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At a reception here in Park City on Sunday afternoon, filmmakers AJ Schnack and Margaret Brown were joined by Indiepix’s Danielle DiGiacomo and the Toronto Film Festival’s Thom Powers to announce the nominees for a new batch of awards honoring excellence in non-fiction filmmaking: the Cinema Eyes. Schnack, who previously announced the formation of the awards on his blog, explained that the name was inspired by Dziga Vertov’s Kino Eye. The gang then announced the nominees for 8 juried awards, plus an audience award, which the public will be able to vote for at Indiepix.net. You can take a look at the full nominee list here.

Based on sheer volume of nominations, it looks like the big winners here are Manda Bala, Into Great Silence, and Zoo??????all films that made a great impression at Sundance in 2006 and 2007, all of which failed to land on the Academy’s short list. This would indicate that the nominations have already succeeded in representing the point of view of the doc community, and as a corrective to the widely disappointing Academy finalists. The awards themselves will be handed out on March 18 at the IFC Center in New York.

Under discussion:

Alive  (1993)

Stranded: I've Come From a Plane That Crashed on the Mountains  (2008)

Note: I’ve seen four notable documentaries over the past two days, all of which are competing here for jury prizes: The Order of Myths, The Recruit, Bigger Stronger Faster, and Stranded: I’ve Come From a Plane That Crashed on the Mountains. In the interest of time and brevity, I’m going to file short posts on each today, but I may revisit a least one or two of these after more thought and possibly additional viewings. ??

Stranded: I’ve Come From a Plane That Crashed on the Mountains

Dubbed by festival shorthand “the cannibal plane crash doc,” it’s a 113-minute oral history of the infamous crash of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, which was previously dramatized in the 1993 Ethan Hawke film, Alive. The surviving survivors give incredibly articulate, revealing, and comprehensive testimony on their ten weeks on that mountain, some (all?) from the site of the crash, but let’s not kid ourselves: this is a film about hearing (and, more affectingly, watching) people explain what it felt like to save their own lives by eating their friends. Filmmaker Gonzalo Arijon understands this maybe too well, and the film’s length??????excessive by all accounts??????could be reduced somewhat if he were to let go of some of the survivors’ verbal attempts at justification.

And yet, there are breathtaking moments padded around the somewhat redundant justifications, often when the camera holds on a subject’s face after a recollection. They stare straight ahead, frozen, dazed, as if shocked at their own memories.?? There’s nothing about this story or the way it’s told that would make any viewer feel anything but sympathy for their ordeal, and certainly, this is a case where asking us to take a second to contemplate the image of someone saying “I didn’t want to do it, but I had to” has far greater impact than the words themselves. Those shots, of an eye twitching almost imperceptibly while a survivor recovers from an admission, tell us everything we need to know.

Two new updates to our Sundance deal chart: Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired has landed US distribution via HBO, who may or may not release the film theatrically; and ESPN has acquired the soccer doc Kicking It. Interesting that it’s day four of the festival and, with the exception of Ballast’s deal for international representation, a) the only films with announced deals are documentaries, and b) no one seems to be talking about how much money they’re putting on the table. Check out our full Sundance 2008 acquisitions chart here.