EXCLUSIVE: National Geographic Documentary Films has signed a first-look production deal with director Sara Dosa and producer Shane Boris, the team behind NatGeo’s Oscar-nominated hit Fire of Love.
The deal, with Dosa and Boris’s newly formed shingle Signpost Pictures, covers documentary features. “As part of the first look,” National Geographic said in a release, “Dosa, Boris and their producing partner at Signpost Pictures, Elijah Stevens, are developing two new films that highlight unexpected character stories of humans making meaning out of awe-inducing natural forces.”
The projects are:
- On Time and Water (working title) “is based on a book of the same name, which topped the bestseller list in Iceland and has been translated into more than 30 languages, being described by The Economist as ‘a haunting meditation on climate change,’” NatGeo said. “It focuses on Árni and Hulda, who fell in love mapping and filming Iceland’s glaciers, amassing the beginning of what would become a majestic and tender multigenerational archive. But 50 years later, as Árni’s memory recedes, so too does Iceland’s ice. Árni and Hulda’s grandson – celebrated writer Andri Snaer Magnason – reckons with the loss of his elders and the ice. Through prodigious archiving of his own, new myth-making, he raises a new generation with the question: What is Iceland without ice?”
- Signpost’s Untitled Mexican Earthquake Project, “explores how earthquakes open up fissures not just into the earth but also portals into geologic time. Through the lived experiences of those marked by Mexico City’s cyclical Sept. 19 earthquakes (in 1985, 2017 and again in 2022), this poetic time-travel film pulls into focus the myriad ways the past can haunt the present, exploring the layers of geological, social and political history unearthed by ‘natural’ disasters.”
Fire of Love, the story of scientists Katia and Maurice Krafft – a French couple devoted to each other and to the study of volcanoes — earned dozens of awards, including the Peabody, and the DGA’s Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Documentary for Dosa. Boris earned two Oscar nominations this past year – for producing Fire of Love and Navalny, winning the Academy Award for the latter film.
Carolyn Berstein, EVP of documentary films for National Geographic, said in a statement, “We are so pleased to continue our creative collaboration with these preternaturally talented filmmakers on the heels of our partnership on the enchanting and critically acclaimed Fire of Love. Their new projects in development also explore the wonder and mysteries of the natural world while diving deeply into character. We can’t wait to bring the next iterations of their unique and poetic vision to the world.”
“National Geographic Documentary Films has been an incredible partner for us as we launched Fire of Love into the world last year, introducing audiences worldwide to a story of love, wonderment and our planet’s most awesome forces. We’re absolutely thrilled to be working with them again on our new projects,” Dosa and Boris said in a statement. “We really look forward to building on that relationship as we continue to tell stories that have meaning to us personally and offer new perspectives on human relationships with non-human nature.”
The deal, which entails “identifying, developing and producing new feature documentaries for theatrical, linear and streaming,” was negotiated by Nick Shumaker and Nicole Romano from Anonymous Content, as well as Andre Des Rochers and Meghan Reilly on behalf of the filmmakers.
Dosa made her feature directorial debut with 2014’s The Last Season, winner of a Golden Gate Award at the San Francisco International Film Festival and a nomination for the Indie Spirit Truer Than Fiction Award. Her feature documentary The Seer & The Unseen premiered in 2019, winning awards at several festivals. Dosa produced the Peabody-winning Audrie & Daisy and the Peabody- and Emmy-nominated Survivors and co-produced the Academy Award-nominated The Edge of Democracy, as well as An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power. Dosa graduated from Wesleyan University and holds a master’s in anthropology and international development economics from the London School of Economics.
Boris equaled an achievement of Walt Disney by claiming two nominations in the nonfiction categories in the same year (Disney’s double occurred in 1942 when he was nominated for two doc shorts). He previously earned an Oscar nomination for 2019’s The Edge of Democracy. His latest films — King Coal and Hollywoodgate — premiered, respectively, at Sundance 2023 and Venice/Telluride 2023. “Boris is also the co-founder of Joon, a multidisciplinary incubator, and has worked as a strategist for businesses and NGOs, a writing consultant for authors, and a song lyricist for musicians,” his bio notes. He received his Bachelor of Arts from Oberlin College and his Master of Arts from Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. He is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the recipient of the Vanguard and Impact Producing Awards.