The only place to view four of the five films nominated for this year’s Feature documentary award at the Academy awards is Doc Play.
Porcelain War is amongst the five nominees, produced by Australian production company Songbird Studios in association with Imaginary Lane. PORCELAIN WAR sees three remarkable artists who, amidst the chaos and destruction of the brutal Russian invasion of Ukraine, choose to stay behind and defend their culture and country. Armed with their art, their cameras, and, for the first time in their lives, their guns, they defiantly find inspiration and beauty.
Co-directed by U.S.-based Brendan Bellomo and Ukraine-based Slava Leontyev, the production was led out of Songbird’s Sydney office and saw an international team of filmmakers and artists across Ukraine, America, Australia, Poland and India collaborate on the project.
Porcelain War is produced by an all-female producing team, comprising Australian Camilla Mazzaferro from Songbird Studios and U.S. based Aniela Sidorska, Paula DuPré Pesmen and Olivia Ahnemann.
PORCELAIN DREAMS depicts the nightmare scenario where artists must take up arms and fight to preserve their culture. It’s an extraordinary achievement for an independent documentary and a testament to the perseverance and dedication of an exceptional team of filmmakers who have worked tirelessly to bring this story to audiences around the world.
Focusing on another horrible and horrifying conflict is NO OTHER LAND, a horror movie, a documentary of destruction and displacement which poses the question, Does expulsion equal extermination? The equation becomes part of the callous, calculated demolition and diaspora-making policy of the Israeli government in this gut wrenching, head scratching, heart sinking film.
Basel Adra, a young Palestinian activist from Masafer Yatta, in the southern West Bank has been fighting his community’s mass expulsion by the Israeli occupation since childhood. He has inherited resistance and protest from his father. Like all that goes on in that part of the world, its is a long festering feud.
Armed with a camera not a Kalashnikov, a cinematic sling aimed at the Israeli Goliath, Basel records the gradual erasure of the region of Masafer Yatta, as Israeli soldiers bulldoze the homes of Palestinian families, the largest single act of forced transfer ever carried out in the occupied West Bank.
Ashamed of his country’s actions, Yuval, an Israeli journalist, joins Basel’s struggle, and for over half a decade the two rage against the expulsion. Their complex bond is haunted by the extreme inequality between them: Basel, living under a brutal military occupation, and Yuval, unrestricted and free.
NO OTHER LAND is the product of a Palestinian-Israeli collective of four young activists, was co-created as an act of creative resistance to Apartheid and a search for a path towards equality and justice.
The Collective comprises of Basel Adra, a Palestinian lawyer, journalist and filmmaker from Masafer Yatta, Rachel Szor an Israeli cinematographer, editor, and director from Jerusalem, Hamdan Ballal, a Palestinian photographer, filmmaker and farmer from Susya, and Yuval Abraham. an Israeli filmmaker and investigative journalist from Jerusalem.
In 2022, after a two decade long legal battle, the Israeli high court gave the military a green light to carry out the expulsion – which is the largest single act of forced transfer carried out in the West Bank since it was occupied in 1967 an astonishing sixty years ago.
The decision to destroy the Palestinian villages and evict around 1,800 people so the military can use their land for tank training exercises triggered worldwide condemnation and a continued determination by the locals to protest the policy of systematic home demolitions.
The Israeli Civil Administration in the West Bank rejects almost all Palestinian requests for building permits, while allowing settlers in the area to build freely. This policy uses military law to force entire families in Masafer Yatta to leave their historical lands, since they are unable to build anything legally. All of their homes, schools, water wells, and roads are considered “illegal” by the army and marked for destruction. Their mere existence, on their private land, is illegal.
After Israel’s victory in the 1967 war, the Israeli minister of defence, Moshe Dayan, declared, “We are now an empire.” To the victor, the spoils, so the saying goes. But what good is the spoils if it spoils any sense of decency, any source of resolution, and demolishes any hope for a future.
BLACK BOX DIARIES is a work of first person journalism from lived experience film maker, Shiori Ito. The film chronicles, or diarises, her investigation of her own sexual assault in an attempt to prosecute her high profile offender. Not only a personal striving for justice against her perpetrator, the film is an indictment of Japan’s judicial system and inherent misogyny.
SOUNDTRACK TO A COUP D’ETAT is epic. One of the most acclaimed and original documentaries of the year, Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat explores the events leading to the assassination of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba in 1961.
Featuring jazz legends Nina Simone and Louis Armstrong, it intertwines political intrigue with cultural vibrancy, a collision of jazz with the dismantling of colonialism, the conniving of traditional Colonial powers and the emergence of the new imperialists, the complicity of the CIA and the frustrations of the United Nations. Extraordinary and what a soundtrack!
Binge them all on Doc Play before the Awards are announced on Monday.
