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The Gracies are gearing up to hand out a long list of awards at a milestone event.

The Alliance for Women in Media Foundation has revealed the winners of the 50th annual Gracie Awards, an event designed to champion women’s voices, stories and achievements in many forms of media, from screens and podcasts to radio and creative accomplishments behind the camera. Among the honorees for this year are Megan Thee Stallion, Kathy Bates, Keke Palmer, Cristin Milioti, Margo Martindale, Diarra Kilpatrick, Norah O’Donnell, Dune: Prophecy, Dora, showrunner Issa López, veteran scribe Molly McNearney, St. Denis Medical, The English Teacher’s Stephanie Koenig and more.

The Hollywood Reporter’s senior editor, film, Rebecca Keegan, also makes the national winners list in the category of digital media for her podcast, The Godfather: A Film We Can’t Refuse, from Audible, Paramount Audio and Spoke Media. The podcast features new insights from...

Cristin Milioti, Megan Thee Stallion and Kathy Bates are among the recipients of this year’s Gracie Awards by the Alliance for Women in Media Foundation.

This year’s celebration marks the 50th anniversary of the awards and will highlight the impact of women’s voices across television, audio, streaming, and digital platforms. Previous honorees of the Gracies have include Ava DuVernay, Carol Burnett, Meghan, The Duchess of Sussex, Marlo Thomas, Michelle Obama, Nicole Kidman, Oprah Winfrey, and Sandra Oh.

“For 50 years, the Gracie Awards have honored the storytellers who push boundaries and redefine what’s possible,” said Becky Brooks, President of Awmf, in a statement. “This is more than an awards show—it is a movement that has championed inclusion, representation, and truth in the media. The women we celebrate today are shaping the next 50 years, ensuring that our narratives are not just seen or heard, but felt and remembered.

“Endurance” is an interesting video that tells the story of two amazing trips to Antarctica that happened more than one hundred years apart. At its core, the movie tells the story of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s famous 1914 expedition, a scary tale of survival that has caught people’s imaginations for generations. It compares it to the mission in 2022 to find the wreckage of his ship.

The documentary “Free Solo” was directed by the renowned team of Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, Jimmy Chin, and Natalie Hewit. The film is an interesting look at how people can be strong and how technology can change things. These directors are known for making movies that push the limits of what people can endure, and “Endurance” continues this powerful story of history.

The documentary cleverly mixes old footage from the original trip, which has been amazingly preserved and is now digitally colorized, with scenes from the...

The fabled expedition of Ernest Shackleton, the Anglo-Irish explorer who led 27 men on a voyage to Antarctica in 1914 aboard the three-masted barquentine schooner Endurance, only to see his ship sink and to spend the next 500 days trying to survive and get back to civilization, sounds like something you read about in history books — or maybe a storybook. It’s a saga so removed from our time, so rooted in a pre-technological world, that the idea that you could actually see it as it’s happening seems wondrous.

Yet Shackleton, who had an early 20th-century showman’s flair for publicity, took a filmmaker along with him as part of the crew — the photographer and cinematographer Frank Hurley, who shot the whole journey. So even as Shackleton and his men were stranded at the bottom of the earth, trapped in an endless stretching expanse of pack ice, their daily routines, their research,...

In the new National Geographic Documentary Films project “Endurance” a camera crew led by BAFTA nominee Natalie Hewit and Oscar-winning documentarian duo Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi follow antarctic expert John Shields as his team sets out to find the remains of the ship iconic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton sunk near Antarctica in 1915, leading to one of the greatest survival stories of all time.

In the exclusive clip above, obtained by IndieWire, Shields and his peers reveal the deeper connection between him and Shackleton, proving why he is the right man for the task at hand. “I think this is my 25th expedition to Antarctica. Going to Antarctica is very addictive,” said the explorer. “It’s something that once you’ve seen it, you’ve got this drive to always go back. And Shackleton, he also had this drive to go back to Antarctica.”

Not only was Shields the...

Disney+ is often regarded as the most popular streaming service after Netflix and Prime Video, with a subscriber base of 153.6 million as of March 2024. Having introduced many timeless classics from Walt Disney and other third-party sources, the streaming platform has also become a home for many Star Wars and Marvel fans, bringing in new movies and TV series from these well-known franchises. Titles may vary depending on your region, but if you live in the United States, you have access to an almost endless number of films. Especially given the streaming platform's efforts to add new content to its collection every month, there is almost always something fresh for everyone to enjoy.

In October 2024, for example, Disney+ added various unique films on its platform, such as Spookiz: The Movie, The Devil's Climb, and Lego Marvel Avengers: Mission Demolition. Similarly, we have numerous more intriguing films to look forward to in November,...

When the crew aboard the S.A. Agulhas II set out in early 2022 to search for the Endurance shipwreck, it seemed nearly impossible.

“It’s the holy grail,” Nico Vincent, the sub-sea manager on the expedition, tells Variety. “It’s the most complicated one. Just being able to reach the field and dive three kilometers beneath the ice, it’s the level of complexity of walking on the moon.”

The Endurance, commanded by explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton on an expedition to traverse Antarctica from one coast to another, sank in the Weddell Sea in November 1915 as its 27-member crew looked on. Over the next 308 days, the men faced starvation and frostbite as Shackleton recruited five crew members to make the treacherous journey in a lifeboat to seek help on the South Atlantic island of South Georgia. Miraculously, when Shackleton returned to save the remaining men, he found all of them still alive.

Married filmmakers Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi specialize in stories about human tenacity against the forces of nature, putting them out at the indefatigable pace of about a film a year — a feat of endurance in itself.

Filmmakers Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin hosted a friends and family screening of their National Geographic film Endurance in October in Manhattan.

Chin and Vasarhelyi have chronicled vertiginous, record-setting ascents in Meru and the Academy Award–winning documentary Free Solo; the daring mission to save the junior soccer team stranded in Thailand’s Tham Luang Nang Non cave system in The Rescue; and Diana Nyad’s real-life 110 mile swim from Cuba to Florida in last year’s Oscar-nominated scripted feature Nyad. And then there are Chin’s own death-defying expeditions, including his latest summiting of Everest in which his party happened to make a momentous discovery. (More on that below.)

All of...

Each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit streaming platforms in the United States. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.

Across the River and Into the Trees (Paula Ortiz)

Hemingway’s work across novels and short stories has been adapted for film countless times over, yet Across the River and Into the Trees has never properly been rendered onscreen. Until now. Written by Peter Flannery and directed by Paula Ortiz, here is a handsome film that is decidedly modest in its endeavor. The best thing going for it is Liev Schreiber as Colonel Richard Cantwell, the lead of the picture. Schreiber is one of those actors who has somehow always been underrated, despite being capable of playing nearly any kind of part. A kind boyfriend thrust into an impossible familial situation (The Daytrippers)? Check. Tough-but-fractured fixer living on the edge (Ray Donovan)? Check.

When you think of famous 20th century shipwrecks, 1912’s Titanic is usually top of mind. But don’t overlook the incredible story of the exploration ship Endurance, which sank three and a half years later in Antarctica, and offers a mind-blowing survival epic. It gets its due in Endurance, a gripping film directed by Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin (Free Solo) and Natalie Hewit. The story charts two narratives — one re-creating the past, the other documenting more recent developments. In 1914, Sir Ernest Shackleton aimed to be the first to cross Antarctica’s icy terrain, setting sail from England with a crew of 27 men. During the voyage, the Endurance got trapped in pack ice for months. After, the sailors were forced to abandon ship, and it eventually sank in 1915. They ate penguins, seals and boiled seaweed. Four attempted rescue missions later, the full crew was saved. In 2022, an expedition team...

In their latest film, Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi continue to pursue their fascination with the lengths to which a human body can be pushed, and the strength of spirit required to push it there. After following up their Oscar-winning documentary Free Solo with a dip into the untested waters of narrative filmmaking in Nyad, they’ve returned to the nonfiction realm to tell the dual story of Ernest Shackleton’s 1914 Antarctic expedition and the quest, over 100 years later, to locate the wreckage from the voyage. But while Endurance continues the thematic through line of Chin and Vasarhelyi’s previous films, and while some of the photography is as impressive as the stomach-churning cliffs of Free Solo, it never manages to delve into the deeper psychological layers that made that film so compelling.

Directed by Chin and Vasarhelyi along with Natalie Hewit, Endurance moves back and forth between the two voyages throughout its runtime.

Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, the Oscar- winning wife and husband filmmaking team behind Free Solo, are set to make a film about the ill-fated 1924 ascent of Mount Everest by British climbers George Mallory and Sandy Irvine, with the question still unresolved of whether they reached the summit.

The film has been inspired by a National Geographic expedition to the Himalayas led by Chin that last month discovered Irvine’s boot, sock and severed foot on a glacier beneath Everest. This follows on from the discovery of Mallory’s remains in 1999.

The chance discovery of Irvine’s boot is...

Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, the Oscar- winning wife and husband filmmaking team behind Free Solo, are set to make a film about the ill-fated 1924 ascent of Mount Everest by British climbers George Mallory and Sandy Irvine, with the question still unresolved of whether they reached the summit.

The film has been inspired by a National Geographic expedition to the Himalayas led by Chin that last month discovered Irvine’s boot, sock and severed foot on a glacier beneath Everest. This follows on from the discovery of Mallory’s remains in 1999

The chance discovery of Irvine’s boot is...

Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, the Oscar- winning wife and husband filmmaking team behind Free Solo, are set to make a film about the ill-fated 1924 ascent of Mount Everest by British climbers George Mallory and Sandy Irvine, with the question still unresolved of whether they reached the summit.

The film has been inspired by a National Geographic expedition to the Himalayas led by Chin that last month discovered Irvine’s boot, sock and severed foot on a glacier beneath Everest. This follows on from the discovery of Mallory’s remains in 1999

The chance discovery of Irvine’s boot is expected...

National Geographic has revealed the official trailer for Endurance, which was directed by Chai Vasarhelyi, Jimmy Chin, and Natalie Hewit. The documentary will begin streaming on Disney+ and Hulu on November 2, 2024.

In a legendary feat of leadership and perseverance, polar explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton kept alive his crew of 27 men for over a year despite the loss of their ship in frigid pack ice. Over a century later, a team of modern-day explorers sets out to find the sunken ship.

Photo courtesy of National Geographic

From National Geographic Documentary Films, Endurance tells the inspiring stories of these two landmark expeditions, bound by their shared grit and determination.

In 1914, Anglo-Irish Merchant Navy officer and veteran explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton commanded an expedition to sail to Antarctica. His mission was to be the first to traverse the vast continent from one coast to another: a distance of 1,800 miles across the most difficult terrain on the planet.

"Why we go, I cannot say..." National Geographic has revealed their official trailer for a documentary film called Endurance, the latest creation from the adventure doc duo E. Chai Vasarhelyi & Jimmy Chin. However, they seem to be attached to have their names onboard, as it is also co-directed by the British doc filmmaker Natalie Hewit. In a legendary feat of leadership and perseverance, iconic polar explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton kept his crew of 27 men alive for over a year despite the loss of their ship in frigid pack ice. Over a century later, a team of modern-day explorers sets out to find the sunken ship. The Maritime Heritage Trust located his shipwrecked Endurance near Antarctica in 1915. Endurance tells the inspiring stories of two landmark expeditions – both bound by their shared grit & determination. Following its world premiere at the 2024 London Film Festival, National Geographic Doc Films will begin streaming this doc...

“Not all shipwrecked treasure glitters. Some’s frozen where nobody dares to look.”

A twinkle in his eye, marine archaeologist Mensun Bound is looking back on an adventurous career exploring waters from the Mediterranean to the South China Sea. Sun, scuba and shining treasure. The Indiana Jones of the deep.

In 2022, Bound embarked on his most high-profile mission yet, a search — his second — for the wreck of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s fabled ship, Endurance. Aboard the icebreaker S.A. Agulhas II, Bound headed to Antarctica’s Weddell Sea in hopes of locating the three-masted vessel, crushed in the pack ice in 1915. With historian Dan Snow on board to follow the endeavor, failure would be expensive and embarrassing.

Now, National Geographic Documentary Films is presenting the story of Shackleton’s epic of survival, and the search expedition a century later, in a knife-edged deep-sea horror. Endurance is directed and produced by...

Exclusive: When Dr. John Shears led the 2022 expedition to find Sir Ernest Shackleton’s ship the Endurance, a former boss gave him a 10% chance of success. “I said to him: ‘Well, Shackleton would have taken that chance,’” he tells Deadline. The extraordinary tale of the effort to find the famous explorer’s ship plays out alongside jaw-dropping newly color-treated footage of the original expedition in Endurance. The feature documentary comes from the Oscar-winning team of Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin and Bafta-nominated Natalie Hewit.

In their first interview about the project, Vasarhelyi, Shears and producer Ruth Johnston tell Deadline about the film, which meshes historic and modern-day adventure. The film will air on Nat Geo and then stream on Disney+ and Hulu later this fall. It will premiere at the London Film Festival.

Endurance tells the stories of two expeditions. In 1914 Sir Ernest Shackleton set out to traverse Antarctica but...

Fifteen features will world premiere at the 68th BFI London Film Festival (Lff), including Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin’s documentary Endurance, and previously announced opening title Steve McQueen’s Blitz.

The festival takes place from October 9-20.

Free Solo and Nyad directing duo Vasarhelyi and Chin direct Endurance alongside Natalie Hewit, which examines the lost ship of Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton. Further world premieres include Sophie Compton and Daisy-May Hudson’s documentary Holloway, about one of the largest women’s prisons in Europe.

Steven Knight’s Victorian boxing series A Thousand Blows, starring Stephen Graham, will receive its world premiere.

Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin’s latest documentary feature Endurance about the epic search to find the lost ship of Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton, Sean Baker’s Anora, and Marielle Heller’s Nightbitch starring Amy Adams are among the titles that have been announced within the full lineup of the British Film Institute’s (BFI) 68th London Film Festival. Scroll down for the full list.

Endurance, which Oscar winners Vasarhelyi and Chin have made for National Geographic, will screen as a world premiere. Running October 9-20, Lff will feature 40 World Premieres, 12 International Premieres, and 21 European Premieres.

Eye-grabbing entries from today’s launch include headline gala screenings of Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or winner Anora, Edward Berger’s latest feature Conclave, and Ali Abbasi’s much-talked-about Donald Trump biopic The Apprentice. Other highly-anticipated titles that arrive from the...

Speakers and mentors taking part include BFI Filmmaking Fund director Mia Bays and Bafta chair Sara Putt.

Reclaim The Frame, the UK’s gender equality in cinema charity, has set the filmmakers from across the UK who will take part in the eighth edition of professional development programme, Filmonomics, with BFI Filmmaking Fund director Mia Bays and Bafta chair Sara Putt among the mentors and speakers offering their support.

Among the 18 filmmakers taking part for this edition are director Jessica Bishopp, who has had documentary shorts premiere in BFI London Film Festival and SXSW; Bafta Scotland-nominated producer and founder of Lothian Films,...

Clouds of gloom have settled over much of the documentary field, brought on by multiple factors: a sluggish acquisition market, cutbacks in the executive ranks at Netflix and Showtime, uncertainty around Hulu’s future, CNN Films taking doc production in house, sharper scrutiny of budgets and content needs, and… well, the list goes on.

But there’s at least one bright spot it the nonfiction firmament – National Geographic Documentary Films. Coming off its latest Oscar nomination – for the feature Fire of Love – the unit of the Walt Disney Company is leaning into documentary production with half a dozen films set for release or in the works.

First up: Wild Life, a film Carolyn Bernstein, EVP of global scripted content and documentary films for NatGeo, calls “a big, beautiful love story.” The couple at the heart of it – Doug and Kris Tompkins — left the corporate world for life in remote Chile.

Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin expressed differing opinions on sharing one’s own work.

Oscar-winning Free Solo wife- and- husband directors Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin debated the niceties of promoting one’s own work in a talk about their filmmaking careers - spotlighting the professional climbers who have been the subject of two of their films.

They were talking at an event in the Cph:Conference Artists & Auteurs series at Cph:Dox on March 21.

“There’s always been those athletes that were really good at self-promotion – leveraged what they did to make their career or start a business,” said Chin,...

Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin expressed differing opinions on sharing one’s own work.

Oscar-winning Free Solo wife- and- husband directors Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin debated the niceties of promoting one’s own work in a talk about their filmmaking careers - spotlighting the professional climbers who have been the subject of two of their films.

They were talking at an event in the Cph:Conference Artists & Auteurs series at Cph:Dox on March 21.

“There’s always been those athletes that were really good at self-promotion – leveraged what they did to make their career or start a business,” said Chin,...

Exclusive: Oscar winners Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin and BAFTA-nominated director Natalie Hewit are boarding the National Geographic documentary Endurance (working title), the incredible story of “the epic search to find the lost ship of Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton.”

The announcement comes almost exactly a year after Shackelton’s ship Endurance was discovered eerily intact on the Weddell Sea floor near the northernmost part of the Antarctic, more than a hundred years after the vessel sank. The Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust organized and funded the mission to find the historic wreck.

Map of the Sir Ernest Shackleton expedition in Antarctica onboard the Endurance

Shackelton and his crew of 27 set sail in late 1914 on an exploratory mission endorsed by Winston Churchill, then Britain’s First Lord of the Admiralty. The ship became trapped in sea ice, forcing the crew to quit the vessel and set up camp on an ice floe.

Dog tags belonging to two members of the Band of Brothers, made famous by Stephen E. Ambrose’s book and the 2001 Steven Spielberg-Tom Hanks HBO miniseries, have been discovered in the UK 78 years after D-Day and are being spotlighted for a documentary for Dan Snow’s History Hit streamer.

Snow’s team discovered the tags belonging to Richard A. Blake and Carl Fenstermaker after digging at Aldbourne, Wiltshire, where the 101st Airborne Division, otherwise known as Dick Winters Easy Company, were stationed during World War II. The tags were found by archaeologist Richard Osgood and a team of veterans from Nightingale and Aldbourne Heritage Centre supported by Breaking Ground Heritage.

Members of the Easy Company were made famous by the Emmy-winning HBO series Band of Brothers from Spielberg and Hanks, which dramatized the experiences of the battalion and starred Damian Lewis as Winters and David Schwimmer as Captain Herbert Sobel.

Over 100 years after explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance was shipwrecked, The New York Times reported on March 9 that the ship has been discovered. The miraculous story is now set to become a NatGeo documentary.

Airing as part of the network’s “Explorer” franchise this fall, “Endurance” will chart the discovery of Sir Shackleton’s shipwrecked Endurance, which sank in the Antarctic in 1915. The ship was located at the bottom of the Weddell Sea, east of the Antarctic Peninsula, using undersea drones. The Endurance22 search expedition team had been searching for more than two weeks in a 150-square-mile area around where the 144-foot wooden ship went down. The wreck was found at a depth of 3,008 meters.

NatGeo is partnering with ABC News, Snow’s History Hit, All3Media label Little Dot Studios, and Consequential for the feature, directed by BAFTA nominee Natalie Hewit.

The Endurance initially sank in 1915 after being “crushed...

The wreck of Ernest Shackleton’s ship “Endurance” has been found 107 years after it sank off the coast of Antarctica and National Geographic has been swift to commission a documentary on the subject that has fascinated the world for over a century.

National Geographic has partnered exclusively with History Hit, the SVOD and content platform co-founded by historian Dan Snow; All3Media’s Little Dot Studios and production company Consequential for a documentary detailing the successful search and discovery of one of the great lost shipwrecks of history — Ernest Shackleton’s “Endurance.”

“Endurance” left South Georgia for Antarctica on Dec. 5, 1914, carrying Shackleton and 27 other men with the goal of reaching the South Pole and crossing the continent via an overland trek. However, nearing Antarctica, the ship became trapped in pack ice and sank in 1915. The crew made it by sea to uninhabited Elephant Island before Shackleton and five men set off...

National Geographic has greenlit an epic documentary detailing the successful search and discovery of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s sunken Endurance ship near Antarctica, helmed by British historian Dan Snow.

The network has partnered with ABC News, Snow’s History Hit, All3Media label Little Dot Studios and Consequential for the feature, which will form part of Nat Geo’s Explorer series. BAFTA-nominated director Natalie Hewit is attached.

The doc will chart the successful search by the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust for famed explorer Shackleton’s shipwrecked Endurance, which sank in 1915 near Antarctica. Miraculously, Shackleton plus 27 crew all survived following an epic journey to South Georgia to get help.

Led by Polar Geographer Dr. John Shears and Marine Archaeologist Mensun Bound aboard the South African icebreaker Agulhas II, a crew of scientists and archaeologists teamed with filmmakers and Snow to document the events in real time leading up to the discovery.

Nat...