In 2018, Feras Fayyad received an Oscar nomination for his documentary feature 'Last Men in Aleppo' about Syria's White Helmet rescue workers. Monday, Fayyad repeated the success as his follow-up documentary 'The Cave', about an underground hospital in Al Ghouta, Syria, received an Oscar nomination in the Documentary Feature category.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has nominated the film alongside four other documentaries, 'American Factory', 'Honeyland', 'For Sama' and 'The Edge of Democracy'. The winner will be announced on Oscar Night 9 February.
About the film
'The Cave' centres on Dr. Amani Ballour who has been instrumental in creating an underground hospital, known as The Cave, in Al Ghouta, where airstrikes have claimed thousands of lives since 2012. Fayyad's team has followed Ballour from 2016 to 2018, documenting the hectic daily life at the hospital – from the harrowing to the mundane – and shining a light on both the quiet details and the gruesome costs of war.
The Cave
For the besieged Syrian civilians, hope and safety lie underground, inside the subterranean hospital known as the Cave, where pediatrician and managing physician Dr. Amani Ballour and her colleagues Samaher and Dr. Alaa have claimed their right to work as equals alongside their male counterparts, doing their jobs in a way that would be unthinkable in the oppressively patriarchal culture that exists above.
'The Cave' picked up the Grolsch People’s Choice Documentary Award at the Toronto Film Festival and has also been honoured with prizes at Cinema Eye Honors, where Danish producers Kirstine Barfod and Sigrid Dyekjær won the producing prize. The film is nominated for both the Producers Guild Award and the Directors Guild Award in the Documentary Feature category.
Fayyad's 'Last Men in Aleppo' received an Oscar nomination in 2018 and was honoured with a great number of accolades, including top awards at Sundance and CPH:DOX.
'The Cave' is produced by Kirstine Barfod and Sigrid Dyekjær for Danish Documentary with support from the Danish Film Institute, TV 2 Denmark, National Geographic, IMS International Media Support, Doha Film Institute, SWR, Yun Sat Yen Foundation, Docs Up Fund and Normandie for Peace.
Read our interview with the team behind the film.
Danish films and the Oscars
'Land of Mine' was Oscar-nominated in 2017 in the international feature category, while Feras Fayyad's 'Last Men in Aleppo' received a nomination in 2018 in the documentary category. Since 2013, four Danish documentary features have been nominated for an Oscar.
Danish films have won the international feature film Oscar three times – Susanne Bier's 'In a Better World' in 2011, Bille August's 'Pelle the Conqueror' in 1989 and Gabriel Axel's 'Babette's Feast' in 1988.
