Three New Categories for 2021 British Documentary Awards

The 2021 Grierson Awards, in association with All3Media and digital broadcast partner Little Dot Studios, has three new categories for this year’s edition and is now open for entries.

The new categories for the British documentary awards include Best Music Documentary, Best Sports Documentary and Grierson Hero of the Year. Further, the Best Cinema Documentary category is suspended for 2021, while the Natural History category definition has been expanded to include documentaries on the environment.

Entries are now open for the 2021 Grierson Awards through May 28. Entrants will be asked to identify steps that were taken to ensure diversity and inclusion in the making of their film or series. Juries will take into consideration the efforts that have been made to include under-represented groups both on- and off-screen, as well as any themes and narratives that address diversity and inclusion.

For the 2021 awards, all entries must have had their first U.K. screening between June 1, 2020, and May 31, 2021. This includes scheduled screenings within recognized film, television and documentary festivals. Entries are accepted for both analog and digital platforms such as Netflix, iPlayer and Amazon as long as the screening was accessible by a U.K.-based audience.

The awards event will take place in November.

Lorraine Heggessey, chair of The Grierson Trust, said: “We are always keen to reflect the breadth of the documentary genre so we have made a number of changes to the awards for 2021 including the introduction of three new categories. There has been an increasing number of outstanding sport-related documentaries on our screens recently, so we have brought in a Sport category for the first time. We also felt that Music deserved a category of its own, so we have separated it from Arts. Natural History has been expanded to specifically recognize the increasing number of documentaries that focus on environmental issues.

“The challenges of the past year have highlighted the invaluable role played by many people behind the scenes who often don’t get the recognition they deserve. We hope to address this through our new special award, the Grierson Hero of the Year. This will be presented to an individual judged by our Trustees to have made a positive impact within the industry during the previous 12 months. This person may be working in any area and be at any level of their career. The award will be given to someone who has gone the extra mile and made an outstanding difference.”