Doc Talk Podcast Sheds Light On Oscar-Shortlisted ‘Come See Me In The Good Light,’ ‘Coexistence, My Ass!’ & ‘We Were The Scenery’

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For documentary filmmakers who made the Oscar shortlists, the brief window to celebrate their achievement has ceded to a fresh round of tension – the agonizing wait to see if they make the final cut of Academy Award nominees.

Nomination voting begins on Monday, and with that date fast approaching we invited filmmakers from three of this year’s shortlisted documentaries to join the latest edition of Deadline’s Doc Talk podcast: Ryan White, director of Come See Me in the Good Light; Amber Fares, director of Coexistence, My Ass!; and Christopher Radcliff, director of the short film We Were the Scenery.

White’s no stranger to Oscar competition, having made numerous Academy Award-contending films in his career including Good Night Oppy, Coded and Ask Dr. Ruth, among others. Come See Me in the Good Light, winner of more than a dozen awards around the world including the Festival Favorite honor at Sundance, tells the love story of poets Andrea Gibson and Megan Falley as they faced Gibson’s terminal cancer diagnosis with courage and surprising humor. White tells us how the project originated with comedian Tig Notaro and how singer-songwriters Sara Bareilles and Brandi Carlile came to collaborate with Gibson on the film’s Oscar-shortlisted original song.

Fares and her protagonist of Coexistence, My Ass! – Israeli comedian Noam Shuster-Eliassi – share how they joined forces for a film that speaks urgently and with unexpected humor to the catastrophic conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Shuster-Eliassi explains how growing up in a “peace oasis” in Israel, where Jews and Palestinians choose to live together in harmony, shaped her view of relations between both communities. She also tells us why “coexistence” as advocated by some well-intentioned supporters of peace has failed to address an “asymmetric” power imbalance on the ground.

We Were the Scenery, too, unfolds with unexpected humor as Radcliff explores the relationship of a Vietnamese couple who fled their homeland as “boat people” after the Vietnam War. Before they reached America, Hoa Thi Che and Hue Nguyen Che initially wound up in a refugee camp in the Philippines in the mid-1970s where, in a strange turn of events, they were thrust into Francis Ford Coppola’s production of the Vietnam War classic Apocalypse Now (famously, Coppola used the Philippines to substitute for the actual setting of his film).

Radcliff tells us why Coppola’s unusual manner of eating a mango remains one of the couple’s most vivid memories of participating in that film. And he talks about why the Ches, to this day, prefer to watch Apocalypse Now on an old VHS tape recorded off local television, complete with ads.

That’s on the new episode of Doc Talk hosted by Oscar winner John Ridley (12 Years a Slave, Shirley), and Matthew Carey, Deadline’s senior documentary editor. The pod is a production of Deadline and Ridley’s Nō Studios.

Listen to the episode above or on major podcast platforms including Spotify, iHeart and Apple.

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