Top Docs: Award-Winning Documentary Filmmakers

Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson joins us to talk about his Oscar-shortlisted “Summer of Soul (…or, When the Revolution Could Not be Televised)”.  In the summer of 1969, a music festival took place in New York that attracted over 300,000 people. Featuring some of the most incredible artists of that — or any — era, it caught the cultural wave of the moment. No, it wasn’t Woodstock. And, until very recent...

Betsy West and Julie Cohen (“ RBG ”, “ My Name is Pauli Murray ”) return to “Top Docs” to discuss their Oscar shortlisted “Julia”, about the legendary culinary educator, Julia Child.  After sharing their favorite Julia Child recipes, Betsy and Julie dive into how they used new visual tools to recreate Julia’s cooking techniques–ones that weren’t available when Julia was at her peak.  They discuss...

A legendary rock ‘n’ roll photographer. An amazing abstract artist. Can they team up to create something completely new and original? In this touching and inspiring dual portrait, filmmaker Alexandria Jackson focuses her lens on the unlikely friendship and collaboration between photographer Baron Wolman and artist Sophie Kipner . In their Top Docs conversation, Alexandria shared with Ken the story...

In this poetical portrait that transcends the standard documentary treatment of war and refugees, filmmakers Gulistan and Elizabeth Mirzaei explore the dreams, frustrations and love experienced by Shaista and Benazir, a young Afghan couple living in a Kabul displacement camp. Ken sat down with Gulistan, Elizabeth, and producer Omar Mullick (“ These Birds Walk ”) to discuss their creative approach...

With 99.4 million Instagram followers and counting, Billie Eilish, who just turned 20 years old, is already one of the most popular and critically acclaimed artists of our time. Throughout the world, her music inspires young people who flock to her concerts and know all the lyrics by heart. Renowned filmmaker R.J. Cutler’s definitive new Apple TV+ documentary “Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little B...

Right now, “ Khabar Lahariya ” might not be as well-known as “The New York Times”, but, with 150 million YouTube views and growing, India’s only women-led news outlet has already established itself as an indispensable local watchdog and source of reporting in the country’s most populated state. Winner of the Audience Award at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival, “Writing With Fire”, directed by first-...

The 2022 Sundance Film Festival is almost here! From Jan. 20– 30, all eyes will be on the Sundance lineup and on what are sure to be some of the year’s most heralded documentaries. Top Docs caught up with Basil Tsiokos, Sundance Senior Programmer, Nonfiction, to preview this year’s doc features and to give us an inside look into how the programming process works.   Basil Tsiokos is Senior Programm...

Two schools, two neighborhoods, two vastly different worlds… one football program. When it became clear that Messmer High School and Shorewood High in Milwaukee would not have enough players to field their own teams, the two schools came together to form the Messwood football team. But playing together does not mean that the team’s young athletes aren’t immune from the systemic problems plaguing o...

Firouzeh Khosrovani’s “ Radiograph of a Family ” is among the rarest of documentaries. Like a perfectly composed classical symphony, the film’s form and content effortlessly complement each other. The result is a film that is both beautifully symmetrical and dynamically creative. Seamlessly moving between the personal and the political, Firouzeh employs the full range of storytelling tools--from r...

Imagine being one of the two young songwriter/lyricists who are invited to an imposing Hollywood mansion to meet with movie legend Gloria Swanson. Greeting you in all her movie star glamour, Gloria pitches her idea for a Broadway musical based on her starring role in the brilliant movie “Sunset Boulevard”. Three months later, your musical BOULEVARD is ready for the big time. Unfortunately, that ve...

Famous for its Beluga caviar and rich oil deposits, the Caspian Sea region is less well-known for the corruption that goes hand-in-hand with both of these highly desired commodities. Taking as his primary subject the post-Soviet regime of Azerbaijan and its strongman leader, Ilham Aliyev, journalist and filmmaker Benoît Bringer pulls back the curtain on the creative ways Aliyev uses to buy his cou...

Alison Bechdel. Jennifer Camper. Howard Cruse. Rupert Kinnard. Mary Wings. From the 1970s to the 2000s and beyond, these five brilliant queer cartoonists broke the mold, paved the way, and told the truth one panel at a time. Each contributed to creating the world of queer comics and helped forge a vital community of LGBTQ artists that continues to thrive today. Effortlessly weaving together portra...

Welcome to the Top Docs Holiday Special! IndieWire Editor-at-Large Anne Thompson joins Mike and Ken to break down the Best Feature Documentary Oscar shortlist released this week. Anne shares her insights about the 15 documentaries that made the cut and the ones that didn’t. What are the biggest surprises? Which films have the best chance to make it to the list of the five final nominees? And, drum...

When “Fiddler on the Roof” opened on Broadway in 1964, many thought that this Yiddish-inspired portrait of Jewish shtetl life in Tsarist Russia would be a huge flop. But audiences flocked to the musical, and its songbook soon entered the popular lexicon. Hollywood set its sights on a film version and United Artists signed the well-respected, but hardly household name, Norman Jewison to direct. The...

A presidential election held during a period of extreme political divisiveness. A constitutional democracy under threat by the incumbent president himself. The possibility of a stolen election. These conditions might bring to mind the U.S. in 2020. But Camilla Nielsson’s masterful new observational documentary “President” focuses its unblinking eye on Zimbabwe during the country’s pivotal and turb...

In our second Anatomy of a Scene featurette, we delve into two key scenes from TRY HARDER! with director Debbie Lum. In this illuminating conversation, Debbie offers some fascinating back story to deepen our understanding of the complex dynamics that play out on screen.   The Scenes: Scene 1: Winter Holiday at Le Soleil Restaurant - 42:37 – 45:06 Scene 2: Chinese New Year at R&G Restaurant - 51:28...

Sometimes you think you know the full story when it turns out you really don’t know the half of it. Oscar-winning filmmakers E. Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin’s (“ Free Solo ”, “ Meru ”) riveting new documentary “ The Rescue ” chronicles the heroic international effort in the summer of 2018 to save twelve boys and their soccer coach trapped deep inside a flooded cave in Northern Thailand. At the t...

141 boxes. That’s a lot of stuff. But, if that “stuff” happens to be the Pauli Murray Papers at Harvard’s Schlesinger Library , then you may well have just struck documentary gold. Filmmakers Betsy West and Julie Cohen first learned of Murray when they were in the throes of research for their Oscar-nominated documentary “ RBG ” about Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Later, after immersin...

For many 17- and 18-year-olds, life exists on the unsettling edge between the daily grind of high school and the promised land of freedom and opportunity: college. The brilliance of Debbie Lum’s enthralling new documentary “ Try Harder! ” is that it occupies the treacherous space in between these two worlds by focusing on the hyper competitive college application process. With an all-access pass t...

Want to know more about how one of our award-winning directors crafts a complex scene? For our inaugural “Anatomy of a Scene'' special segment, we invited “ Rebel Hearts ” director Pedro Kos to peel back the curtain on his filmmaking process by dissecting a pivotal scene from his new movie. It’s a fascinating “deep dive” that we know you will enjoy! The Scene: The 1967 Immaculate Heart General Ass...

Almost daily, the news media report on a new refugee crisis or a tragic border crossing attempted by those fleeing desperate circumstances in their home countries for the promise of a better life elsewhere. Danish filmmaker Jonas Poher Rasmussen takes the measure of one such story in his remarkable new documentary “ Flee ”, which gives a blow-by-blow, first-hand account of a young Afghan refugee n...

Miscarriage of justice doesn’t begin to describe the wrongs that have been done to the six men at the heart of Robert Greene’s (“ Bisbee ’17 ”, “ Kate Plays Christine ”) pathbreaking, searing, and, ultimately, immensely healing, new documentary “ Procession ”. As boys, Joe, Mike, Ed, Dan, Michael and Tom each suffered sexual abuse, including rape, at the hands of Catholic Church clergy. As men, th...

Academy Award-nominated director Matthew Heineman’s (“ Cartel Land ”, “ City of Ghosts ”) harrowing new cinema verité documentary, THE FIRST WAVE , takes us into the eye of the storm, a New York City intensive care unit during the worst four months of the COVID-19 crisis. Trailing a relentlessly driven medical team led by the remarkable Dr. Nathalie Dougé and spending countless hours with desperat...

Immaculately produced by Daniela Alatorre and Elena Fortes and stylishly directed by Alonso Ruizpalacios (“ Museo ”, “ Gueros ”, “ Narcos: Mexico ”), A COP MOVIE is a dazzling hybrid documentary brain teaser and gorgeous piece of cinematic eye candy. It’s also, well, a cop movie, with a blood pumping chase scene and a pair of captivating Mexico City police officers known as “the love patrol.” At i...

“Faya dayi” is a hymnal chant recited by the Harari farmers of Ethiopia as they harvest khat, a native plant chewed for its stimulant properties. Roughly translated, faya dayi means “giving birth to wellness or health.” It is also the title of Ethiopian/Mexican filmmaker Jessica Beshir’s one-of-a-kind, profoundly moving new documentary set in the magical and troubled land where she grew up. Deeply...