Multi-year SDFF alumni Ben Proudfoot’s Queen Of Basketball (U.S., 22 mins) won Best Short at the 2021 Critic’s Choice Documentary Awards on Sunday. The film, one in Proudfoot’s ongoing Almost Famous collaboration with New York Times Op-Docs, is about Lucy Harris, arguably the greatest living women’s basketball player, who has won three national trophies, played in the ’76 Olympics and was drafted to the NBA. Proudfoot’s films have shown at SDFF numerous times, including 2019’s That’s My Jazz and 2017’s Montage: Great Film Composers and the Piano.
Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s Summer of Soul about the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival swept the six categoriesin which it was nominated, sharing the award for best direction with Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi’s The Rescue about the daring rescue of a boys soccer team from a Thai cave in 2018. Other nominees in multiple categories included Jessica Kingdon’s Ascension about the pursuit of the “Chinese Dream”; and Liz Gabrus’s Becoming Cousteau, which uses archival footage to tell the story of beloved documentarian and won for Best Science/Nature Doc.
Ascension is currently showing at the Sebastopol Rialto and runs through Nov. 18.