Doc Corner: Surprise Nominee, 'A House Made of Splinters'
Friday, January 27, 2023 at 9:00PM By Glenn Dunks
I wasn’t expecting to have to review this movie so early. Until little more than a week before the 85th Academy Awards, Simon Lereng Wilmont’s film about Ukrainian children didn’t even have an American distribution deal. PBS and POV swooped in just in time, acquiring the rights to a film that nobody had on their predictions and yet ultimately landed a surprise nomination for Best Documentary Feature alongside more recognised titles All That Breathes, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, Fire of Love and Navalny (all titles we have looked at over the last year).
The movie had of course been on my radar for a while. Wilmont’s previous film, The Distant Barking of Dogs, was one of the great documentaries of the 2010s. A House Made of Splinters doesn’t quite reach the five-star heights of that one, because it has less of a laser focus. But it’s a beautiful, aching story and it is definitely not just making up the numbers on the Academy’s five.