The Academy Awards, commonly and now officially known as the Oscars, are awards for artistic and technical merit for the film industry. They are presented annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences located in Beverly Hills, California, United States, in recognition of excellence in cinematic achievements as assessed by the Academy's voting membership. The Oscar statuette depicts a knight rendered in the Art Deco style.
The Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature Film is an award for documentary films. In 1941, the first awards for feature-length documentaries were bestowed as Special Awards to Kukan and Target for Tonight. They have since been bestowed competitively each year, with the exception of 1946. Copies of every winning film are held by the Academy Film Archive.
This is a list of films by year that have received an Academy Award together with the other nominations for best documentary short film. Following the Academy's practice, the year listed for each film is the year of release: the awards are announced and presented early in the following year. Copies of every winning film are held by the Academy Film Archive. Fifteen films are shortlisted before nominations are announced.
Jaye Davidson is an English model, fashion stylist, and retired actor. He made his acting debut as Dil in the thriller film The Crying Game (1992), for which he received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. Following his breakthrough, he portrayed the villainous Ra in the commercially successful science fiction film Stargate (1994). Davidson retired from acting afterwards, disliking the fame that the roles brought him.
Charles Eli Guggenheim was an American documentary film director, producer, and screenwriter. He was the most honored documentary filmmaker in the academy history, winning four Oscars from twelve nominations.
Haskell Wexler, ASC was an American cinematographer, film producer, and director. Wexler was judged to be one of film history's ten most influential cinematographers in a survey of the members of the International Cinematographers Guild. He won the Academy Award for Best Cinematography twice, in 1966 and 1976, out of five nominations. In his obituary in The New York Times, Wexler is described as being "renowned as one of the most inventive cinematographers in Hollywood."
Irene Taylor is a Peabody and Emmy-winning, Oscar-nominated director and producer whose documentaries have shown theatrically, at film festivals and stream worldwide.
Mitchell Block is an American filmmaker, primarily a producer of documentary films.
Daniel Junge is an American documentary filmmaker. On February 26, 2012, he won the Academy Award for Best Documentary for the film Saving Face, which he co-directed along with Pakistani filmmaker Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.
Redemption is a 2012 short documentary film directed by Jon Alpert and Matthew O'Neill. The film, which details the lives of New York City's "canners," people who survive by redeeming bottles and cans for money, was nominated for the 2013 Academy Award for Best Documentary.
Mondays at Racine is a 2012 short documentary film directed by Cynthia Wade, about two sisters who open their Long Island hair salon to women diagnosed with cancer, every third Monday of the month. The film was nominated for the 2013 Academy Award for Best Documentary.
Kings Point is a 2012 short documentary film about five seniors living in a retirement resort in Kings Point, Florida, directed by Sari Gilman. The film was nominated for the 2013 Academy Award for Best Documentary.
Inocente is a 2012 short documentary film directed by Sean Fine and Andrea Nix. The film received the 2013 Academy Award for Best Documentary. The film is an inspiring coming-of-age story of a 15-year-old girl in California. Though homeless and undocumented, she refuses to give up on her dream of being an artist, proving that the hand she has been dealt does not define her – her dreams do.
Martin Bell is an American film director best known for films such as Streetwise and American Heart. He was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary for Streetwise.
13th is a 2016 American documentary film directed by Ava DuVernay. The film explores the prison-industrial complex, and the "intersection of race, justice, and mass incarceration in the United States"; it is titled after the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, adopted in 1865, which abolished slavery throughout the United States and ended involuntary servitude except as a punishment for conviction of a crime. This allowed for a constitutional loophole in which black Americans became criminalized and faced involuntary servitude in the form of penal labor.
Carson "Kit" Davidson was an American filmmaker, writer, and editor. His filmmaking career spanned four decades, during which he made more than a dozen short films, two of which were nominated for Academy Awards.
3rd Ave. El is an American short film made by Carson Davidson in 1955. The film presents four vignettes of passengers riding the Third Avenue elevated railway in New York City, made shortly before the line closed in 1955. The film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film.
Kief Davidson is an American filmmaker who was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short at the 2013 Academy Awards for his work on Open Heart with Cori Shepherd Stern.
