Skip to main content

1995 Academy Award Nominees: Best Documentary Feature

By IDA Editorial Staff


Two women standing on a balcony smile at the camera, from Deborah Hoffmann's 'Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter.'

COMPLAINTS OF A DUTIFUL DAUGHTER

Producer, Director, and Writer: Deborah Hoffmann
Cinematography: Frances Reid
Editors: Jennifer Chinlund and Deborah Hoffmann
Music: Mary Watkins
Distributor: Women Make Movies

With profound insight and a healthy dose of visual and verbal levity, the personal documentary Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter chronicles the progressive stages of a mother's Alzheimer's disease and the evolving response of the daughter—who is also the filmmaker—to the illness. The desire to cure the incurable—to set right her mother's confusion and forgetfulness, to temper her mother's obsessiveness gives way to an acceptance that is finally liberating for both daughter and mother.

Deborah Hoffmann (Producer/Director/Writer) has worked in the San Francisco Bay Area as a film and video editor for the past 12 years, editing numerous internationally acclaimed documentaries. Hoffmann's editing on The Times of Harvey Milk earned her a national Emmy, and the film received an Academy Award. Marlon Riggs's Color Adjustment, which she edited, received a Peabody and an IDA Distinguished Documentary Achievement Award. She also edited Ethnic Notions and Men Who Molest, both of which received national Emmys; was an editor on Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt, which received an Academy Award; and edited Acting Our Age, about women growing old. Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter is her directorial debut.

D-DAY REMEMBERED

Producer and Director: Charles Guggenheim
Narrator: David McCullough
Executive Producer: Grace Guggenheim
Senior Producer: Jennifer Milstone
Editor: Joseph Wiedenmayer
Music: Michael Bacon Distributor: Direct Cinema Ltd.

The story of the most defining moment of the Allied victo­ry against Nazi Germany in World War II is recounted in D-Day Remembered by those who planned and carried it out. The film tells of the successful invasion of the Normandy coast on June 6, 1944, by the largest armada in history and of the battle that followed.

Charles Guggenheim (Producer/Director), a Washington, D.C., based filmmaker, has achieved an international reputation in the area of documentary films. His nonfiction films for television and theatrical release have covered architecture, history, and social issues. Described by the Saturday Review's film critic, Hollis Alpert, as "probably the most accomplished maker of documentary films in the country," Guggenheim has won top awards in every major international film competition. He has received the George Foster Peabody Award in broadcasting, eight Academy Award nominations, and three Academy Awards.

FREEDOM ON MY MIND

Producers: Connie Field and Marilyn Mulford
Directors: Connie Field and Marilyn Mulford
Writer: Michael Chandler
Cinematography: Michael Chinn, Steve Devita, and Vicente Franco
Editor: Michael Chandler
Narrator: Ronnie Washington
Distributor: Tara Releasing

Freedom on My Mind brings to life the dramatic story of the 1961-64 Mississippi Voter Registration Project and the subsequent formation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. The film focuses on two groups: local Mississippi sharecroppers, maids and day laborers of great courage, as well as the young, committed, equally courageous organizers who worked with them. Freedom on My Mind exposes the institutionalized racism of 1960s Mississippi and the complicity of the Democratic Party.

Connie Field (Co-Producer/Co-Director) has worked on numerous dramatic and documentary films, as well as independently producing her own work. She was a founding member of Boston's Newsreel Films. Her credits include directing the Academy Award-nominated Forever Activists and producing, directing, and editing the multi-award-winning feature documentary The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter.

Marilyn Mulford (Co-producer/Co-director) was a mem­ber of New York Newsreel from 1969 to 1973. She went on to found Pandora Films and co-produced How'Bout You, about birth control and sexuality, and Chris and Bernie, about two single women raising their children together. She also directed the award-winning feature documentary Chicano Park, the story of a Mexican-American community in San Diego.

A GREAT DAY IN HARLEM

Producer: Jean Bach
Coproducer: Matthew Seig
Editor: Susan Peehl
Narrator: Quincy Jones
Original Photograph by Art Kane Jean Bac
Original 8mm Film by Mona and Milt Hinton
Distributor: Castle Hill Productions

The film A Great Day in Harlem and the photograph on which it is based present an extraordinary cross-section of people and musical styles that have comprised the evolution of jazz from its beginnings up to the avant-garde. Included a re conversations with and about the various jazz stars pictured, as well as archival performance footage and a rare treasure unearthed just as production on the documentary began: some never-before-seen home movie footage showing the jazz greats arriving on the scene, greeting one another, displaying obvious affection for each other, and all but ignoring the photographer trying to get them to pose.

For decades, Jean Bach (Producer) has been part of the jazz scene A Great Day in Harlem brings to life. She has been listening to and writing about jazz since the big band era, when she was a journalist in Chicago. Active in radio and television for decades, Bach produced The Arlene Francis Program, New York's top-rated talk show, for 24 years.

Matthew Seig (Co-producer) has directed numerous jazz documentaries, including five episodes of the acclaimed Masters of American Music series. Of these latter, his Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday earned a CableACE Award for best cultural documentary. He has served as an associate producer and production executive on many films for feature director Robert Altman.

A Great Day in Harlem was edited by veteran documentary editor Sue Peehl (Editor), among whose many credits are two  award-winning episodes of the Mas­ters of American Music series, Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday and The World According to John Coltrane.

MAYA LIN: A STRONG CLEAR VISION

Producer and Director: Freida Lee Mock
Coproducer: Terry Sanders
Cinematography: Eddie Marritz and Don Lenzer
Music: Charles Bernstein

A documentary portrait of the designer of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the Civil Rights Memorial, and other Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision major public artworks, tells the story of how an unknown architectural student was able to create, against great odds and intense political opposition, stunning memorials whose impacts on the American people have been profound. Lin's works are described as "places of pilgrimage, where merely to touch seems to heal long-broken hearts, reconciling armies of veterans, assuaging historic wounds of activists... She has rendered stones into compelling American shrines."

Maya Lin first came to prominence at the age of 21 by winning the largest design competition in American history, the competition to create the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. She continues today, at 34, to produce a range of public art with significant national impact.

Freida Lee Mock (Producer/Director/Writer) has twice before been nominated for Academy Awards, for her documentaries Rose Kennedy: A Life to Remember and To Live or Let Die. She has produced a range of films on the arts and humanities, in­cluding the Emmy Award-winning Lillian Gish: The Actor's Life for Me, the Kennedy Center Honors biographical films, for which she earned a prime-time Emmy Award, and numerous film biographies.

Terry Sanders (Co-producer) is an Academy and Emmy Award-winning filmmaker (A Time Out of War). He produced War Hunt, Robert Redford's first starring role in a feature film, and many other features, television specials, and series.

Tags