Do You Need to Premiere at a Major Festival to Qualify your Doc for an Oscar? Roger Ross Williams on the Shortlist Process

One of the most intriguing aspects of this year’s Savannah Film Festival’s Docs to Watch Roundtable, which I wrote about a couple months back, was the lively back-and-forth that occurred when the subject of the Oscar shortlist came up. From all appearances it seems that a documentarian’s chances of making that Holy Grail cut are “predetermined” — i.e., if your film didn’t debut at one of a narrow number of A-list fests, well, forget about it.

However, Roger Ross Williams, a member of the Documentary Branch of the AMPAS board of governors, took vigorous issue with that assessment. Which intrigued me even more. So Filmmaker decided to follow up with the multitasking, Academy Award-winner a few weeks after the fest, as he was preparing for the UK release of his latest nonfiction artwork Life, Animated. (Which, yes, subsequently made the Oscar shortlist.)

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.