The Quilters (2024)

This short documentary was short listed for the Oscars in 2025, but it did not make the final cut. I love the short list though, because many of the documentaries are as good if not occasionally better (in my opinion) than what makes it to the nomination phase, and this is one such example. It is not because it is about quilting and that I am a quilter--it is about finding purpose in a place where there isn't much of that. The quilters are in prison, many of them for decades, and the quilts they make are for children in foster care--which is a place many of them are familiar with. The fabric is donated, and while they do not focus on this, they seem to be quilted by one long arm quilter--very fascinated about how he chooses designs and watching that process, but that is not included. They have very entry sewing machines and have to design with the fabric they get that is donated. They know very little about each kid they are making a quilt for, and yet they put a lot of thought into what they are going to do, and why. It is well worth watching and even better, think about the threads that it pulls in terms of what it means to all of us as we think about incarceration.

No Other Land (2024)

The documentary that could not get a U.S. distributer (it is a political hot potato) and few interviews (one of the directors is Palestinean) won the Best Documentary at this year's Oscars, as well as at many other award ceremonies. It is directed by the courageous Palestinian-Israeli filmmaking collective of Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor and it is compassionate, thoughtful, and even revolutionary. It is a devastating profile of the community of Masafer Yatta (a group of Palestinian villages in the West Bank constantly on the brink of destruction), the people living in perpetual uncertainty, and the way state violence consumes entire generations. This battle is mostly seen through the young eyes of Basel. A 28-year-old Palestinian activist, filmmaker and journalist, he has spent all of his life living in the shadow of annihilation as the documentary captures how the Israeli military routinely destroys their homes with bulldozers. In every shot where we see these convoys of destruction approaching on the horizon, there is a sense of grim familiarity and impending loss seen in the faces of the people we cut to. It’s a compassionately constructed film — it never looks away from the grimness.

Soundtrack To A Coup D'Etat (2024)

This is a wonderfully innovative documentary that is set on the eve of independence from France for the Congo. There is worry about communism, because the Cold War is still going hot and heavy, but there is also the question of natural resources and who will control them. The later question is an ongoing one, which gives this more relevance than it might otherwise have. The rise and fall of Patrice Lumumba is the backbone of this film. On October 28, 1960, for instance, Louis Armstrong jubilantly arrived in the Congolese capital to perform as part of a U.S. State Department-sponsored tour of Africa. Four months earlier, the Republic of the Congo’s bid for independence had become a living reality. Three months after Armstrong’s performance, with the murder of Lumumba, the dream had already died. It happened that fast. The film uses jazz as the soundtrack for this troubling story, and it is quite effective--Jazz legends: Nina Simone, Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, Abbey Lincoln, Max Roach, and Armstrong--are featured, and improvisational jazz proves to be a perfect foil for the story that unfolds. The take home message, told with 20:20 hindsight, is true independence for former territories turned countries was always going to be a fraught proposition in the face of colonial powers afraid to part from the unchecked wealth they gained through ultra-violent oppression.

Queendom (2024)

THis is a not at all dull documentary about a fascinating subject. Jenna Marvin is a daring 21-year-old queer artist in Russia who takes the moniket "Drag Queen" to a whole new level. Using found objects, layers of makeup and tape, and a jaw-dropping amount of creativity, she manifests otherworldly outfits and strange creatures that seem to have fallen out of a sci-fi TV show and onto the streets of Moscow. The costumes alone are worth watching this movie--I have never seen anything like it, and her impossibly tall and thin physique accentuates a lot of her style. Some of her outfits are fun and fanciful, others are directly political, drawing attention to the causes that matter most to Jenna. Her public drag performances earn the curiosity of the public; others scorn her, and the police are only too happy to keep her away from others. Jenna and her friends sometimes film these harsh encounters to capture the homophobic anger her silent presence in public spaces provokes in strangers. But after attending a protest taped in the colors of the Russian flag, Jenna is expelled from beauty school and returns home to Magadan, where her grandparents live and where she must decide for herself how to survive. A world away from Moscow, Magadan is a desolate place, a former Soviet-era gulag that lived on past that chapter in the country’s history--Jenna's grandparents do not get her either--they encourage her to join the military and head to Ukraine, not realizing she would be killed by her fellow soldiers. Yet Jenna is in danger whether she’s in a major city or a rural town because Russia has penalized its queer citizens, not protected them. Jenna is strikingly bold in her performance and courage, taking her creations to the streets, the faces of the people who might reject her, and this documentary.

The Bibi Files (2024)

This insightful documentary about Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been in power, on and off, for more than 17 years since 1996, is about the corruption charges that he has been facing. The parallels between his situation and the recently reelected American president are both startlingly clear and frightening that about half the population in both countries vote for a leader who is clearly a criminal who has the goal of enriching themselves at the expense of their country. The film consists of leaked interviews by the police with Netanyahu, his wife and his son, as well as the investigators’ interviews with Miriam Adelson and husband, Sheldon, the hotel and casino magnate who died in 2021. These longtime Netanyahu allies here sound, in admittedly brief clips, like they’re trying to distance themselves from Bibi and Sara. The video clips of police interrogations are interspersed with interviews by the filmmakers with journalists, politicians, and a childhood friend of the prime minister. The film makes a strong case that Netanyahu’s legal woes – the politician is charged with fraud, breach of trust and accepting bribes – mean that it’s very much in his interests to prolong Israel’s war on Gaza. Interviewees talk of wholesale quantities of champagne and cigars requested by Netanyahu from associates, with extravagant gifts of jewelry for his wife, Sara. Meanwhile, interrogation footage of her husband – a key component of the film – is eye-opening. He’s described elsewhere as an adept liar and the whole situation is a warning for other democracy’s that have autocratic leaders.

Black Box Diaries (2024)

This documentary, which made the list of nominees for the 2025 Best Feature Length Documentary Oscars, shines an unflattering light on Japan's rape culture. Not that there was any doubt about this, but #MeToo extends beyond the borders of the United States, and this is a story that reveals that to be true. The story begins in 2015, when JPnese journalist Shiori Ito — then a 26-year-old intern at Thomson Reuters — went out for a drink with renowned TV reporter Noriyuki Yamaguchi, only to become intoxicated and taken against her will to his hotel room. Her allegations of ensuing rape are brusquely dismissed by police: Under a century-old Japanese law that has only recently been revised, sexual assault wasn’t necessarily defined by non-consent, especially if the victim’s resistance was not violent. Ito methodically lays out a national culture built to protect men’s honor first in such situations — in particular well-protected men like Yamaguchi, whose friends in high places include Shinzo Abe, then Japan’s Prime Minister (spoiler alert--he does not come off well here either). Discouraged by both the authorities and her family from taking the matter any further — at potential cost to her reputation and career prospects — Ito nonetheless goes public with her accusations in 2017, pursuing legal action against Yamaguchi and finding a publisher for her tell-all book “Black Box,” a volume intended not just to relay her experience but to prompt a reevaluation of Japan’s archaic sexual assault laws. Undeterred when the prosecution review board rules that she has no case, she transfers it to civil court instead, whereupon her fortunes gradually begin to shift, even as she faces hostility from the media and hate mail from the general public. This is a compelling tale--it opens with CCTV footage from the hotel where she was raped showing that we was carried into the hotel and tries to escape several times and then follow with Ito's interview with the driver that night backing up her story that she wanted to leave and her attacker wouldn't let her. We know the ending, and the film unfolds to show just how hard it is to get justice for sexual violence in Japan.

The Remarkable Life of Ibelin (2024)

Here is the thing. This is a movie about a young man who was born with an illness that would inevitably lead to an early death after a long period of decline. So this is a tough story, and it stirkes close to home for me. My youngest son had a brain tumor when he was five years old and had surgery, radiation, and 18 months of chemotherapy, so I know what it is like to fear for your child's life, to mourn the things that they will miss, and to grapple with the reality that death might come too soon for them. Some people might run to the hills rather than watch this, but I lean into it. Ironically, it is my childhood cancer survivor, now an adult himself, who wanted to watch this. Mats Steen was born in 1989, and before he was even a few years old, his parents knew something was wrong with his development. He was diagnosed with a truly cruel disease called Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy, which weakened his physical state with each passing year, leading to his death at the age of 25. The opening half-hour details his existence through interviews with his emotionally vulnerable parents & sister, alongside home videos that make his fading physical condition palpable. After he died, his parents discovered that Mats had spent possibly as much as 20,000 hours in a game called “World of Warcraft,” where he created an avatar named Ibelin. To say he had a rich online life would be an understatement, and it is presented in his own words, through the game, as well as with interviews of players who he had relationships with in the game. It really allows for an understanding of not only why this experience mattered to him, but how much Mats shaped the lives of others through his encounters. He made friends, had his first crush, encouraged growth in others, and found his best self. A lot of modern culture derides screen time as a fruitless pursuit, but this illustrate its potential connective value, how it can bring people together in ways that forever change them, and in that light, is strangely uplifting.

Dahomey (2024)

The movie starts off by contextualizing exactly what the problem being addressed is. “I grew up completely ignorant that my heritage, my culture, my education, my life and soul had been kept overseas for centuries.” The problem is not unique to this culture and these people—invaders and occupiers have routinely taken what they see of value, and for centuries thought little about it and had few regrets. The indigenous people of Bolivia were enslaved by the Spanish and mined enough silver to build a bridge made of it from South America back to Spain in the early days of sea travel, and that continued for much of the next 400 years. This film depicts the return of 26 royal treasures from the Kingdom of Dahomey, which was established in the 17th century. In late 2021, the artifacts were transported from museums in Paris back to their place of origin, The Republic of Benin. This is about reckoning with history that has been forever altered by colonialism. French troops originally seized the artifacts after war broke out between them and the Kingdom of Dahomey, in 1892. Like most colonial occupiers, France inflicted both physical and cultural violence against the people of Dahomey, robbing them of their history as well—they were especially deprived because of their historical skills as metal workers. They made things that had both artistic as well as cultural value. The current state of Africa has been largely shaped by European interference, from language and education to the state of their cultural institutions.

Sugarcane (2024)

This is what generational trauma looks like. This impactful, multistranded documentary weaves together a dogged investigation into the horrific crimes perpetrated against generations of Indigenous children at a residential school run by the Catholic church in Canada, with accounts of the trickle-down of damage, from grandparents to parents to children. Specifically, children were raped, beatened and killed. The rapes produced babies, who were mostly incinerated. In the midst of uncovering what happened, which involved a detailed record review, ground penetrating radar to find unmarked graves, and in one case, DNA testing that revealed the father of one native elder to be a specific priest. The pervasive feeling of shame and being inferior, being unworthy of love are the legacy of the survivors of the residential schools throughout the Americas. It’s a remarkably courageous and exposed work, particularly for co-director Julian Brave NoiseCat and his father, Ed Archie NoiseCat, whose painful journey together in search of healing is the film’s spine. The sickening facts of the case are presented with a respectful restraint but it’s impossible to watch this and not feel a cold, hard rage on behalf of the victims. The Catholic church does not come off well, either in the past, or currently--they do nothing to atone for their sins, including not confessing them. This is streaming on Disney and is well done and well told.

Frida (2024)

This documentary of the artist Frida Kahlo is one that you will love or hate, and it might depend on how you feel about the subject herself. Creative, colourful, and predominantly told through the words of its subject as recorded in her illustrated diaries, this engaging documentary about the Mexican artist is a beguiling and rather beautiful tribute to her spirit and originality. Its deft blend of archive footage and what I found to be lovely, organic animation of her works of art marks the directorial debut of Carla Gutiérrez, who served as the editor on several documentaries about groundbreaking women including RBG, about Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Julia, which looked at the legacy of television chef Julia Child. Kahlo’s life was full and eventful, but while the film doesn’t attempt to explore every aspect and every romantic connection, it does delve satisfyingly deeply into her interior life, explored through her artistic output. There is something wildly appealing about how Kahlo approaches art that has endured robustly, more so than her fragile body endured, and for me, it is captured in this imaginative telling of her life and her creative process. I saw an exhibit of her early work, some dating back to her childhood, and the consistency with which she applied magical realism to her art is breathtaking, and reflected throughout this documentary, which is short listed for the 2025 Feature Length Documentary Academy Award.

Daughters (2024)

I wondered where the idea for this documentary came from, and I read that review that explained it. In 2013, Angela Patton gave a TED Talk that got lot of mileage. She spoke about a program she created in Richmond, Virginia, to bring girls and their incarcerated fathers together in an environment that would make the fathers and daughters feel cherished and connected. These “Daddy Daughter Dances” have been so impactful the program has expanded to other prisons. This movie is co-directed by her and is a documentary about the first of these dances in a Washington D.C. prison. To qualify for the program, the fathers have to complete a 10-week program to strengthen their fathering skills, which means sharing some painful experiences, regrets, and fears. One man says it is the first time he has ever been in an environment where men talk about feelings. As the title indicates, Patton and co-director Natalie Rae make the girls the center of the story, with four as the focus. They all miss their fathers to varying degrees, and while the reasons they are in prison are never discussed, but the daughters are aware of the time they have left and the things that they are missing because of it. There are dozens of carefully observed and touching moments in “Daughters,” which won both the Documentary Audience Award and the Festival Favorite Award at Sundance. Watching the fathers change out of their orange prison uniforms into jackets and ties is extremely powerful. And then it becomes even more meaningful as we see some of the fathers teaching others how to tie a tie, a skill we associate with tended bonding moments between father and son, then with occasions like graduation, dates, and interviews for office jobs that these men never had. It is a movie well worth watching.

Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story

I watched this en route to a memorable vacation in Southern India, having read favorable reviews of it prior to my departure and with the knowledge that the 2025 Oscar shortlist for Documentary Feature Films would be announced while I was gone. It did not make the shortlist (which came as a bit of a surprise to those who know more than I do), but it is a suitably a comprehensive, if overly celebratory, tribute in this traditional talking-heads-style documentary. Christopher Reeve is best known for playing Superman in the iconic 1978 movie of the same name. but in truth most of what I knew about him occurred after his life changing equestrian accident that left him a quardiplegic. This is not a before-and-after story. Instead, it considers the breadth of Reeve’s career and personal life — his beginnings in the theater, his feelings about playing Superman, his efforts to break the mold, and his two most important romantic relationships — with his injury looming over his successes like Kryptonite. Reeve’s bond with his fellow actor Robin Williams was completely unknown to me, and it also makes up one of the documentary’s meatiest threads, adding depth to the character study. In many ways, Reeve actually was a gentle all-American type, but footage of his friendship with Williams brings out his funny, artistic — and to some extent dark — side. There is a lot of dark here, and a healthy helping of sadness when both he and his wife die young, but it is well worth watching as bio-documentaries go.

The Donut King (2024)

This is a documentary about the story of donuts in California, where it turns out that a large portion of those doughnuts are made by Cambodian refugees and their families. And that’s because of one man: Ben Tek “Ted” Ngoy, a Cambodian refugee who made millions through his doughnut shops, helped hundreds of Cambodian families fleeing Pol Pot’s murderous regime. It took six months between Ngoy landing in a US refugee camp in 1975 to him being handed the keys to his first doughnut store. He worked almost 24 hours a day to achieve it, juggling three jobs and a young family, but focused on the idea of being somebody. As he says, “When you’re poor, you’ll do anything.” By 1979 he would own 25 doughnut shops and go on to sponsor more than 100 more Cambodian families fleeing the war. It wasn’t just pure selflessness, of course, he saw these families as providing even more business opportunities and money. It is a rags to riches story, withe the inevitable fall from grace that so often happens, and where Cambodian families start to be able to own their own shops as a result. I would say that the story could have been told more succinctly, with fewer donuts in the mix, but somehow, this sat just about right with me, and if I hadn't been on a plane when I saw it I might have gone out to get a donut myself.

David Holmes: The Boy Who Lived (2024)

This is an emotional documentary about David Holmes, now 40, was Daniel Radcliffe’s stunt double on the Harry Potter movies until he broke his neck during the filming of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1. The two were children when the filming began and as the filming of the books was more or less continually over a decade, the cast and crew knew each well, and some formed friendships. This is a look back over how that happened and then a sobering look at what the present holds. First, there are the extraordinary good times, when a short kid from Essex found his way, via youth gymnastics, to movie stunt work. Holmes was a few years older than Radcliffe when they began work on the Potter franchise, so he became a cross between an elder brother and a personal trainer, schooling Radcliffe on how to make his physical work more convincing, while also teaching him and everyone in earshot how to enjoy life to the maximum by hurling yourself at it at full speed. The side-by-side footage of Holmes performing a stunt, then Radcliffe doing a safer version of it, is a fascinating insight into how action sequences come together. Then disaster strikes and Holmes has a severe accident on set and is left paralyzed. The film then shifts to the relationships that Holmes’s has maintained since then. Radcliffe is open and articulate on the challenges of rebuilding a relationship when the shared experience it has been built on has not just been brought to an abrupt end, but has been tainted too. The film is neatly wrapped up, but it also doesn’t shy away from the reality of what happened, and what the aftermath brought. Well done.

American Symphony (2023)

I am sorry that this movie did not make the cut from the short list of Best Documentary to the nominated list this past year, but it is a very good documentary. It follows Jon Batiste, Stephen Colbert’s band leader and the Oscar winner for the movie "soul", for a year. I think to start it was to see the creative process unfold, which does happen, but what also happens is that the musician's long time partner, Suleika Jaouad, author of Between Two Kingdoms about her diagnosis and recovery from leukemia, marries him and then her cancer relapses. So there is the creation and the pain, the growth and the contraction of their lives. Batiste comes across as both visionary and very human. I read a review that knocked this as not going deeply enough into either the creative process that went into Batiste's American Symphony nor into the fear and grief that cancer begets, but having walked on the path of the later, both personally and with a loved one, this is pretty evocative of that process, and how to do it authentically but also to survive it. I really enjoyed this.

Going To Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project (2023)

I had never heard of Nikki Giovanni but this documentary, which has great footage of her back in the 1960's as an early 20's as she is being interviewed by James Balwin, entirely confident and contained within herself, and he clearly enjoys the interchange. The filmmakers carefully synthesize a combination of new and archival footage of Giovanni, discussing and sometimes embodying her work in her typically direct, unsentimental, and deeply moving style. The end result, for me, was to fall in love with someone who was previously unknown to me. She was one of the luminaries of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s into the 1970s, and she is now a 79-year-old who continues to address the pain and joys, the anger and resilience of the descendants of the Middle Passage, who know much about uncertain and dangerous journeys. The title of the documentary comes from something she saud, that if they want to populate outer space they need to send black women, because they have been getting it done for centuries. It’s genuinely refreshing to see Giovanni celebrated for having a personality that extends beyond her youth into her elder years. Yes, she’s rightfully shown speaking to and lighting up auditoriums full of fans, many of whom are Black women, but not just because they presumably share similar experiences or skin color. Rather,the filmmakers show and contextualize scenes of Giovanni’s public appearances, some televised and others filmed at recent speaking engagements, as proof of her animating presence. It’s one thing to hail Giovanni as an iconic presence and another to show her talk about and exemplify the qualities that have made her and her work so indispensable. The scenes where she reads her poetry are particularly good, and this is well worth watching.

Apolonia, Apolonia (2023)

This documentary is both quirky and strangely thorough. It was short listed for Best Documentary, but did not make the final list of nominees—I try to watch quite a few of these because for the three to four months between the ten categories that produce a short list are announced and when the Oscars occur is the only time that I actively and intentionally watch, talk, and think about documentaries. This is an intricate portrait of Apolonia Sokol, the on-the-rise French figurative painter whom Danish documentary filmmaker Lea Glob met in 2009 and filmed for 13 years, is full of such details. Sokol’s story of trying to find her artistic groove is a captivating one, but it is Glob’s own presence in the film that makes an equally memorable point about womanhood and artistry, and helps to double down on the film’s multifaceted thesis. The result is something deeply reflective about femininity, culture, commerce, friendship, sexuality and the various souls who dwell in the impossible intersection of it all. I know nothing about the nuts and bolts of being and becoming an artist. This walks the viewer through some pretty gritty realities of that world, all the while being true to it’s subject. Very well done.

To Kill A Tiger (2023)

In 2017 a 13 year old girl is at her cousin's wedding and she is kidnapped, gang raped, and beaten--then told that she will be killed if she reveals what happened and who did it. She ignores that, tells her family, and while they go to the police and report the crime, there is intense pressure from the village to renege on the complaint, the crime is minimized, despite the physical violence that was evident on examination, and widespread in the vollage among men and women alike that she should marry one of her rapists, that it was the only way out. When she refused they were angry, not just that it brought undue scrutiny on the village, but that she needed to marry and this was the only way, she would never find someone to marry her otherwise. Not one person is angry with the boys who attacked her, no one is alarmed that boys who want to marry a girl who does not want them can just rape her and get her that way. No escape. The family wants to support their daughter, who is very damaged by this attack, and yet the odds are so stacked against them. Without the support of outside agencies, men and women who are trying to stop rape in a country where a woman is raped every 20 minutes and fears little in the way of consequences, and the documentary filming there is no doubt that they family would have caved to this intense village pressure--there are times when her father does not show up for court appearances and the family is threatened with violence, harm to property, and death by the families of the accused rapists. It is very hard to bear witness to scenes so devastating and anger-inducing that even viewers fully aware of what they are getting into may be taken aback. This is, I recognize, not exactly the kind of thing that one normally says about a film they are trying to encourage people to seek. But in this case, it seems both accurate and appropriate. "To Kill a Tiger" tells an important story in a compelling manner that makes it worth watching, but its journey is so intense at times it might prove to be too much for some. Living in a country where women are now legally not treated equally to men, this is very very chilling.

Bobi WIne: The People's President (2023)

This gripping documentary charts the inspiring activism of Bobi Wine, the pop star-turned-politician seeking to end Uganda's brutal dictatorship. Rising from the ghetto slums of Kampala to be one of the country's most beloved superstars, Bobi begins to use his music to call out corruption, then becomes an Independent Member of Parliament to defend the rights of his people. The country's institutions are controlled by President Museveni, an autocratic tyrant who has held power since 1986. Bobi and his wife Barbie choose to risk their careers, their family, and their lives to challenge him and bring democracy to their country. But the state, and the effective dictator, are determined to silence not only them, but anyone who supports their cause by using military and police force. The parallels between Putin and the death plan he had to stop the very charismatic Navalny (the documentary that won the Oscar last year) is chilling.

The Eternal Memory (2023)

The two central characters portrayed are prominent people in their home country. Augusto Góngora was a television newscaster and interviewer from the early 1970s onward; he also produced films and books and acted in a miniseries for the great Raul Ruiz. He was on the front lines at a turbulent time in Chile's past and revealing what was happening carried a certain amount of risk. He was charismatic. smart and handsome. His wife Paulina Urrutia is 17 years his junior, which is important because she has got the youth and energy to manage. She is an actress with a solid filmography, not much of which has traveled to the United States. Alberdi’s movie chronicles their life together as they cope with Góngora’s condition, early onset Alzheimer’s disease. It is a horrible disease, which gradually robs you of yourself, and that is gently and persistently pointed out in this Oscar nominated documentary.