How family plays a key role for documentary awards hopefuls this year

For Ian Bonhôte, joint director of documentary Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story, “I truly believe stories are a vehicle to emotion. The emotion is the most important thing.”

That’s not to say that he and fellow director Peter Ettedgui set out to manipulate the audience when delving into the life of the Superman star, who was left paralysed from the neck down by a horse-riding accident in 1995, and who died in 2004. Rather, they leaned into the emotional payload that naturally arrived in testimony from Reeve’s three adult children and former partner Gae Exton, and archive material featuring his late wife Dana Morosini.

Super/Man — which won in six categories at the Critics’ Choice Documentary Awards in November, including best documentary feature, tied with Will & Harper — is just one notable non-fiction film this year tilting into the theme of family. Several films do so explicitly: Blink, for example, from Daniel Roher (Navalny) and Edmund Stenson, depicts a Canadian family taking their children on a global trip before the congenital condition that affects three of the quartet will rob them of their sight. Or Sweden’s international feature Oscar entry The Last Journey, in which directors Filip Hammar and Fredrik Wikingsson attempt to revitalise the life of Hammar’s elderly father by taking him on a road trip to France.

Other documentaries this year offer audiences a subject hook about something else altogether, and then find their emotional beats in an arc affecting family members. That is the case in Lucy Walker’s Mountain Queen: The Summits Of Lhakpa; in Emily Kassie and Julian Brave NoiseCat’s Sugarcane; and in Benjamin Ree’s The Remarkable Life Of Ibelin.

In Mountain Queen — which premiered at Toronto in 2023 and was then acquired by Netflix, launching on the streamer in July — Walker joins the titular Lhakpa Sherpa as a single mother working in a Connecticut Whole Foods store, and living in a cramped apartment with her teenage daughters Sunny and Shiny. She sets out to climb Everest one more time — her 10th ascent — for reasons of personal fulfilment, but it is the impact the achievement has on her daughters that carries most weight in the film.

Lhakpa moved to the US after marrying Romanian-American climber George Dijmarescu, but the relationship proved abusive, and she and the two girls ended up living in a rescue shelter. These events still cast a shadow.

Mountaineering films are always really about something else, suggests Walker, who has two Oscar nominations including one in 2011 for documentary feature Waste Land. “I knew the film was about Lhakpa’s life and the summits she climbed in her life. It’s this story of a woman who is incredibly strong, but is that enough to surmount the deep pain of her past?

“The gift of documentary film­making is when you open yourself to what is, and you let life be your co-writer. What I hadn’t anticipated — and I called up the producers excited when I figured it out — was, ‘Actually, it’s the kids.’”

Walker is talking not just about how younger sister Shiny sees her mother in a new light when she joins the climbing party for the early stages of the ascent of Everest, but also the breakthrough achieved by elder sibling Sunny, who begins the film closed off and shut down. “If the movie is about Lhakpa reclaiming her legacy of inspiring women and girls, what better way to tell that story than the girls themselves, feeling that inspiration.”

Love story

From directors Natalie Rae and Angela Patton, Daughters makes its connection to family explicit from the get-go, beginning with its title. The film follows four Black girls as they prepare to join their incarcerated fathers for the first Daddy Daughter Dance permitted at a Washington DC prison as part of a fatherhood programme aimed at reducing rates of reoffending.

Over the course of the film’s long development, Patton — who is an activist and CEO of Girls For A Change — and Rae — whose background is directing music videos — referred to it as Date With Dad. But when Rae suggested Daughters for the title, “There was no debate,” says Patton. “We were realising that it’s a family story that’s not just about the fathers. We wouldn’t tell a jail story, but a love story.”

“It just comes back to the POV of the daughter, and connecting as daughters,” adds Rae. “I felt it was symbolic of this film, but also the universal connection that hopefully the film would have.”

Date With Dad is a programme founded by Patton in 2008, initially at a prison in Richmond, Virginia. And while Rae and Patton do follow the fathers in the DC prison as they are guided by life coach Chad Morris in preparation for the event, the film centres on Aubrey, Santana, Ja’Ana and Raziah — who span ages five to 15 — as well as their mothers. “The theme of this film is the wisdom of these girls — they know what they need for themselves and the healing that they can do, and for their fathers,” says Rae.

Netflix acquired Daughters following its premiere at Sundance in 2024, and also swooped at the same festival on The Remarkable Life Of Ibelin, which won Sundance’s directing award and audience award in the world cinema documentary section.

Norwegian director Ree had a past family connection with the main subject of his film — Mats Steen, who died of a degenerative muscular disease at the age of 25. Presumed by his parents to be living a lonely, isolated existence in his bedroom playing video games, Mats was discovered after his death to have experienced a deep and enriching social life in the online World Of Warcraft game, friend and counsellor to many who knew him as his heroic avatar Ibelin.

Ree’s family and the Steens were friends when Benjamin was a baby, but they moved away when he was aged one, and lost contact. However, one of Mats’ uncles was a teacher at Ree’s school and had taught him filmmaking; it was through this connection that Ree — best known for 2020’s The Painter And The Thief — was drawn into the project. Still, he was surprised when he started to view the 50 home-video VHS tapes filmed by Mats’ father Robert, and saw himself as a baby, plonked next to Mats, alongside both sets of parents.

The Steens appear in the film in newly shot interviews and in home-movie archive, and their presence is a given. But the emotional payload further enriches with the inclusion of Mats’ other — online — family. After his death, the Steens “received around 50 messages telling stories, not only of a good friend, but a friend that had helped them fundamentally change their lives, save their lives,” explains Ree. “Mats was great at asking, ‘How are you doing?’, and meaning it. This goes both for his family in real life and his other family virtually. He was good at creating that feeling of family, the closeness, which is one of the most important things to do in life.”

Ree was able to recreate Ibelin and his friends inside World Of Warcraft thanks to their rolepay dialogue and character actions being transcribed and published on a community forum. A trio of gamers who specialise in making independent YouTube animations based on the game spent two-and-a-half years recreating key sequences. Only then did Ree and producer Ingvil Giske fly to California with an almost-finished film to show the game’s creator Blizzard Entertainment, which granted approval.

National Geographic Documentary Films’ Sugarcane also has a family coincidence as part of its genesis. Its two directors, Emily Kassie and Julian Brave NoiseCat, met when they worked together in their first jobs as reporters at The Huffington Post. Kassie went on to know NoiseCat as “an incredible journalist and historian of Indigenous life in North America”, while she herself became a documentarian and investigative journalist focusing on international global conflict.

When Kassie determined to make a film about a story closer to home, the abusive treatment of Indigenous children forced into residential schools in North America, she reached out to NoiseCat as a collaborator. Then news broke in Canada of a search for unmarked graves at St Joseph’s Mission near Williams Lake First Nation (aka Sugarcane Reservation), British Columbia, giving Kassie a hook for the film.

“I couldn’t believe what she had said,” recalls NoiseCat. “Out of 139 Indian residential schools across Canada, Em had happened to choose the one school that my family was taken away to and where my father’s life began.”

Despite the connection, NoiseCat and his father and grandmother entered the film as screen subjects only gradually. “For the first year of production, we shot almost nothing from my narrative, because I wasn’t sure I wanted to tell such a heavy and personal story,” says NoiseCat. “So that was something I had to think long and hard about. I came around to feeling it was the right thing to do creatively and life-wise, and the right people to do it with.”

NoiseCat had been estranged from his father Ed, who had battled personal demons stemming from his traumatic start in life — which included being abandoned as a baby next to the incinerator of the residential school. The evolution of the relationship between Julian and his father, and the one between Ed and his own mother Kyé7e, combine to give the film its strongest narrative thread.

“The purpose of the Indian residential schools was to break down the family structure and the culture,” explains NoiseCat. “The literal policy was to not allow Native parents to raise their kids. It was important to us to show the consequences of the breaking down of that family structure, but also the love and beauty that still exists.”

Deep impact

Sugarcane — which Kassie also produces alongside Kellen Quinn — premiered at Sundance where it won the directing award in the US documentary section, going on to earn eight nominations at the Critics’ Choice Documentary Awards. Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story was likewise a Sundance 2024 premiere, after which the film was acquired by Warner Bros Discovery in a $15m deal, giving it a Q4 theatrical release in territories including North America and the UK.

All along Bonhôte and Ettedgui — known for the Bafta-nominated McQueen — knew they had the co-operation of Reeve’s children, Matthew, Alexandra and Will, but their eventual impact on the film was not initially guessed at.

“We were aware Christopher Reeve had been the greatest superhero on screen ever — and he was equalling that in his own life, with his advocacy and using his voice on behalf of the disability community and galvanising science, raising money,” says Ettedgui. “That’s what we thought the film was going to be about, and that the family was going to be key in allowing us to tell that story.”

“As we were interviewing them, and as we were making the film, it became very clear they were the stars of the show,” explains Bonhôte. “They were young, beautiful and vulnerable, and they all took some aspect of Chris.” Elaborates Ettedgui: “Will [who reports for ABC News] has got the entertainment gene, loves being on camera. Matthew is the reflective artist and filmmaker. And Alexandra has got the activist gene.”

Making an equivalent impact is archive footage featuring Reeve’s actress wife Dana — mother to Will, stepmother to Matthew and Alexandra — who became an equal partner to Reeve in the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation.

The affluent family had a camcorder from the early 1980s. “Luckily, they had one, and they didn’t hide from filming each other,” says Bonhôte. “We didn’t want to make a film just about Chris. We made a film about an extraordinary family.”

His emphasis on family echoes Rae’s perspective on her own film Daughters (“I felt every family could heal and benefit from watching this story, connecting audiences through a shared humanity”) and also how Kassie talks about Sugarcane. “The witnessing to three generations of Julian’s family reckoning with this [trauma], it’s inspiring to anyone who sees the film, anyone who has a family, which is all of us,” she says. “All of us know what it is to have pains and secrets with the people we love most. These are universal themes.”

• Screen digital edition: November 29