Today’s announcement of the documentary nominees for the Producers Guild of America Awards has given another lift to Oscar contender The Tale of Silyan, the National Geographic film that’s also representing North Macedonia in the Oscars’ Best International Feature Film category.
Silyan, directed by Tamara Kotevska, was among seven nonfiction features to make the PGA nominations cut. And on Saturday, the film – which tells the story of a farmer in a North Macedonian village who cares for an injured white stork – won Best Feature Documentary at the 41st IDA Documentary Awards in Los Angeles.
Deadline’s Doc Talk podcast hosts John Ridley and Matt Carey went into the field for the IDA ceremony at the Los Angeles Athletic Club downtown, corralling winners as they stepped off stage and into our ad hoc recording studio – the LAAC’s wine room. Along with Kotevska, we toasted the team behind Apocalypse in the Tropics — director and producer Petra Costa and producer Alessandra Orofino – who won two awards including the newly created Best Production prize.
Brittany Shyne, who won Best Director for her work on Seeds as well as the Emerging Filmmaker Award, joined us in the wine room as did WTO/99‘s Alex Megaro, winner of Best Editing (a prize he shared with director and co-editor Ian Bell). We also visited with Jenny Raskin of Impact Partners, winner of the IDA’s Pioneer Award.
There was plenty of talk at the IDA Documentary Awards about the proposed merger of Netflix and Warner Bros Discovery, which if approved by regulators would combine two of the biggest streaming platforms. A day before the awards ceremony, the IDA issued a sharply worded statement condemning the merger, saying it would harm the documentary field which is already reeling from reduced acquisitions and narrowed distribution opportunities. Our guests shared their unvarnished opinions about the possible corporate marriage between two of the industry’s biggest content creators and distributors.
Petra Costa, an Oscar nominee for her documentary The Edge of Democracy, updated us on the status of one of her chief characters in Apocalypse in the Tropics – former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. He’s been under house arrest pending the start of a 27-year prison term for allegedly inciting a coup attempt after he was defeated for reelection in 2022. Days before he was to report to prison, he took a soldering iron to his ankle monitor; Costa tells us why Bolsonaro is blaming the ankle monitor itself for the incident.
In the LAAC wine room, we indulged in plenty of potent conversation, if not fermented grapes. Listen in 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.
Click on the audio link above or find Doc Talk on major podcast platforms including Spotify, iHeart and Apple.