News

Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s animated documentary “Flee” has been named the best nonfiction film of 2021 at the 15th annual Cinema Eye Honors, which were presented on Tuesday night in New York City. “The Rescue,” about the efforts to retrieve a Thai youth soccer team from a flooded cave, won the Audience Choice Prize.

The Neon release “Flee,” which uses animation to give anonymity to a young gay man who escaped Afghanistan as a teenager and made his way to Denmark, also won the award for graphic design and animation. It is nominated for Oscars in the documentary, animated-feature and international-feature categories.

Robert Greene won the directing award for “Procession,” while Matthew Heineman, Jenna Millman and Leslie Norville took the producing prize for “The First Wave.”

Jessica Kingdon’s “Ascension” won the most Cinema Eye awards, three, taking the prizes for debut feature, cinematography and score.

Other winners included “Summer of Soul...

Reconstruction in documentary filmmaking is an eternally divisive technique: What some deem vivid and immediate, others find distancing and artificial, cloaking and blurring reality in the language of fiction cinema. Yet what if the reconstructions don’t just feature the documentary’s real-life subjects, but are expressly conceived and realized by them — not recreating reality so much as their lingering, haunted memories thereof? That’s a different proposition entirely, as is “Procession,” a risky, wrenching film in which celebrated docmaker Robert Greene frequently surrenders the directorial reins to his subjects and collaborators: six middle-aged, middle-American men living with the trauma of childhood sexual abuse at the hands of Catholic Church priests and clergymen.

With each of these survivors given the means and support to make an interpretive short film rooted in their decades-old experience, “Procession” is intricately woven from the amateur filmmakers’ original work, alongside Greene’s patient, empathetic observation of their creative process.

“Procession,” the Netflix documentary directed and edited by Robert Greene, focuses on six men who were abused by Catholic priests who are now trying to heal from their trauma. But instead recounting their stories in a standard talking-head style format, the men reenact their trauma through scripted short films as a form of drama therapy. It’s a unique form of therapy that Greene himself wasn’t sure they would all be on board with — and he was ready to wrap at any point in the process.

“The first meeting you see in the film when we’re talking through ideas, it’s not just like, ‘Hey, I have an idea and would like to do this.’ It was very much, ‘Should we do this?'” Greene tells Gold Derby at our Meet the Experts: Film Directors panel (watch above). “We were prepared that that was going to be the...

Robert Greene had an idea. The filmmaker behind such blurred-line experimental documentaries as Kate Plays Christine (2016) and Bisbee ’17 (2018) had seen a Kansas City press conference, in which an attorney named Rebecca Randles and her clients — four men who’d been abused by Catholic priests as kids — were demanding that the authorities in Kansas and Missouri begin criminal investigations into the incidents. Never mind the statute of limitations; after discovering that more than 230 priests “that we know of” in the area who’d been actively abusive over several decades, it was...

There have been many movies about victims telling their stories for the first time, but “Procession” is one of the few to put survivors in control of the narrative itself. Filmmaker Robert Greene’s boundary-pushing documentary explores the experiences of six adult men who suffered sexual abuse from Catholic priests and clergy, but rather than simply asking them to recall their harrowing experiences, the movie finds them collaborating on reenactments as a form of drama therapy.

This risky gamble tracks with Greene’s other experimental approaches to teasing out the boundaries of fiction and non-fiction, but it also introduces a more holistic qualify to the approach. The six victims at the center of “Procession” — Joe Eldred, Mike Foreman, Ed Gavagan, Dan Laurine, Michael Sandridge, and Tom Viviano — work together throughout the movie to develop scenes that capture the power dynamic behind the abuse they suffered. They also revisit locations where...