Last Days On Lake Trinity (2025)

This short documentary was shortlisted in that category for this for the 2026 Academy Awards. South Florida is facing a housing crisis, and that is one focus that this documentary brings to light. In March of 2022, Trinity Broadcasting Network, who owned the land, informed residents of Lakeside Park Estates that they had until December 31, 2022 to move out. Cooley centers on three women–Nancy Sanderson, Laurie Laney, and Nancy Fleishman–as they begin their hunt for another place to live after, it appears, that the county cannot combat TBN’s order. There are three things that I noticed watching rather than listening to this story. The 1st is that the place that they have which is waterfront is very beautiful and would be very hard to replicate. The second is that the mobile homes that these women live in are well beyond their sell by date. They are living in conditions that would be condemned I believe and then the third is that they have very few financial options and so this is a story of David and Goliath where the corporation holds all the cards. At the beginning of the film, Laney tells us that her first big purchase was her mobile home, but the real sense of belonging came within the community of Lakeside. Community and the collective experience is at the heart of Trinity. Fleishman worked off and on for TBN for years, and the silence from the company is troubling, especially when she calls to speak to someone about following up on the help they allegedly said they would provide.

Viva Verdi! (2024)

This documentary has a song that was nominated for Best Song in the 2026 Academy Awards--which it did not win, but I liked the song far more than the winner. This is a documentary which follows the lives of artists after their careers end but not before their lives end. Situated in Milan, the cradle of art, retired opera singers and musicians live together in harmony at Casa Verdi, a neo-Gothic sanctuary commissioned by Giuseppe Verdi in 1898 to honor artists who devoted their lives to music and the arts. The documentary opens to the soaring strains of La Traviata, the curtains opening to a quotation that captures the spirit of a compassionate humanist devoted music lover: “Among my works, the one I like best is the Home that I’ve built in Milan for accommodating old singers not favored by fortune.” The premise of his deed was simple: during Verdi’s time, there were no pensions for artists; they were sadly left to their own devices. Devoting one’s life to art was therefore a courageous choice, reliant on hard work and luck, and Verdi sought to host all of those who had dared to follow their artistic passions. The cinematography in Viva Verdi! is both intimate and evocative, capturing the soul of Casa Verdi and its residents with a painterly touch. This visual approach creates a warm and immersive atmosphere that reflects the enduring and unifying brilliance of music, shared across generations. Through their personal stories, we traverse time, theaters, countries, and librettos. A wide range of nationalities mingle in Casa Verdi, telling intimate chronicles marked by success and ovations, disappointments, loss, and discrimination. Most of all, the film shows how a love for music and performing does not end when the paychecks cease. Even though most of the performers in the film have died by the time it came out, you can see that they were engaged in activies they loved to the end.

Chasing Time (2025)

This short documentary was short listed for an Academy award in 2026, and while it did not make the final list, it is an excellent documentary all the same. Back in 2012, Jeff Orlowski documented famed photographer James Balog as he setup his Extreme Ice Survey, a series of remote cameras set to record the immediate effect of climate change on the world’s glaciers. With stunning visuals and pioneering use of time-elapsed photography, Chasing Ice served as direct evidence of the warming of the planet. Images showed millennia-old ice sheets radically transforming over just a few years, contributing to the rise of sea levels, and making manifest the way the world is undergoing fundamental transformation due to environmental changes. This film is slightly more philosophical and ruminative. Directed in collaboration with Sarah Keo, the film sees Jeff and James return to Jakobshavn Glacier to remove the camera and close a chapter in both their work and their relationship. It’s a touching film about mentor and mentee, and manages in its compact running time to provide a rich portrait of their collaboration, additional stunning views of their otherworldly locations, and an even more open-eyed look at the catastrophic changes that have occurred over the last decades in this majestic environ. It is all set in motion by James’ cancer diagnosis, which makes him aware of his own limited time frame. The story and the photography are both beautiful.

Classroom 4 (2025)

This short documentary was short listed in that category for the 2026 Academy awards--it did not make the final cut, but it is open source and available to for viewing by all. The documentary takes place inside the Columbia River Correctional Institution (CRCI) in Portland, where incarcerated students and Lewis & Clark undergraduates meet weekly over the course of a semester to study the history of crime and punishment in the United States. The Inside-Out course—which is part of the nationwide Inside-Out Prison Exchange program—meets in Classroom 4 at the facility. There, students explore ideas of justice, mercy, and the evolution of the carceral state. What emerges is not only a study of history but a shared experience of humanity. The course is taught by Reiko Hillyer, professor of history and department chair. Hillyer began teaching Inside-Out courses in 2012, a year after completing training through the Philadelphia-based program. Since then, she has taught the CRCI class every other year, guiding mixed cohorts of “inside” (incarcerated) and “outside” (college) students through lively weekly discussions and shared assignments. Each class usually includes 30 students—15 from CRCI and 15 from the college—who meet behind prison walls to learn, debate, and reflect as equals. It is a very good watch.

All The Empty Rooms (2025)

This short documentary was seven years in the making. Media correspondent Steve Hartman used to work on finding something positive to report after mass school shootings, basically the silver lining after children have been killed in their classrooms. You could see how that would wear on you over time. Much like all the “thoughts and prayers” rather than real outrage and an effort to make change. So along with long-time friend and photographer Lou Bopp they visit families across the US who have been affected by school shootings and document all of their ‘empty rooms.’ We’re so used to seeing the media side of stories that this is where it gets very real in a way that puts us into the long term effects of the loss, the hole that dead children leave behind. Directed by Joshua Seftel and distributed by Netflix, the emotionally poignant untold stories have been nominated for ‘Best Documentary Short’ at this year’s Academy Awards. We step into the families lives. From keeping the lights on to hearing their voice recordings through teddies and keeping their rooms exactly how they left them. Alongside this we see Lou talking through the process of photographing his daughter every day to see her progression. This freedom of growing up serves as a reminder for the importance of life.

Armed Only With A Camera (2025)

There is so much to care about in this documentary and so much tragedy to go along with it. Brent Renaud is a photo journalist who was purposely targeted and killed by the Russians in Ukraine. There is so much to dislike about Putin, Russia, and the soldiers fighting for things that do not belong to them, but that is not what this is about. This short documentary, which is nominated in that category for the 2026 Academy Awards, is more of a celebration of a photo journalist's life. The span of where he went, what he filmed, and how important the brave work that he accomplished in his too short life is what the film is about.We meet Brent Renaud as he trudges through a shallow, fast-moving river on the border of Guatemala and Mexico. He films a 16-year-old boy as he makes the arduous trek from his former home of Honduras to what he hopes is his future home, the United States. The boy says he has no parents and no future in Honduras, but believes the U.S. will be a place where he can build a new family and find some hope. That is another tragedy best left untalked about right now but the camera and the man behind it are so sympathetic to the underdog you can feel him routing for the boy when he has to part ways with him, and it is more than what he says. He survived many scary situations before he met his death, and I was left bereft when he was shot down. Much like Tim Featherington, who's full length documentary Restrepo, filmed when he was embedded with a U.S. platoon in Afghanistan, took us into one war before another war left him dead, it seems that the very best of them are heroes who show us what we are missing about the world and violence, but they too are so slow to it that more than a few of them get burned. This is worth every minute of time watching it.

Perfectly A Strangeness (2024)

This quiet and strangely beautiful short documentary is nominated for a 2026 Academy Award. The film maker has done this before, or something like it. In her 2017 feature length documentary Cielo, which was also shot in Chile’s Atacama Desert, her cameras follow the simple, sauntering gait of the donkeys to allow audiences to take in vast mountainous terrains by day and by night the marvels of the Milky Way filling the Atacama Desert sky. She is aware that light pollution that keeps most people from seeing starlit galaxies at night, recalled the first time she saw the cosmic movements in the Atacama Desert nighttime sky. This time around we follow the donkey trio, where they come upon a building--no people, no vehicles, just the building. Her cameras did interior shots at the Paranal Observatory run by a consortium of European astronomers at around 2,635 meters above sea level. The whole experience of watching these eerily calm animals saunter in and around the observatory, never seeing anything--no food, no water, where do they get sustenance? It left me with more questions than answers, but also at peace.

The Devil Is Busy (2025)

Here we are on the front lines of the war on women. While the sex trafficking of underage women by powerful men is minimized by the current administration--we can all guess why that might be--they are waging an equally destructive war on reproductive health care for women of child bearing age. This is a front row seat into what that health care looks like in the post-Roe era. This is nominated for an Academy Award in the Short Documentary category. The film focuse on Tracii, a staff member at Atlanta’s Feminist Women’s Health Center—now renamed the Feminist Center for Reproductive Liberation—whose workday begins long before sunrise. Her mornings are marked by both practical vigilance—ensuring the safety of the clinic and its patients—and private prayer that sustains her through a job fraught with protest, legal restriction, high stress, and real danger. The film captures the tense choreography of daily life at the clinic: security guards patrol parking lots, staff screen patients to comply with increasingly complex laws, and protesters wield megaphones and scripture as tools of intimidation. Most telling is a man who literally murdered someone himself who spends his days telling women that god will not forgive them while he believes himself forgiven. The audacity and conceit of men is on full view here, once again giving Christianity a bad look, having fully strayed from the teachings of Christ. Yet amid this hostility, the documentary emphasizes compassion—the small gestures of reassurance that Tracii and her colleagues offer women at their most vulnerable moments.

Come See Me In The Good Light (2025)

This is wonderful. Yes, it is about recurrent cancer. Yes, someone dies. Add to all this, as if it is not enough, that it is ovarian cancer, which is notoriously deadly and something that I have had. I am wholeheartedly recommending this, because it is deep and thoughtful, it depicts a head on approach to what is happening and there is still joy and love and a lust for life. Andrea Gibson is a spoken word poet and their wife is fellow poet Megan Falley. In 1921 they are diagnosed with ovarian cancer, which has inevitably spread. That is often, if not almost always true by the time one has symptoms. Then she has the terrible misfortune of having a platinum resistant tumor and she recurs within 6 months. This is the point at which there really is very little hope, but she wants to live. She wants to try everything, and she does. The film is as intimate as it gets, following Gibson into doctor’s appointments, curling up with them and Falley in bed, and eating meals soundtracked by the laughter of close friends. This is not fly-on-the-wall observant, but rather seat-at-the-table active. Structured also through Gibson’s reading of their poems, spliced in when narratively relevant, we come to see just how much they are synonymous with their work. There is no separation of the art and artist, as Gibson’s life is unabashedly unfiltered in their prose. So yes, it does not end well, but it is a beautiful tale well told, and as they say themself, we all face this, it is only a matter of when, not if.

The Alabama Solution (2025)

This documentary is nominated for an Oscar, and is a revelatory new documentary about the long-simmering humanitarian crisis in Alabama’s state prisons. About 15 minutes into the movie that they were filming, they got a tip about an incarcerated man who had been beaten so badly he was taken to the ICU at an outside hospital.By the time the film makers arrive, Steven Davis was dead. Uncovering that Davis had been killed by a guard is only part of the focus of the documentary, which is now streaming on HBO Max. Death is increasingly common in Alabama’s prisons. Since 2019, roughly 1,380 incarcerated people have died or been killed while in custody of the state. The documentary — which features footage shot on cell phones by several incarcerated men — zooms out to explore why, despite federal inquiry and a lawsuit brought by the U.S. Justice Department, officers are still able to neglect, harm and kill incarcerated people with seeming impunity. The Marshall Project has a review of the film on their web site, and note five take aways from the doculmentary, which is mostly filmed by inmates themselves on illegal cell phones within the prison. 1. Alabama’s prisons have reached a “humanitarian crisis level,” as one of the men featured described it, with unchecked violence and deaths. Scrutiny from the U.S. Department of Justice has failed to improve conditions. 2. Drug use is rampant in prison, and so are overdose deaths. Alabama has failed to stem the flow of illicit substances and doesn’t provide adequate substance abuse treatment to incarcerated people who need it. 3. The emotional and financial cost of Alabama’s prison violence is staggering. Families struggle for years to get answers about the deaths, and the state has spent millions on lawyers and settlements. 4. Incarcerated people have risked their lives to expose conditions behind bars, filming the chaos inside on cell phones furnished by corrections officers. 5. Alabama’s economy is powered in part by incarcerated people, who are employed by corporations in industries such as poultry processing. Many also provide services like sanitation and groundskeeping for the state, often working alongside the public. None of this is new, and it appears that while this is widely known, nothing is able to be done to change it.

The Perfect Neighbor (2025)

This is a familiar story with an inevitable tragedy, this one told almost exclusively through police body cameras. In 2022, a white woman named Susan is living in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Florida began frequently calling the police to complain about children playing near her house. Each time the police come, the other adults and children in the neighborhood inform them that the allegations are either exaggerated or completely false. The police give some warnings, make notes on the situation, and leave. They are know what is going on, they name it amongst themselves, but they are unfailingly polite to both the complaintant and the community they serve. Although the police never make any arrests or notice any issue with the children being accused or their parents, the calls continue and there is a lot of sighing about the situation. This white woman will not let up. And then, one day, she acts. It is a familiar enough story, one that rarely makes anything or anyone change thier mind, but occasionally justice is served.

Mr. Nobody Against Putin (2025)

This documentary is short listed for the 2026 Oscars and is an easy way to see just how destructive to a society totalitarian regimes are. Putin is putting a generation of Russians at risk, and for what? Much like his American counterpart, it is all about his ego and nothing about his country. This is an easy way to see that. It is a clandestine collaboration between high-school video-maker Pavel “Pasha” Talankin and Copenhagen-based American director David Borenstein. Talankin clearly loves his job as a teacher, events organiser and official videographer at the biggest high school in Karabash, a remote industrial town nestled in the Urals around 1100 miles east of Moscow. Although Karabash is infamous for its toxic climate and short life expectancy, Talankin expresses only deep fondness for his shabby home town and its citizens. Already a compulsive video diarist, Talankin is well-placed to document the official wave of pro-military propaganda that sweeps Russia following Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. These Kremlin-imposed changes heavily impact the school routine, where a new “patriotic education” curriculum forces glum-faced students to take part in daily flag-waving ceremonies, study revised pro-Russian history books, join paramilitary youth clubs and even attend lectures by Wagner Group mercenaries. If these methods sound familiar, most are throwbacks to the darkest days of the Soviet Union. Children are once again being brainwashed to blindly obey a ruling party elite. In the case of adolescent boys, they are also being groomed for imminent military conscription. This timely documentary offers a highly personal, emotional charged insider’s view of how Putin’s ongoing imperial aggression is proving corrosive and divisive on the domestic front, destroying young lives and forcing even mild-mannered educators to risk everything by speaking truth to power. Talankin is now living in exile for his own safety.

Going Varsity in Mariachi (2025)

I watched this Feel Good documentary while on a transatlantic flight ans highly recommend it. In Texas, where football usually tends to dominate any discussion about spirited rivalries between high schools, over 100 public schools also field competitive mariachi teams in the hopes of winning the state championship. Most of the premier teams hail from the Rio Grande Valley — specifically, a closely connected group of towns along the US-Mexican border, and it is really great to see the school support such a culture bound tradition. There are differences in funding from school system to school system, and as is so often the case across sports and academia, not all teams are created equal. Mariachi Nuevo Santander from Roma High School in Roma, Texas traditionally bestrides the match-ups like a colossus, sporting flashy attire and impressive musicianship. But the directors have chosen to focus on the underdogs of Mariachi Oro from Edinburgh North High School, an under-financed institution in a low-income district that is in the process of rebuilding their mariachi band. It is more a film about what belonging and competing can do for young adults than it is abou the music, but the music is great. It ranges from such mariachi standards as “Mexico Lindo y Querido” and “Volver, Volver” to newer songs composed for the competitions, is so appealing that you can’t help wishing there were a lot more of it.

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.