A short film released by The New Yorker and ProPublica won three prizes this week, at the 2024 News and Documentary Emmy Awards. “The Night Doctrine,” a sixteen-minute animated work directed by Mauricio Rodríguez Pons and Almudena Toral, received honors for Outstanding Graphic Design and Music Composition in the News category, and shared the Emmy for Outstanding News Discussion and Analysis in the Editorial and Opinion category. Two additional New Yorker films, “Deciding Vote” and “Swift Justice,” earned nominations.
“The Night Doctrine,” narrated by the journalist Lynzy Billing, chronicles her efforts to learn about the killings of her mother and sister, who died in the course of a nighttime raid in eastern Afghanistan during the country’s long civil war. As Billing investigates their fate, she meets a widow named Mahzala whose two sons were killed, much more recently, in a different nighttime raid. Mahzala doesn’t know who killed her sons, or why, and the encounter inspires Billing to look deeper into the Zero units, élite squads of U.S.-backed Afghan Special Forces, which carried out lethal raids that were often based on inaccurate information. In the course of almost four years of reporting, Billing confirmed and investigated the deaths of more than four hundred and fifty civilians in such attacks. “The Night Doctrine” considers those casualties amid the twenty-year U.S. occupation of Afghanistan, after 9/11, and their impact in the years since America’s hasty withdrawal.
“ ‘The Night Doctrine’ was a Herculean effort by a small and committed team spread across the world,” Pons and Toral said. “We want to dedicate the awards to all of the Afghan victims and survivors who still to this day don’t have closure after these U.S.-sponsored night-raid operations.”
Two other New Yorker films nominated for Emmys this year, “Deciding Vote” and “Swift Justice,” competed, respectively, in the Outstanding Short Documentary and Outstanding Cinematography in Documentary categories. “Deciding Vote,” directed by Rob Lyons and Jeremy Workman, revisits the passage of a New York State abortion-rights law—three years before Roe v. Wade—that became one of the most expansive in the nation, and the fateful choice of a lawmaker who faced the end of his political career if he defied his constituents by supporting it.
“Swift Justice,” directed by Victor Blue and Ross McDonnell, records the proceedings inside a Sharia courtroom in Afghanistan, exploring tensions between Islamic religious law and local tribal customs, and how those conflicts are resolved.
With its three awards on Wednesday, “The Night Doctrine” became the second New Yorker film to win an Emmy. “Reeducated,” a virtual-reality documentary, won an Emmy, in 2022, in the Outstanding Interactive Media category. The film takes viewers inside a detention center in Xinjiang, China, the western province where the government has carried out what is likely the largest internment of ethnic and religious minorities since the Second World War.
Each month, The New Yorker releases a variety of new short narrative and documentary films. The magazine’s full slate of films can be viewed in its video library, and on its YouTube channel. To receive future New Yorker films in your in-box, along with movie reviews, profiles of actors and directors, and more, sign up for our daily newsletter. ♦
