The SDFF 2021 film, When We Were Bullies (Jay Rosenblatt, 2021), and two other short films from SDFF alumni filmmakers Ben Proudfoot’s The Queen Of Basketball (2021) and Pedro Kos’s Lead Me Home (co-directed with John Shenk, 2021), have all been nominated for the 2022 Best Documentary Short Oscar®. The nominees were announced this morning, and the awards will take place on March 27.
When We Were Bullies is an autobiographical doc about a filmmaker who is spurred to investigate a 50 year-old bullying event in which he was complicit after a chance encounter with an old classmate. The short recently won the Audience Award for Documentary Short at the 34th annual Virginia Film Festival.
The Queen Of Basketball is about Lucy Harris, the first woman ever drafted by an NBA team, the New Orleans Jazz (now Utah Jazz) in the late 70s. 2021. Though she didn’t ultimately make the team, she left the sport with having won three national championships and an Olympic silver medal. The film recently won a Critics Choice Award and is available as part of Proudfoot’s Almost Famous series of shorts by New York Times Op-Docs. 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.
Another SDFF alumni filmmaker, Pedro Kos’s collaboration with filmmaker Jon Shenk, Lead Me Home, is nominated. The project is an immersive film about homelessness shot in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Seattle. Lead Me Home is available to stream through Netflix, as is his Kos’s 2017 film with Kief Davidson Bending The Arc (SDFF 2018), which documents the birth of Partners In Health, which began 30 years ago with the work of a group of extraordinary doctors and activists working to save lives in a Haitian village and became a battle in the halls of power for healthcare for all.