Pushing the Envelope: A Decade of Documentary at the Cinema Eye Honors

When the inaugural Cinema Eye Honors award ceremony was held in March of 2008, it was both a celebration and act of defiance. Although documentary filmmaking was experiencing a new peak in terms of artistic achievement, formal innovation, and diversity, these developments had gone largely unnoticed by the American film industry. To remedy that, the Cinema Eye Honors developed a full spectrum of awards for the nonfiction craft, from Editing and Cinematography to Music and emerging talent. The landscape has changed somewhat in the years since 2008, thanks in part to Cinema Eye, which will hold its 10th annual awards this coming January at the Museum. To mark this occasion, the Museum will present highlights from their first decade with a series featuring more than twenty films that have won or been nominated, along with a few key films released in the year before that first Cinema Eye Honors. Highlights include four-time Cinema Eye Honoree and Academy Award winner Laura Poitras presenting her post-9/11 trilogy—My Country, My Country; The Oath; and Citizenfour—a showing of Joshua Oppenheimer’s stunning diptych The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence. Other guests include Margaret Brown (The Order of Myths), Jeff Malmberg (Marwencol), Jennifer Venditti (Billy the Kid), Billy and Turner Ross (45365), and others.