominations and the November 29 voting deadline.

The craft and category awards follow a different route. Jurors of more than 200 documentary professionals from over 60 countries select winners in Best Director, Best Cinematography, Best Editing, Best Original Music Score, Best Production, Best Sound Design, Best Writing, Best Curated Series, Best Episodic Series, Best Documentary Not in the English Language, Best Music Documentary, Best Student Documentary, the ABC News VideoSource Award and the Pare Lorentz Award.

The 42nd edition runs Friday, December 4 at The Ebell of Los Angeles. Tabitha Jackson, director of Film Forum in New York City and former director of the Sundance Film Festival, hosts.

The nonprofit IDA framed the event against industry headwinds. In a release, it said: "At a time when filmmakers face critical distribution and funding challenges, IDA looks forward to gathering and uplifting this irrepressible global community and introducing their work to new audiences."

By James Calloway