It begins with the waning days of summer, when the glittery triumvirate of TIFF, Venice, and Telluride ushers in a six-month frenzy of film festivals, screenings, interviews, and receptions. This is Awards Season, that high-octane, high-priced joy ride that takes filmmaking teams from continent to continent, city to city, in a career-transforming quest for the holiest of grails: the Oscar.
For the documentary community, the epic trek to Hollywood’s Biggest Night gathers force en route to the first plateau, in late December: the Short List, when the Academy’s Documentary Branch of some 800 members worldwide winnows down the hundreds of entries into 15 features and 15 shorts. Then, a month later, the nominations announcement anoints the final five from each category, followed by the next month-and-a-half, when the ten contenders converge on Los Angeles for a final madcap swirl. And after all this, only two winners emerge. Then everyone goes home.
Over the past couple of decades, as documentaries have soared in popularity and prestige, and the community has evolved into a multi-stakeholder ecosystem, the awards campaign has burgeoned into its own cottage industry. Doc filmmakers have learned how to build out their teams of publicists, experts, partners, and, on occasion, celebrities to develop a strategy to reach their target constituent: the Documentary Branch.
This is a big-budget enterprise, and if contenders are fortunate enough to have secured deep-pocketed distributors to help foot the costs, that’s an obvious advantage. But documentary makers are generally hard-wired for entrepreneurship, ingenuity, and chutzpah, and many of the scrappier doc teams have devised ingenious, cost-efficient ways to navigate the awards circuit.
The 2024 Hot Docs Industry Conference featured a case study about one of the 2023-24 nominees: To Kill a Tiger, which documents an Indian family’s crusade for justice after their teenage daughter survived a brutal gang rape. Director/writer/producer Nisha Pahuja joined theatrical and distribution strategist Annalisa Shoemaker and moderator/journalist Addie Morfoot to discuss the long and winding road from the doc’s 2022 premiere at TIFF—where it earned the Best Canadian Film Award—to the hallowed halls of Hollywood.
While the film had secured National Film Board (NFB) backing for production and earned awards along the festival circuit, To Kill a Tiger did not land a distributor until after its Academy Award nomination. That’s the obvious reward which comes to Oscar-nominated doc-makers, even if they don’t garner the ultimate prize. Pahuja hadn’t thought about an Oscar nomination or even a campaign in the very early stages, but when colleagues put that idea in her head, she resolved to try. While she and her team were approached by US distributors, “They weren’t offering us anything substantial, and we anticipated that they wouldn’t be able to go the distance that I felt I could do,” she said.
Pahuja’s previous film, The World Before Her (2012), enjoyed a robust festival run around the world, but this time around, To Kill a Tiger did not attract such high-profile players as the prestigious festivals in Copenhagen, CPH:DOX, or Amsterdam’s IDFA. “But what was interesting was that most of the festivals that we got into, we won awards,” Pahuja explained. “So we thought, ‘We probably have something here and maybe the market doesn’t quite understand what we have.’”
And so, over the course of the campaign, the Tiger team secured such high-wattage celebrities as Mindy Kaling and Dev Patel as executive producers. They helped to raise money while getting behind the social issues inherent in the film through their respective networks, which helped the Tiger team’s impact screenings, and had the reach to make Documentary Branch members aware of the doc. The team also included not only seasoned producers but also thought leaders in the areas of medicine and public health, philanthropy, social justice and female empowerment, and technology.
Annalisa Shoemaker came on board in September 2023. As she recalled, “I watched the film, and the first thing I said to Nisha was, ‘This isn’t a movie; it’s a movement, and I want to be part of it.’” She was instrumental in identifying a team of publicists who were savvy about awards campaigns and the Documentary Branch. The team focused on the three hot spots for Branch members—New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles—and deployed the higher-profile executive producers to attend the screenings there. They also engaged London-based WMD Entertainment to spearhead screenings in the UK and Europe, as well as Product of Culture, an LA and NYC-based agency that, according to Pahuja, “specializes in activating and representing South Asian and BIPOC communities.” The team also used online platforms like Gathr and Kinema for geo-targeted screenings. This series of special screenings “would lay the foundation for something larger,” Pahuja told POV, “like a second round of theatrical screenings, which is what we ended up doing.”
En route to the short-list announcement, the Tiger team made one crucial, albeit high-priced, stop: the DOC NYC luncheon in November. “We wanted to introduce ourselves to as many Documentary Branch members as possible,” Pahuja explained at the panel. “What you need is for people in the community to watch and talk about your film.”
Once the film made the short list a month later, Anita Lee joined the team as executive producer, representing the NFB, one of the film’s co-producers. In her capacity as executive producer at the NFB, Lee had shepherded To Kill a Tiger from development to picture-lock before joining TIFF as chief programming officer (she recused herself from deciding on any films that she had overseen at the NFB). “One of the early pieces of advice that I gave them,” Lee recalled, “is that as a Canadian doc, it was really important to make sure that it was put in front of the larger documentary industry, especially in the US—and the Branch. I think being a Canadian documentary, you’re a little bit outside of that circle.”
During her time at NFB, Lee continued, “I had been part of the Oscar campaign process multiple times, and I saw what worked, what didn’t work. It was really more my documentary knowledge and experience that I’ve had for so many years, not only at the NFB, but in general, the understanding of that community and industry and the people in it, that was probably the most useful. It’s really understanding the level of effort that is required for a successful Oscar campaign.”
While Pahuja praised the NFB to POV for its support of not only To Kill a Tiger, but of her filmmaking career, she emphasized, “The Oscar campaign was an initiative I took on, and though the NFB and I had some conversations around it, it was a grassroots, DIY effort funded by a number of executive producers and made possible because of a committed core team of women. The NFB and Telefilm both generously came on to support us at a key stage, which was wonderful and needed.”
The NFB has a storied history with Oscar campaigns, having earned Academy Awards for Terre Nash’s controversial anti-nuke If You Love This Planet (1982), Cynthia Scott’s dance doc Flamenco at 5:15 (1983) and the animated documentary hybrid Ryan by Chris Landreth (2004) as well as a number of nominations and awards, particularly for animation. Johanna Lessard, NFB’s Director of Marketing, noted, “We have a very well-oiled machine and a committee that yearly sits down and discusses films that could potentially be interesting candidates for Oscar campaigns. Does it resonate in a world where we could get attention from trade media and industry stakeholders? We’re always listening to what is trending, but also what is changing; it’s a business that evolves quickly. So networking is something that we are investing a lot of time in. We are experts in making sure that we raise the profile of our projects.”
With the To Kill a Tiger campaign, the next key stop on the post-short-list journey was securing a spot on an in-person, on-stage interview in Los Angeles, presented by the Pure Nonfiction podcast and The Ankler—another pricey promo push. “I was really about strategy, strategy, strategy,” Shoemaker explained in the session. “What is going to have the most impact to meet our goals?”
“What I’ve realized with this entire awards campaign is that there’s a certain pace and tone that has been set by those with deep pockets,” Pahuja recounted to POV. “In order for you to be seen as a contender, you have to, as much as you can, play in that same sandbox. So, there were certain expenses that we felt we had to assume, because it meant we were taken seriously.”
Once To Kill a Tiger earned a nomination, the work continued. The Oscar Nominees Luncheon, held a month before the ceremony, packs a lot of power in one room, and, like the DOC NYC luncheon three months before, afforded the Tiger team a golden opportunity for high-yield networking. And so, Pahuja approached Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos, then followed up with an email—and he followed up soon after with a “Yes.” To Kill a Tiger had finally landed a distributor.
All told, the budget for the awards campaign exceeded that of the entire production. “We were always having conversations around this,” Pahuja reflected in the panel. “And there were times where it just felt so unethical to be spending more than it costs to make the film when I was trying to have an impact. Could I not take this money and actually go to India and start something for survivors? Or find NGOs on the ground who were doing this really critical work? But in the end, one of the things that we always knew is there’s no greater visibility in the world than the Oscars. And what better way to amplify your message than the campaign? We got on Netflix as a result of being nominated.”
That said, she and her team will be launching an extensive impact campaign this October around To Kill a Tiger, working with Equality Now, a global NGO in the business of, according to its website, “advocating for the protection and promotion of the human rights of women and girls.”
For those filmmakers who are considering dovetailing their awards and impact campaigns, Pahuja told POV, “Launch your impact campaign right after the awards campaign, if you can. In our case, it would have been so great because the momentum was there. But we just didn’t have the energy, bandwidth, or money to go right from awards to impact.”
Filmmaker Geeta Sondhi, who manages the impact campaign for To Kill a Tiger, added, “If you ground yourself in the impact, and in the mission of your film, you’re good, because we always thought we’ll win no matter what, because this journey is helping us to our goal.”
To Kill a Tiger was not the only Canadian documentary to engage in an awards campaign this past year. Zaynê Akyol’s Rojek, which takes viewers to Kurdistan following the ISIS occupation, and features interviews with imprisoned Islamic State members, won a Special Jury Prize at Hot Docs 2022, along with several other festival awards, and was the Canadian submission for Best International Feature. The process for this category differs somewhat from that for the Documentary categories. According to Akyol, a 16-member committee, overseen by Telefilm Canada, selects the candidate from a group of submitted films (there were 28 last year). Telefilm Canada then helped fund the Rojek campaign; Akyol’s team also secured grants from two other entities, including the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.
“For me, it was the first time, and the same for one of the producers,” Akyol explains. “For the other producer, the last time he did it was 10 years ago; things have changed so much. And so, we learned on the ground. We hired a publicist who specialized in the international category, and we kept some money for the documentary part.”
From August 2023, when Rojek was selected, to the short list announcement in December, Akyol and her team embarked on a series of Academy screenings in New York and Los Angeles, as well as festival screenings. The team eventually hired three publicists—two in Canada to handle respective English and French language outlets, and one in Los Angeles to handle the Academy screenings. “It was a full time job,” she admitted. “I’m used to risking my life making films, and suddenly I’m in this campaign, which is more political than artistic. Playing politician and campaigning for Oscars is basically the same thing; you have to know the right people; you have to answer the right way.”
The final, priciest leg in the Rojek campaign came in December, when the team used the grant from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec to pay for an online and print interview with The Hollywood Reporter via its THR Presents series. (According to Akyol, it was $25,000 CAD; THR was not available for confirmation.) “That was the strategy of the publicist,” she explains. “He said, ’You have to have this interview right at the end of your campaign, because that’s when people vote.’”
Rojek ultimately did not make the short list, but Akyol was sanguine about it. The networking opportunities certainly presented themselves, and, she added, “It’s a privilege to represent your country. Not everyone has this chance, and maybe it’s one time in your life. It was also a good experience for my team because we were doing that together.”
The interviewees for this article all noted the financial and physical toll that a campaign can take, but they also cited the long-term benefits for both their films and their careers. “Try to look for the opportunities around a campaign,” advised Moses Bwayo, co-director of the Academy Award-nominated Bobi Wine: The People’s President. “Yes, this is your film at the moment, but there’s life after the campaign. It’s really not about the competition. It’s about the people you meet, the good time you have, sharing your story. That’s why we make these films: so they can be seen. If your film gets shortlisted or nominated, or if you have a campaign at all, that’s already a win. There’s more visibility for your story.”
