Double Oscar Nominee Shane Boris identifies similarities between his two documentaries

Shane Boris has been nominated as producer for not one but two documentaries in the Oscars Best Documentary Feature category.

Boris is nominated as a producer for both National Geographic’s Fire of Love and CNN Films’ Navalny, a sporadic feat in documentary that puts him in the same category as Walt Disney, who was nominated in 1942 for two nonfiction shorts.

“As far as having two [nominations]… gosh, I feel lucky and grateful,” Boris tells Deadline. “More than anything, I feel this gratitude and camaraderie for everyone who made it possible… for everyone else that works in the teams with me.”

“I think the work of a producer is so much about trying to intuit and understand what the director’s vision is and how to make that happen and how to actualize it,” he explains. “And you have this process of sort of selflessness as an actor in that encounter.”

Although the two documentaries Fire of Love and Navalny are entirely different, Boris identifies some similarities.

“I was very conscious of a thematic relationship between them… a shared embodiment of fearlessness in the main protagonists of both films,” he notes. “You have Alexei fearless in the face of authoritarianism and sort of a fight for a better political and social future for his country. And then Katia and Maurice, of course, fearlessness in the face of existential uncertainty and the forces of creation and destruction. And when that exists within a person you can have extraordinary outcomes — the lives that they live rise to a place of inspiration and being deserving and worthy of attention.”