the devil came on horseback Tagged Articles at Cinematical

The Toronto International Film Festival is over, we have a couple months respite before Sundance, so naturally thoughts turn to the Oscar race. While I'm as curious as anyone else which films will end up garnering the big nod (and I will be really surprised if Juno doesn't get a few noms, especially for screenwriting), as an indie girl I'm most interested in the docs and foreigns. I'm a documentary dork, and one of the things I most look forward to covering at any given film fest is the doc slate -- which, as both David Poland and Anne Thompson have noted in post-Toronto columns, have been weak this year relative to the past couple years. No one really seems to be sure why this is, exactly, although the surprising success of March of the Penguins in 2005 fueled an interest in documentaries that led, perhaps, to a bit of a glut.

The trouble with documentaries is that, penguin love aside, docs are not something your average person is going to go out of their way to shell out ten bucks to see at a theater. Rent from the video store or add to your Netflix queue, perhaps, but when you're looking for a film to see on date night, the depressing topics that tend to make up much of the available documentary fare are not really the first thing that comes to mind. When's the last time you said, "Hey, honey, I know what to do tonight -- let's get dinner at that place over in Little Italy we like, and then let's go see that new Iraq war doc!" Given a choice between a bummer doc and, say, Superbad, most folks are going to opt for the laughs over the conscience-pricking dose of reality.

The Darfur documentary has done it again. Variety has reported that The Devil Came on Horseback, Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stein's film about soldier-turned-activist Brian Steidle's experiences in the Sudan, has nabbed another prize. This time, it has won the International Feature prize from the second-annual BritDoc Festival. As previously covered, the doc was a Jury finalist at HotDocs and it won the two filmmakers the Women in Cinema, Lena Sharpe Award for Persistence of Vision at SIFF. At Sundance this year, James Rocchi gave the film a solid review, calling it a film that "hurts the heart and stirs the soul," and he got a chance to speak with Steidle and Sundberg about the film, which you can see here.

Beyond that chilling documentary, BritDoc handed out an honorable mention to Andre Paounov for his film, The Mosquito Problem and Other Stories -- which, as the title suggests, tackles a community's insect problem, a British feature competition prize to Kim Longinotto's Hold Me Tight, Let Me Go, about excluded children and their careers and Jezza Neumann won a MySpace-sponsored audience award for China's Stolen Children. Apparently, the fest had to fight off severe flooding, but trucked on from July 25-27. Hopefully doc filmmaking can do the same and gain more ground despite any flooding challenges.