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Hulu, Netflix triumph at IDA awards

Hulu’s Minding the Gap comes from Bing Liu

US streamer Hulu’s coming-of-age doc Minding the Gap picked up a trio of prizes at the 34th annual IDA Documentary Awards, while fellow SVoD giant Netflix’s Wild Wild Country was named Best Limited Series.

In addition to taking the top prize for Best Feature, Minding the Gap’s director Bing Liu also collected the emerging filmmaker award and the Best Editing trophy for the youth and skateboarding-focused doc.

US pubcaster PBS’s documentary strand POV, which has TV rights to Minding the Gap, was honoured with the Best Curated Series prize at the ceremony. And in addition to winning Best Limited Series with the cult-focused Wild Wild Country, streaming giant Netflix also found success in the Best Short category, which was won by Floyd Russ’s Zion.

Elsewhere, US cablenet Showtime’s opioid crisis series The Trade, from Matthew Heineman and Pagan Harleman, picked up the award for Best Episodic Series.

“More than 72,000 people died from overdoses in 2017 when we made The Trade,” Heineman told the crowd of fellow documentary professionals. “With journalism constantly under attack, I feel it’s more important than ever for us to use this art form.”

US premium cablenet HBO was also among the night’s winners, picking up the ABC News VideoSource Award for John McCain: For Whom the Bell Tolls, a film exploring the life of the late American senator from directors George, Peter and Teddy Kunhardt.

Jayisha Patel’s Circle was given the Student Documentary Award, while MEL Films was awarded Best Short Form Series. The Best Music Documentary category, meanwhile, saw a two-way tie between Melissa Haizlip and Samuel D. Pollard’s Mr. Soul!, and Steve Loveridge’s Matangi/Maya/M.I.A.

At times, the awards ceremony – held on the Paramount lot in LA on Saturday night – struck a decidedly political tone.

Accepting the Best Writing prize for her Serbian doc The Other Side of Everything, writer/director Mila Turajlić warned of the rise of authoritarian regimes and how quickly things can fall apart. “Don’t take the peace you’ve lived in all your life for granted,” she said.

And upon collecting the Best Music Score award for Hale County This Morning, This Evening, director RaMell Ross told the crowd that when he reflected on the history of black imagery in cinema, “it’s almost always people that aren’t black making images – and that’s a problem.”

Finally, the IDA’s Career Achievement Award was bestowed upon three-time Oscar-nominee Julia Reichert. Accepting the prize, the filmmaker urged her peers to think of themselves as a community and to unite and push for change, suggesting they “go to Netflix and say we want our movies to play community screenings or movie theatres before streaming.”

“We have a movement,” she added. “We stand for values, for ideas, for commitment.”

Check out C21’s Sundance 2018 video special, featuring interviews with the creatives behind Minding the Gap, The Trade and Wild Wild Country, here.

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