This year’s five Oscar-nominated documentary filmmakers agree: In an especially crowded content landscape, finding a story that they have to tell is critical. “Compelled, obsessed — I mean, you have to really love [a topic]. You have to just feel like it has a gravitational pull towards you,” “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” director Laura Poitras said.
“A film is very often like a fever dream. You jump off a cliff,” said Shaunak Sen, the director of “All That Breathes.” “It just takes a sort of life of its own.”
Poitras and Sen were recently joined by fellow 2023 nominees Sara Dosa (“Fire of Love”), Simon Lereng Wilmont (“A House Made of Splinters”) and Daniel Roher (“Navalny”) in a panel hosted by TheWrap’s CEO and editor-in-chief Sharon Waxman in Los Angeles.