Deadline on Monday launched streaming sites for its first two Contenders awards-season events that took place over the weekend: Contenders International and Contenders Documentary.
Click here for Contenders International videos.
Click here for Contenders Documentary videos.
On Saturday, Contenders International featured 22 movies from 15 studios, streamers and distributors, with creative talent joining for panel Q&As along with clips from the films. In all, 20 films are official submissions to the Best International Film category at the 93rd Academy Awards, repping countries including Serbia, Greece, Colombia, Switzerland, Chile, Hungary, Finland, Poland, Romania, France, Georgia, Russia, Ivory Coast, Italy, Mexico, Denmark, Slovakia, Indonesia, Guatemala and India.
Panelists included Sophia Loren, Edoardo Ponti, Nina Hoss, Andrei Konchalovsky, Philippe Lacôte, Mads Mikkelsen, Thomas Vinterberg, Javier Cámara, Fernando Trueba and Alexander Nanau among others.
On Sunday, Contenders Documentary showed off 23 movies from 12 studios in a season where nonfiction fare was not held back by the pandemic; the record for films in contention for the Best Documentary Oscar certainly will be shattered. Panelists who joined us included Oscar-winning and Oscar-nominated filmmakers Alex Gibney, Liz Garbus, Ron Howard, Bryan Fogel, Errol Morris, Gianfranco Rosi, Amy Ziering and Kirby Dick.
Deadline’s annual awards-season kickoff is being juiced up this year with three supersized Contenders events, all of which feature virtual presentations of the movies that will be making noise all the way up to the Oscars in April. The inaugural editions of International and Documentary lead up to Contenders Film, a two-day extravaganza set for January 23-24.