The San Francisco Film Society has announced the winners for their 2014 Documentary Film Fund with awards totaling more than $75,000. All films are in postproduction, and since its inception the fund has awarded over $300,000 to filmmakers with non-fiction documentary films. Previous winners include Cutie and the Boxer, American Promise, and Narco Cultura.

Below are this year’s winners, with descriptions provided by SFFS.

The Joneses, Moby Longinotto
$30,627

The Joneses is a portrait of Jheri, a 73-year-old transgender trailer park matriarch, who lives in bible belt Mississippi. Reconciled with her family after years of estrangement, and now living with two of her sons, Jheri embarks on a new path to reveal her true self to her grandchildren. Will their family bonds survive?

Romeo is Bleeding (pictured), Jason Zeldes
$22,500

Donte Clark’s poetic voice was honed on the violent street corners of a struggling city. Yet rather than succumb to the pressures of Richmond, CA, Clark uses his artistic perspective to save his city from itself.

$22,500

In a new America where the promise of education, safety and shelter are in jeopardy, three Detroit men fight to build something lasting for themselves and future generations.

“We are thrilled to continue our tradition of supporting innovative documentary films that feature compelling stories told through a strong visual aesthetic,” said Michele Turnure-Salleo, director of Filmmaker360. “This round of winners has captivated us with their striking and charismatic characters, and we can’t wait to see the finished films and experience the unique and fascinating worlds their subjects inhabit. Our deepest thanks go to Jennifer Battat, whose generous support has been critical to the growing success of the Documentary Film Fund.”

If there’s one thing in common between Best Foreign Film and Best Documentary, it’s that no matter what you’re gonna piss somebody off. That’s what happened this year when two popular documentaries didn’t get past the shortlist: Stories We Tell and Blackfish. 2013 was actually a terrific year for documentaries, but the best of the best is still underrepresented in this list of five.

Starting with the most insignificant of the five, Cutie and the Boxer follows Ushio and Noriko Shinohara, an elderly couple trying to live off of their art careers. Ushio is famous for his avant-garde pieces, while Noriko has sacrificed her own artistic ambitions to play the role of assistant to her husband. At a scant 81 minutes there isn’t much nuance to speak of, and a lot of interesting details are glossed over (Ushio’s troubles with alcohol in the past are briefly touched on, and the strained relationship with their son only gets several minutes of screentime). By the end it feels like a very slight film, and its subject matter won’t stand up against the competition.

20 Feet From Stardom, on the other hand, is the kind of fluffy doc that Academy voters adore. Director Morgan Neville puts the focus on backup singers, finding out who was singing behind classics (a highlight of the film gives the backstory on Merry Clayton’s vocals in “Gimme Shelter”) and wondering why such talented people could never break out on their own. Neville has picked a terrific topic for his documentary, and he’s lucky enough to have such charismatic personalities carry along his film while he flails from topic to topic. If Neville was able to find something to anchor his film, 20 Feet could have been much better. But it’s doesn’t matter anyways, audiences love the film, and Harvey Weinstein is putting all he can into ensuring it walks away with a trophy on Oscar night. While 20 Feet From Stardom is far from the best film in this category, its crowd-pleasing nature and heavy campaigning will probably make it win. I’m sincerely hoping that this won’t be a repeat of last year’s Searching for Sugar Man win, but the cynic in me says otherwise.

Unsurprisingly politics dominated the category this year. Rick Rowley’s Dirty Wars is the most overtly political film of the bunch, focusing on reporter Jeremy Scahill’s investigation into the US’s new methods of fighting wars. The truth is, of course, horrifying. Drone strikes and seemingly unlimited access to anywhere in the world (along with many, many other depressing revelations) show a level of unchecked power that would give anyone pause. Oddly enough, Dirty Wars is similar to 20 Feet From Stardom in that its subject matter does most of the heavy lifting. The doc’s attempt to play out like a conspiracy thriller falls flat; Scahill’s overly serious narration combined with Rowley’s attempt to make him look like a martyr don’t work well when seeing innocent people get slaughtered. Nonetheless, Scahill and Rowley are covering material that absolutely needs to be exposed to the public more. It’s a pleasant surprise that Dirty Wars was nominated at all, and even though it won’t win it should hopefully get more people watching the film.

When it comes to the battle for the overall best documentary in the group, it boils down to two films: The Act of Killing and The Square. The Square could provide a pleasant upset on March 2nd, as its immediacy and relevance may appeal to voters. The Act of Killing has been a critical darling ever since it premiered on the festival circuit in 2012, with its mortifying look at a country proud of the genocide it committed decades ago. Personally speaking, it’s no contest. As terrific as The Square is at showing the highs and lows of Egypt’s revolution in real-time, it’s still a film in progress (it was re-edited between its Sundance premiere and official release to include more recent developments). The Act of Killing is a documentary that will be referred to years from now as one of the major films in the format. Whether or not director Joshua Oppenheimer deserves mention alongside names like the Maysles, Wiseman, Herzog or Morris (the latter two love the film, and put their names on it as executive producers) remains to be seen, but he’s made a film that can easily be put next to those directors’ strongest works.

Like I said at the beginning, 2013 has been a terrific year for docs, so choosing only one that should have been nominated is quite tough. While I disagree with the consensus on Blackfish, I enjoyed Stories We Tell. My personal pick for best documentary last year would be Leviathan, but I’m not thick enough to expect AMPAS to ever nominate something that borders on avant-garde so much. My pick for what should have been nominated goes to Let The Fire Burn, Jason Osder’s terrific film about the tragic battle between a group of radicals and a city government at its wits end. It’s a balanced look at a messy situation, showing how failure from both sides led to devastation. The fact that Osder effortlessly shows all sides of the story through nothing but archival footage makes his film all the more impressive.

Category Predictions

Best Documentary Nominees

The Act of Killing (review)

Cutie and the Boxer (review)

Dirty Wars

The Square (review)

20 Feet from Stardom (review)

Previous Category Analysis

Best Shorts
Best Supporting Actress
Best Supporting Actor
Best Original Screenplay
Best Adapted Screenplay
Best Foreign Film

As a bracing, painfully honest look at the artistic temperament in its full kaleidoscopic nature, few films will come as close this year as Zachary Heinzerlig’s Cutie and the Boxer. Following the trials and tribulations of Japanese-born, New York-based ‘action’ painter Ushio Shinohara (the ‘Boxer’ in question, owing to his dipping fists in paint and punching to apply layers of abstract colour to his huge canvases), this efficiently-made documentary is by turns subtly powerful and deeply sad, given our introduction to the counterpoint to Ushio’s ‘genius:’ unflailing Noriko, wife and lifetime supporter and carer. When the action opens we’re witnessing the couple well into their twilight years (Ushio is an Octogenerian and Noriko late into her 60s), in a makeshift and far from glamorous New York loft and studio, still living with an air of bohemian spontaneity but at least, it seems, content.

Far from content, though, is director Heinzerlig with just crafting a hagiography of The Artist for that more obscure Lennon-Ono you probably haven’t heard of. With a whimsical contrast in style, Heinzerlig opts for hand-drawn animation to delve into the troubled shared past of Ushio and Noriko. He was almost 40, eccentric, ambitious and wild, and successful in his homeland before making a cocksure move to Manhattan; she 19, a starstruck art student with well-to-do parents that kept her afloat while she fell in love under guise of working towards her qualification. When that fell through, Ushio and Noriko were left to fend for themselves financially over the tumultuous next four decades which saw Ushio fall into bouts of Alcoholism, wavering between bursts of passionate creation and an nihilistic outlook toward his art. Meanwhile, Noriko effectively gave up her own career to absorb Ushio’s turbulent changes of affect, alternating moments of self-aggrandizing Ego with moments demonstrative of the generous, infectious love she was drawn to all those years ago.

The animation affords Cutie and the Boxer a sense of undeveloped, childlike immediacy in sentiment that is key to the emotional effectiveness of the film as a whole. In the same way that Isao Takahata’s animated Grave of the Fireflies (1988) employed the medium as a buffer between a difficult and in many ways traumatic subject matter and having an audience understand those feelings without being subject to direct re-enactment, Cutie and the Boxer too frames Noriko’s silent suffering in ways that alarm with their simplicity but achieve their impact precisely because of it. We begin these sequences unsure if the narrator is the director Heinzerlig or Noriko herself, but as her own work burgeons because of (or perhaps in spite of) all the attention paid to Ushio, we slowly realise we are witnessing the liberation of an individual, highly singular artist in her own right. Noriko’s meticulously drawn cartoons are full of the narrative, repressed feeling and labored-after, thought-about technique that the work of her husband can be argued to ‘lack’. If his art is about an essential kinetic energy and iterative, impulsive aesthetic judgments through the layers of abstraction, the two exhibited in tandem could not provide a greater material and philosophical contrast.

A combined show of this kind is precisely what Heinzerling works towards as the climactic moment of the documentary. No doubt the issue of artistic and creative competition among the couple is prevalent, providing dramatic tension, but Henzerlig’s generosity in his shaping of the film is in not leaving this a clear, clean, black and white dynamic. Regret and resentment form only smaller parts of a more complex relationship that marries the petty with the intangibles that form the bonds of long love. When we watch the reactions of these parents to their son Alex – who, we learn, is very much his Father’s Son in temperament – there is an inimitable sense of true failed opportunity, a sense of loss, but not of fingerpointing between the couple, and through it all a humanity shines through in the acceptance of whatever shortfalls he might have, and an ability to support him through it: to love, anyway. In this freely structured but both intimate and impartial document of the artist as a persona, it’s a reflection of the extraordinarily elastic relationship his parents share with each other — one that, I suspect (and perhaps Heinzerling is offering) is not so uncommon or extraordinary at all.

Cutie and the Boxer trailer: