NYT gets its first Oscar; Khabar Lahariya documentary loses out to film on ’69 Harlem festival

In the first such win for the New York Times and its opinion video department Op-Docs, a documentary titled Queen of Basketball – based on the life of women’s basketball pioneer Lusia “Lucy” Harris Stewart – won the 2022 Academy Award in the documentary short subject category. Op-Docs, launched in 2011, has previously been nominated for four other Academy Awards.

Meanwhile, Writing With Fire, a documentary on the rural news network Khabar Lahariya run by Dalit women, lost the best documentary feature award to Summer of Soul – about the legendary 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival which celebrated African-American music and culture and promoted Black pride.

Writing With Fire, a debut documentary by Delhi-based filmmakers Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh, was the first Indian documentary made by an all-India independent production to bag an Oscar nomination in this category. The film had earlier come under criticism from Khabar Lahariya which said it portrayed the newspaper "inaccurately" by insinuating that it only focuses on reporting on issues surrounding "one political party”.

Meanwhile, Queen of Basketball, directed by Ben Proudfoot and executive produced by Shaquille O’Neal and Stephen Curry, is part of the Op-Docs series “Almost Famous,” a collection of short films featuring people who nearly made history, according to the NYT. The Times’s Op-Docs team developed, commissioned and debuted the film. It tells the story of Lusia “Lucy” Harris Stewart, one of women’s basketball’s most accomplished players, who died in January 2022. She was a pioneer in the sport, scoring the first basket in women’s Olympic history and becoming the first and only woman officially drafted by the NBA. And while she was one of the first two women inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame, she has remained largely unknown, even among basketball enthusiasts.