Earlier this year, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin won an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for “Free Solo,” a look inside Alex Honnold’s quest to make history as the first person to free solo climb El Capitan. If the newly announced nominations for documentary motion picture at the 2020 PGA Awards are any indication — which they usually are — another woman-directed or co-directed title has a good shot of taking home the Oscar next year as well. Of seven nominees, five are helmed or co-helmed by women, amounting to about 71 percent of the docs in the running.
Among the titles up for the PGA honor are “One Child Nation,” Nanfu Wang and Jialing Zhang’s investigation into the untold history of China’s controversial one-child policy and its impact on generations of families, and “American Factory,” Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar’s look inside what happens when a Chinese billionaire buys a former GM plant in Ohio. The race also includes Waad Al-Kateab and Edward Watts’ “For Sama,” a message to Al-Kateab’s daughter, and the story of her life in Aleppo through five years of the Syrian revolution, and Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov’s “Honeyland,” a portrait of the last woman working as a wild beekeeper in Europe. “Advocate,” which sees Rachel Leah Jones following Jewish human rights lawyer Lea Tsemel, received a nod as well.
More nominees for the PGA Awards will be announced on December 19 and January 7. The ceremony will be held January 18 in Hollywood.
