Top Docs: Award-Winning Documentary Filmmakers

In her Oscar-shortlisted new documentary, “Seeds”, director Brittany Shyne depicts the lives of Black farmers in the South.  In a flexible verité style in which she doesn’t fear breaking the fourth wall, Shyne pays meticulous attention to the workings of farm life, focussing, as she notes to Mike, literally on the hands that do that labor.  But she sets the entire experience with a broader framewo...

You might assume that receiving a fellowship to Harvard University represents the culmination of a burgeoning academic career. But, as director Amber Fares (“ Speed Sisters ”) shows in the amusing opening scenes of her Sundance award-winning documentary “Coexistence, My Ass!,” when Noam Shuster Eliassi, the main participant in her film, receives such an honor, she has actually been invited by Harv...

You find out your husband of many years is cheating on you, but you still love him anddesperately want to keep your family together. What do you do? In Elizabeth Lo’s (“Stray”) remarkable documentary “Mistress Dispeller,” we are introduced to a heart broken Mrs. Li, who hires a mistress dispeller to end her husband’s affair and save her marriage.  Yes, it’s true: in modern-day China, mistress disp...

When Tig Notaro suggested to filmmaker Ryan White that he make a documentary about Tig’s friend, the poet Andrea Gibson, two words gave Ryan pause: “cancer” and “poetry.” He wondered who would fund (and watch) such a documentary. But, to Ryan’s great surprise, as evident in his deeply moving, funny and highly engaging documentary “Come See Me in the Good Light,” following Andrea and their wife, th...

There are power couples… and then there is Juma Xipaia and Hugo Loss. As illustrated in Richard Ladkani’s (“Sea of Shadows”) riveting, urgent, and Oscar-shortlisted documentary “Yanuni,” the two are fierce defenders of the Amazon rainforest engaged in a life-and-death struggle against illegal mining operations that threaten the existence of Brazil’s Indigenous territories.   Richard joins Ken on t...

Pavel “Pasha” Talankin may seem like just another primary school events coordinator, but when he is forced by Vladimir Putin’s new dictates to not only implement a pro-war curriculum but to record teachers delivering its absurd, self-contradictory nonsense, he decides to use his camera to document the effects of the war in Ukraine and the propaganda war at home on his community, and especially his...

It took 20 years of asking by an Oscar-winning filmmaker, but famed investigative reporter Seymour Hersh finally said, “Yes.” The result is "Cover-Up", a revelatory new documentary portrait of Hersh’s fascinating life and career by Academy Award-winning filmmaker Laura Poitras (“ Citizenfour ”) and Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Mark Obenhaus (“ Steep ”).   Joining Ken on the pod, Mark (who jointly...

Welcome once again to our Anne-ual Top Docs Holiday Special featuring the one-and-only Anne Thompson, Editor-at-Large at IndieWire! Anne joins Mike and Ken to tackle this year’s Best Feature Documentary Oscar Shortlist, released on December 16th. One day following the release of the list, Anne is already fired up and ready to go. How competitive is this year’s race? Who are the Favorites, Runners...

Sometimes, timing is everything. If Julia Loktev’s 5 hour and 24-minute documentary masterpiece “My Undesirable Friends: Part 1 — Last Air in Moscow” can be boiled down to its essence, it may be that, often in life, there is a “before” and an “after,” and nothing can possibly prepare you for what comes after. In this case, the event that changes everything for the courageous generation of Russian...

When Liat Atzili and her husband Aviv were kidnapped from Kibbutz Nir Oz by Hamas on October 7th, 2023, their families were not only devastated by the news but also at a loss of what to do next.  In Brandon and Lance Kramer’s (The First Step”) brilliant, nuanced and stirring documentary “Holding Liat,” each member of the family must decide what he or she can do to help bring Liat and Aviv home not...

In Marshall Curry’s (“ Street Fight ,” “ A Night at the Garden ”) new Netflix documentary, “ The New Yorker at 100 ”, the magazine’s editor, David Remnick, calls its very existence “a miracle”: in a typical issue you might find  a long profile of a museum, and then a report from Southern Lebanon, all interspersed with gag cartoons   Curry’s documentary reflects the variegated nature of its subject...

When Suuna Hassan and Madinah Babirah founded Masaka Kids Africana in the Masaka District of Uganda, they hoped to help a handful of orphaned children and other young people living on the streets. They had no way of knowing where their efforts would lead or that one day the whole world would be watching.   Directors David Vieira Lopez and Oscar-nominated filmmaker Moses Bwayo (“Bobi Wine: The Peop...

Who really took the photo widely known as “Napalm Girl”?  And does it really matter over a half-century later?   In his new Netflix documentary “The Stringer”, Bao Nguyen (“The Greatest Night in Pop”) follows a journalistic team lead by Anglo-American Gary Knight as they seek to show that the real photographer on that day in 1972 in Trang Bang was not the renowned and fêted Pulitzer Prize-winning...

The main protagonist of Tamara Kotevska’s (“ Honeyland ”) enchanting new documentary “The Tale of Silyan” is a lovable farmer named Nikola. But as compelling a screen presence as he is, Nikola can’t hold a candle to the film’s real stars, the gorgeous, majestic — and even more lovable — white storks who steal the show.   Producer/Director Tamara Kotevska and Cinematographer/Producer Jean Dakar joi...

Elvis. The Beatles. Madonna… Selena. Selena Quintanilla was a huge star on the cusp of becoming an international superstar when she was tragically killed in 1995 at just 23 years old. Filmmaker Isabel Castro (“Mija”) explores the life, music and legacy of this incredibly talented and beloved musician in her exceptional Netflix documentary portrait “Selena y Los Dinos.” As the film’s title implies,...

Whether you are a fan of motorcycles or not, it’s hard to dispute that riding one down an open stretch of road delivers an intoxicating sense of freedom. As filmmakers Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni make clear in their extraordinary documentary “Cutting Through Rocks,” the motorcycle can also be a powerful — and threatening — symbol of female empowerment and independence.   Sara and Mohammadreza...

For filmmaker Petra Costa, democracy in her native country of Brazil is personal. Two years after Petra was born, the country returned to democratic rule after more than twenty years of military dictatorship. As Petra grew up, so, too, did the country’s democracy. But, in more recent years, as she has meticulously documented in two densely layered and highly personal documentaries — first, in her...

The version of the American Revolution many of us were taught was focussed on the ideals and principles of the revolution:  Independence, democracy, liberty guaranteed by enumerated rights.  And if we were taught about the actual conflict, we maybe heard of a few battles in New England and the mid-Atlantic– maybe there was a setback here and there.  But the whole thing was presented as basically i...

Today we feature a live event that Top Docs held a few weeks ago at the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival (where our co-host Ken Jacobson serves as Executive Director).  After Ken and Mike talk about the origins of Top Docs and some of the memorable moments over the years, Joshua Seftel, who has previously appeared on the pod for his Oscar-nominated “Stranger at the Gate,”  joins them to discu...

Mr. Scorsese is “Marty” to his friends and “Legend” to admirers and imitators.  But he’s also still that kid, the "minuscule asthmatic”--as lovingly described by his ex-wife, Isabella Rossellini--who fervently loved both the movies he watched in Times Square as well as the characters that populated the Little Italy of his youth.  The results were "Mean Streets", "Taxi Driver", "Raging Bull", and "...

It’s easy to glibly identify what’s happening as “Orwellian”:  that we live in an era of “newspeak,” that we have reached the point at which the depths of the surveillance state of 1984 seems all too possible, maybe even already here. But in his new “Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5”, Raoul Peck (“ I am Not Your Negro ”, “ Exterminate All the Brutes ”, “ Ernest Cole: Lost and Found ”) digs much deeper into these...

It’s that time of the year! The Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival 2025 runs from October 10-18th.  Ken, who, in addition to his Top Docs duties serves as the Executive Director of the Festival, joins Mike to talk about some of his picks for the Festival including: “Lost Wolves of Yellowstone” “The Cowboy” “Move Ya Body:  The Birth of House” “Armed Only With a Camera:  The Life and Death of Bre...

As director David Osit describes his new film, “ ’Predators’ peels back the story of the TV show ‘To Catch a Predator’, which ensnared potential sex predators in a television hidden-camera sting operation and explores the fallout from the show and the legacy of journalism as entertainment that it helped create.”     “Predators” (MTV Documentary Films) is now playing in select theaters, with more a...

In honor of Matt Wolf's big wins at the Emmys this year--not only for "Pee-wee as Himself" as Best Documentary Feature, but for his own win as director of that documentary as well as picture editing for Damian Rodriguez--we are re-releasing our interview with him at Sundance earlier this year.   As Director Matt Wolf shows in his  insightful and fun 2-part HBO series “Pee-wee as Himself”, in Pee-w...

It’s Primetime. Yes, the Primetime Emmys are here, and we’ve got you covered. Culminating our “Top Docs” podcasts featuring the leading contenders for in the documentary categories, we talk to The Hollywood Reporter’s Executive Editor of Awards Scott Feinberg who breaks down the 2025 Emmy nominees in all the major documentary categories, including Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Special; Out...