Annal:2002 Academy Award® for Best Documentary Feature
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Academy Award® in the year 2002. For a ranked list of films, try an honor roll:
- 2002 Oscar-Documentary winner
- Score: 10.52
The Academy Award-winning documentary Murder on a Sunday Afternoon, which originally aired on HBO as part of its America Undercover series, is a troubling look at modern police investigation that unfolds in a story as compelling and suspenseful as any fictional drama. French director Jean-Xavier De Lestrade’s intimate camerawork pulls viewers into the jury box to help decide the fate of 15-year-old Brenton Butler, a black resident of Jacksonville, Florida, who becomes the prime suspect in the shooting death of an elderly white woman simply because…
- 2002 Oscar-Documentary nominee
- Score: 6.52
This astonishingly intimate documentary follows five homeless children in Romania, where the collapse of communism has led to a life on the street for 20,000 children. From a 16-year-old girl who runs her gang with a mixture of brutality and compassion, to a small, intelligent, and remarkably articulate 12-year-old boy, these children seem at first feral and frightening—yet over the course of the movie their loneliness, desperation, and glimpses of hope will transform how you perceive them. Make no mistake: this is difficult watching.…
LaLee's Kin: The Legacy of Cotton
- 2002 Oscar-Documentary nominee
- Score: 6.52
Lalee’s Kin takes us deep into the Mississippi Delta and the intertwined lives of LaLee Wallace, a great-grandmother struggling to hold her world together in the face of dire poverty, and Reggie Barnes, superintendent of the embattled West Tallahatchie School System. The film explores the painful legacy of slavery and sharecropping in the Delta.
62-year old LaLee Wallace is the lifeblood of this film. Matriarch to an extended family that moves in and out of her house, LaLee is a woman of contradictions and hope. “Could have been worse,” she says…
B.Z. Goldberg, Justine Shapiro
- 2002 Oscar-Documentary nominee
- Score: 6.52
Promises presents a powerful portrait of seven Palestinian and Israeli children who live in and around Jerusalem. As filmmaker B.Z. Goldberg, who was raised in Israel, notes, “They live no more than 20 minutes from each other, but they are each growing up in very separate worlds.” The children include Mahmoud, Shlomo, Sanabel, Faraj, Moishe, and twins Yarko and Daniel. With the exception of the latter, all are religious (the twins are the grandchildren of a Holocaust survivor). Most have strong political beliefs and have seen their share of tragedy—Faraj’s…
