The Stairs | |
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Directed by | Ben Maddow |
Written by | Ben Maddow |
Produced by | Helen Levitt |
Production companies | Film Documents, Inc. for the Mental Health Film Board and the South Carolina Department of Mental Health |
Distributed by | International Film Bureau [1] |
Release date |
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Country | United States |
Language | English |
The Stairs (later renamed as The Steps of Age) is a 1950 American short documentary film. It focuses on a woman in her sixties who retires and goes to live with her daughter. [1]
It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short. [2] [3]
The Academy Awards, commonly 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 (AMPAS) in the United States in recognition of excellence in cinematic achievements as assessed by the Academy's voting membership. The Oscars are widely considered to be the most prestigious awards in the film industry.
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.
The Music Box is a Laurel and Hardy short film comedy released in 1932. It was directed by James Parrott, produced by Hal Roach and distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The film, which depicts the pair attempting to move a piano up a long flight of steps, won the first Academy Award for Best Live Action Short (Comedy) in 1932. In 1997, it was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". The film is widely seen as the most iconic Laurel and Hardy short, with the featured stairs becoming a popular tourist attraction.
Dame Julia Mary Walters, known professionally as Julie Walters, is an English actress. She is the recipient of four British Academy Television Awards, two British Academy Film Awards, two International Emmy Awards, a Golden Globe Award, and an Olivier Award.
Rita Moreno is an American actress, dancer, and singer. She has performed on stage and screen in a career spanning over eight decades. Moreno is one of the last remaining stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood. Among her numerous accolades, she is one of the few actors to have been awarded an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony (EGOT) and the Triple Crown of Acting, with individual competitive Academy, Emmy, and Tony awards. Additional accolades include the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2004, the National Medal of Arts in 2009, the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award in 2013, the Kennedy Center Honor in 2015, and a Peabody Award in 2019.
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Albert Lamorisse was a French filmmaker, film producer, and writer of short films which he began making in the late 1940s. He also invented the strategic board game Risk in 1957.
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Alexandr Hackenschmied, born Alexander Siegfried George Hackenschmied, known later as Alexander Hammid, was a Czech-American photographer, film director, cinematographer and film editor. He immigrated to the U.S. in 1938 and became involved in American avant-garde cinema. He is best known for three films: Crisis (1939), Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) and To Be Alive! (1964). He made Meshes of the Afternoon with Maya Deren, to whom he was married from 1942 to 1947. His second marriage was to the photographer Hella Heyman, who had also collaborated with Hammid and Deren on several films.
Ben Maddow was an American screenwriter and documentarian from the 1930s through the 1970s. Educated at Columbia University, Maddow began his career working within the American documentary movement in the 1930s.
Cynthia Scott is a Canadian award-winning filmmaker who has produced, directed, written, and edited several films with the National Film Board of Canada (NFB). Her works have won the Oscar and Canadian Film Award. Scott is a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. Her projects with the NFB are mainly focused on documentary filmmaking. Some of Scott's most notable documentaries for the NFB feature dancing and the dance world including Flamenco at 5:15 (1983), which won an Academy Award for Best Documentary at the 56th Academy Awards in 1984. She is married to filmmaker John N. Smith.
First Steps is a 1947 short documentary film about the treatment of children with disabilities. Produced for the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations by Frederic House Inc., the film was distributed by the National Film Board of Canada. First Steps, directed by Leo Seltzer, won the Documentary Short Subject Oscar at the 20th Academy Awards in 1948 for the United Nations Division of Films and Visual Education.
So Much for So Little is a 1949 American animated short documentary film directed by Chuck Jones and Friz Freleng. In 1950, it won an Oscar at the 22nd Academy Awards for Documentary Short Subject, tying with A Chance to Live. It was created by Warner Bros. Cartoons for the United States Public Health Service. As a work of the United States Government, the film is in the public domain. The Academy Film Archive preserved So Much for So Little in 2005. Produced during the Harry S. Truman administration, it attained renewed relevance during the modern Medicare for All movement in the United States nearly seven decades later.
Eric Simonson is an American writer and director in theatre, film and opera. He is a member of Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago, and the author of plays Lombardi, Fake, Honest, Magic/Bird and Bronx Bombers. He won the 2005 Academy Award for his short documentary A Note of Triumph: The Golden Age of Norman Corwin, and was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical in 1993 for The Song of Jacob Zulu.
On Tiptoe: Gentle Steps to Freedom, also called On Tiptoe: The Music of Ladysmith Black Mambazo is a 2000 American short documentary film directed by Eric Simonson. It tells the story of South African singers Ladysmith Black Mambazo. It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short.
Bob's Birthday is a 1993 Canadian-British animated short by Alison Snowden and David Fine, winner of the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film at the 67th Academy Awards, and serves as the pilot to the animated series Bob & Margaret. It features a humorous look at how Margaret plans to throw a surprise birthday party for Bob on his 40th birthday, as he struggles with the sudden impact of middle age. Bob's Birthday has won 10 awards, one of which includes the National Film Board of Canada's 60th Oscar nomination. The film was inspired by the creators, Alison Snowden and David Fine, both turning 30.
Mitchell W. Block was an American filmmaker, primarily a producer of documentary films.
The Witness: From the Balcony of Room 306 is a 2008 documentary short film created to honor the 40th annual remembrance of the life and death of Martin Luther King Jr. Directed by Adam Pertofsky, the film received a 2008 Oscar nomination in the "Best Documentary Short Subject" Category at the 81st Academy Awards.
Naresh Bedi is an Indian filmmaker, the eldest of the Bedi Brothers and a member of the second generation of three generations of Wildlife photographers and filmmakers. He is the first Asian to receive a Wildscreen Panda Award and the first Indian to receive a wildlife film nomination for the British Academy Film Awards. He was honoured by the Government of India in 2015 with Padma Shri, the fourth highest Indian civilian award.
Utthara Unni is an Indian Bharatanatyam dancer from Kerala. She has directed some short films, documentaries and music videos. She also acted in two films. She heads a dance academy called Temple Steps in Kochi, Kerala.