The Paraguayan film Nothing but the Sun / Apenas el sol by director Arami Ullón was announced this morning as one of the nominees for Best Feature Film in the 37th Annual IDA Documentary Awards. The film which had its world premiere a year ago as opening night of IDFA, International Documentary Film Festival, tells the story of Mateo Sobode Chiqueno who has been recording stories, songs, and testimonies of his Ayoreo people since the seventies. In an attempt to preserve fragments of a disappearing culture, Mateo walks across communities in the arid and desolate Paraguayan Chaco region, and registers on cassettes the experiences of other Ayoreo who, like him, were born in the vast forest, free and nomadic, without any contact with white civilization, until religious missionaries forced them to abandon their ancestral territory, their means of subsistence, their beliefs and their home.
Other Latinx nominees include Faya Dari, the debut feature by Ethiopian-Mexican director Jessica Beshir was also nominated for three IDA Documentary Awards: for Best Feature Film, Best Director and Best Cinematography. The lyrical film explores the coexistence of everyday life and its mythical undercurrents. Though a deeply personal project—Beshir was forced to leave her hometown of Harar with her family as a teenager due to growing political strife—the film she returned to make about the city, its rural Oromo community of farmers, and the harvesting of the country’s most sought-after export (the euphoria-inducing khat plant) is neither a straightforward work of nostalgia nor an issue-oriented doc about a particular drug culture.
Two Latinx titles have been nominated for Best Short Film: Águilas by Kristy Guevara-Flanagan, and Since you arrived, my heart stopped belonging to me / Desde que llegaste, mi corazón dejó de pertenecerme by Erin Semine Kökdil. The U.S.-Mexican production No Soy Óscar by Jon Ayon nabbed a nomination for the David L. Wolper Student Documentary Award; the HBO series Exterminate All the Brutes by Haitian director Raoul Peck was nominated for Best Multi-Part Documentaryl and the documentary Pelé on the Brazilian soccer legend was nominated for Best Music Score.
The winners of the 37th annual IDA Documentary Awards will be announced on February 5 in a ceremony at Paramount Studios in Los Angeles.
