The documentary community is still absorbing the win by Mr. Nobody Against Putin at the Academy Awards on Sunday. The film didn’t exactly “come out of nowhere” to claim the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature, but Netflix’s The Perfect Neighbor sure looked like the favorite going into the ceremony.
On the new edition of Deadline’s Doc Talk podcast, hosts John Ridley and Matt Carey parse the results and debate what they tell us about Academy voters. Ridley, an Oscar winner himself and Academy member, proposes what he calls a conspiracy theory to explain why The Perfect Neighbor, directed by Geeta Gandbhir, came up short.
On the latest episode of the pod, we also travel to True/False in Columbia, MO to speak with makers of two documentaries that just premiered at the prestigious festival: Phenomena and Pinball.
Phenomena, directed by Melbourne-based Josef Gatti, creates one of the most stunning visual experiences of any nonfiction film, all of it done without resorting to any visual effects. Gatti’s focus is illustrating the primary forces of the universe – like light, gravity, and electromagnetism – through a set of ingenious experiments (some performed with the aid of the filmmaker’s dad, a physicist). What could, in the hands of, say, your high school science teacher, appear like a dry or baffling exercise, becomes in Gatti’s film a dazzling display.
The director likens his project to “a trippy science musical” or, alternatively, a “psychedelic odyssey into the fabric of the universe.” (It’s now screening at CPH:DOX, with Gatti present in Copenhagen for that).
Pinball, it bears noting, doesn’t have anything to do with the arcade game (or the Who’s Tommy, for that matter). What the film directed by Naveen Chaubal and produced by Bryn Silverman does explore is the experience of Yosef, a young man living in Kentucky who finds himself pulled between several gravitational poles – the Baghdad of his early life, the Cairo of some of his formative years, and the Louisville of his coming of age as a refugee from the U.S. invasion of Iraq. It’s a film that defies expectations – for instance, what one might imagine a community in a red state might be like for someone of Yosef’s background, or the conversations between Yosef and his group of Iraqi American friends (which, as Chaubal describes it, includes plenty of “sh*t talking.”).
The filmmakers also tell us why they chose the title Pinball for their documentary, acknowledging some viewers have wondered at its lack of depiction of any game featuring bumpers, silver balls or flippers.
That’s on the new episode of Doc Talk hosted by Oscar winner Ridley (12 Years a Slave, Shirley) and Carey, Deadline’s senior documentary editor. The pod is a production of Deadline and Ridley’s Nō Studios.
Listen to the episode above or on major podcast platforms including Spotify, iHeart and Apple.
English (US) ·