It felt like there was a real space and need for a different voice that was maybe looking at documentary in a slightly different way,” said Schnack. He ticked off a range of programmers, from TIFF’s Thom Powers to then-SFFILM programming head Rachel Rosen, True/False’s David Wilson, and former SXSW producer Matt Dentler, all of whom agreed with the sense that documentaries resonated on the festival circuit weren’t finding that same support in awards season - in part because the Best Documentary field wasn’t sufficient to salute the scope of the work involved in documentary production. “It had been a really exciting year for nonfiction film, particularly a lot of young new voices who were coming into the documentary world with great films,” he said, but not one of those 15 films were IDA nominees or on the Oscar shortlist. The year the awards launched, Schnack had been on the Independent Spirit Awards jury for the Truer than Fiction Award, which picked a shortlist of 15 of the year’s top films from emerging filmmakers. “It was a reaction to what was happening elsewhere in the field,” Schnack said in a recent interview with IndieWire.

Schnack (“Kurt Cobain About a Son” and the recent “30 for 30” entry “Long Gone Summer”), the Cinema Eye Honors have led the charge in shaking up conversations about the types of non-fiction storytelling that were worthy of celebration. Led by Los Angeles documentary filmmaker A.J. One force for change throughout has been the Cinema Eye Honors, an awards body created in 2007 by a group of independent filmmakers. No longer the domain of a few cable channels or public television stations, no longer bound by the old cinema verite rules of engagement, non-fiction filmmaking has spent the past decade bursting out of the low-budget indie sidelines into mainstream acceptance, adopting tricks and tropes from fiction and series storytelling as directors capture audience attention from all over the world.

The documentary universe has changed radically over the past dozen years.

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