With one month left of 2013, we invite you to participate in the first annual Nonfics celebrating the best documentaries of the year.
And by “you” we mean pretty much anyone reading this. We will be compiling a master list from film critics and one from filmmakers, but we will also be posting individual lists from anyone we get one from. Because, after all, everyone is a critic. And also there can never be too many lists of documentary recommendations. Just give us your name, what your relationship is to docs (critic, filmmaker, enthusiast, etc.) and your selections.
You don’t have to come up with as many as ten or only ten (but let’s not go overboard), but you should rank titles, with 1 being the best and so on. That way we can properly tally up these individual lists for the master lists of the top 10 documentaries of the year. You also need not write anything about any of the films, unless you really desire (very brief statements may accompany personal lists in the post).
Qualifications of what’s a doc and whether it counts for 2013 are a bit loose, so as to avoid too much discussion and debate of the matter, but we can answer any questions you have.
Preferably your picks should be official U.S. releases since January 1 — whether it debuted first in theaters, on TV or online/VOD, etc. Anything you include that you saw at a festival or that was only released in another country (some of you may be based elsewhere) will remain on your personal list but will only be counted towards a separate master of unreleased favorites if there are enough to warrant this feature. And please let me know if you’ve seen the 115-minute or 159-minute version of The Act of Killing, if you remember.
It’s up to you what you want to consider as a documentary by your own definitions, with a certain logic of course. Cases can be made for Bad Grandpa and This Ain’t California and maybe even any drama based on a true story you want to argue is a doc completely made up of reenactment (i.e. Captain Phillips). But no “Iron Man 3 is a documentary in which we see real actors performing a film play about a superhero” sort of extension (even if I do subscribe to the “every film is a documentary” theory for other purposes).
Please feel free to forward this to any other writers or filmmakers you think would like to participate. The deadline for submission is December 13, so you have two weeks to think about it, catch up with films and fine-tune your rankings.
Email us at editor (at) nonfics (dotcom) when you’re ready.
Thank you in advance if you do participate and we’ll let you know by email when the final post goes up on the site (probably around December 18th). And thank you in general for your support of Nonfics!
