Cinema Eye Honors 2025 Noms: ‘Sugarcane’ Leads All Docs With Six Nominations

Mubi's 'Dahomey' and the U.S.-distributor-less 'No Other Land' both garnered five noms.

Sugarcane, the Nat Geo documentary feature about abuse and forced separations in a Canadian Indigenous community, landed a field-leading six nominations for the Cinema Eye Honors, the organization, which celebrates nonfiction work made for big and small screens, announced on Thursday.

Among the noms for Sugarcane is one for best nonfiction feature, a category in which it will compete alongside Mubi’s Dahomey and the U.S.-distributor-less No Other Land, which both garnered five noms, and MTV Docs’ Black Box Diaries, Netflix’s Daughters, A24’s Look Into My Eyes and Kino Lorber’s Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat.

This is the first year in which the nominees for best nonfiction feature will include the entire creative team behind each doc — the directors, producers, editors, cinematographers, composers, sound designers, visual designers and significant on-screen participants.

The audience choice award, nominees for which were determined by more than 30,000 votes from nonfiction lovers around the world, will go to the aforementioned Daughters or Sugarcane or Greenwich’s Copa 71, Amazon/MGM’s Frida, Netflix’s Mountain Queen, Picturehouse’s Porcelain War, Netflix’s The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, Netflix’s Skywalkers: A Love Story, Warners’ Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story or Netflix’s Will & Harper. The last six films that won the best documentary feature Oscar were all first nominated for the audience award.

Steve James reclaimed the record for most Cinema Eye noms for an individual, landing his 14th, in the category of best nonfiction series for ESPN’s The Luckiest Guy in the World.

The 18th annual Cinema Eye Honors awards ceremony will take place at the New York Academy of Medicine in East Harlem on Thursday, Jan. 9, 2025.

A full list of this year’s nominees follows.

Nonfiction Feature

Black Box Diaries Shiori Ito, Eric Nyari, Hanna Aqvilin, Ema Ryan Yamazaki, Yuta Okamura, Yuichiro Otsuka, Mark Degli Antoni and Andrew Tracy

Dahomey Mati Diop, Eve Robin, Judith Lou Levy, Gabriel Gonzalez, Joséphine Drouin Viallard and Nicholas Becker

Daughters Natalie Rae, Angela Patton, Lisa Mazzotta, Justin Benoliel, James Cunningham, Mindy Goldberg, Sam Bisbee, Kathryn Everett, Laura Choi Raycroft, Adrian Aurelius, Philip Nicolai Flindt, Michael Cambio Fernandez and Kelsey Lu