This morning's Oscar nominations included one made-in-Memphis film. Nominated in the Best Documentary category is Undefeated, the coming-of-age story of the football team at Manassas High School.
The documentary was inspired by a story in The Commercial Appeal about Manassas High School football player O.C. Brown. It premiered in March at SXSW in Austin, Texas and screened in November at the Indie Memphis Film Festival.
Undefeated tracks coaches and players through the 2009-2010 season as it aims to win the first playoff game in the school's 110-year history.
The documentary was made in cooperation with Memphis City Schools and with the assistance of the Memphis and Shelby County Film & Television Commission. The directors, Dan Lindsay and T.J. Martin, and producer Rich Middlemas lived here for nearly a year and shot 500 hours of video. Deputy Film Commissioner Sharon Fox O'Guin worked closely with Middlemas to help make the project happen.
Also nominated this morning in the Best Documentary category were Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky's Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory (about the West Memphis 3 and also screened at Indie Memphis); Hell and Back Again, an embedded journalist's account of a Marine company in Afghanistan; If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front, a look at the radical movement; and Wim Wender's Pina, a 3-D dance performance.
The 84th Academy Awards ceremony will be presented on Sunday, February 26, 2012, at the Kodak Theatre at Hollywood & Highland Center, hosted by Billy Crystal.
Here's the IMDB link for Undefeated.
