Oscar Nomination for Rory Peck Finalists

10 Feb 2010

Congratulations to Jon Alpert and Matthew O’Neil who have received an Oscar nomination for "China’s Unnatural Disaster; The Tears of Sechuan Province".  It is one of five films competing in the Documentary Short category on 7 March.

The New Yorkers were finalists in last November's Rory Peck Awards - in the Sony Professional Impact category - with their jointly-shot film which follows a group of grieving parents in the days and weeks following the 2008 earthquake in central China which killed 70,000 people. 10,000 were schoolchildren crushed beneath the rubble of collapsed school buildings and Jon and Matthew follow the grieving parents as they try to come to terms with their loss and go on to challenge government officials about the shoddy construction of their childrens' schools.

The US media has reported that official Chinese news reports on the Oscars have omitted any mention of the film’s nomination. You can read more in an article by the Hollywood Reporter.

You can also watch a clip of the film and read more about the filmmakers in the RPA finalists pages. 

Jon and Matthew are independent filmmakers who run the non-profit Downtown Community Television Centre in New York.  They have won numerous awards for their work, including 15 Emmys.  They were Rory Peck finalists in 2006 for their film Baghdad ER.

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Our friends at the Democratic Voice of Burma in Oslo are also celebrating the Oscar nomination for Burma VJ which tells  the story of the DVB’s role recording and distributing footage of the 2007 uprisings in Burma. It is competing in the Documentary Feature category. 

Two of DVB's freelance cameramen, Ngwe Soe Lin and 'Zorro', won the Rory Peck Features Award in November for Orphans of the Burmese Cyclone. Ngwe Soe Lin is currently serving a 13 year sentence for filming without government permission.  Watch a clip of their documentary here.