03/25/2001

By Gary Dowell / The Dallas Morning News

Change happens at a glacial pace at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. But when it does occur, it's usually for the best. Last year the live performances were condensed into one big uber-medley, and the year before that saw the long-awaited demise of those bizarre interpretive dance routines (much to the dismay of die-hard Saving Private Ryan fans).

But one of the more sweeping Big Changes (Steve Martin excepted) occurred behind the scenes. After years of complaints, the academy in 1999 changed both its criteria for feature-length documentary as well as its voting procedure. Any doc with a running time greater than 40 minutes is considered feature length, and a Documentary Executive Committee now carries out first-round voting, selecting 12 semi-finalists from nominations made by academy members. Last year's committee included such luminaries as Michael Apted, Taylor Hackford and Erroll Morris. The intent is to have the entrants judged by a jury of the peers.

With that in mind, perhaps the most interesting aspect of the this year's nominees is the homogeneity of theme. All five films are, in some aspect, about tolerance, either in a racial or social sense. The nominees:

– Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport, directed by Mark Jonathan Harris.
The odds-on favorite for this year's award is a moving, haunting tale about a little-known Holocaust saga. In the nine months before the outbreak of World War II, 10,000 Jewish children navigated a Kafka-esque bureaucratic maze and made a mass exodus from Nazi Germany to England – and, in some cases, points beyond. Harris' use of archival footage and interviews with the children, now elderly, borders on maudlin, but is stirring nonetheless.

– Legacy, directed by Tod Lending.
A cinema-verite styled documentary that traces an inner-city family through five years, as they each member struggles with their own demons (addiction, chronic unemployment, finding a way out of the projects) following the death of one of the older, more promising children. A sublime, understated documentary with a great deal of respect for its subjects.

– Long Night's Journey Into Day, directed by Deborah Hoffman and Frances Reid.
An eye-opening look at the ongoing proceedings of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, through which that nation administers amnesty for the horrors of apartheid crimes on a case-by-case basis. It focuses on four specific cases, and pulls few punches, subjecting the viewer to a series of unsettling interviews and gruesome, unedited footage.

– Scottsboro: An American Tragedy, directed by Daniel Anker and Barak Goodman.
A gripping account of one of longest-running and most despicable courtroom pursuits of racism in American history. The doc was very successful on the festival circuit before its nomination. It recounts the facts in the case of nine African-American teen-agers, ages 13 to 18, who, accused of raping two young white women on an Alabama train in 1931, found themselves the center of a legal battle involving everyone from the NAACP to the Communist Party.

– Sound and Fury, directed by Josh Aronson.
The most interesting movie in this year's batch of nominations takes a look at the questions raised by the development of cochlear implants, which can restore hearing to those with congenital deafness. While few people in the hearing world would feel this to be a bad thing, many within the deaf community see it as technology that will eventually obliterate the deaf culture. Aronson personifies the complex argument by focusing on the families of two brothers as they consider the implant. One brother is the son-in-law of deaf parents and the father of twins – one of whom is deaf – and the other is deaf, as are his wife and children.