Top Docs: Award-Winning Documentary Filmmakers

While we gear up for Season 5, we hope you enjoy this re-release from July of 2023.  Since we spoke with Fisher, "Beckham" went on to win several Emmys including Best Documentary or Nonfiction Series and Outstanding Directing of a Documentary/Nonfiction Program for Fisher.   From the opening moments when David Beckham strolls through a country field wearing a beekeeper’s outfit, you know you’ll be...

As we gear up for Season 5, please enjoy one of our favorite shows.  Since we released this pod first in July of 2023, "20 Days in Mariupol" won the 2024 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.   The letter “Z” seems innocent enough – until you see a Russian tank painted with that mark slowly turn its turret in your direction. For AP journalist Mstyslav Chernov, who, at the time, was covering...

To finish out Season 4, we're revisiting some telling moments from 4 of our most popular shows of the season: Rob Reiner: "Albert Brooks: Defending My Life" Lucy Walker: "Mountain Queen: The Summits of Lhakpa Sherpa" Sam Lipman-Stern & Adam Bhala Lough: "Telemarketers" Ibrahim Nash'at & Shane Boris: "Hollywoodgate" The Presenting Sponsor of "Top Docs" is Netflix .

“Stand Your Ground” became a part of the cultural lexicon over a dozen years ago when a Florida jury acquitted George Zimmerman of murder in the killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin under the Florida self-defense law. Director Geeta Gandbhir takes a probing look at Stand Your Ground laws in her searing new documentary “The Perfect Neighbor,” which recently premiered at the Sundance Film Festival...

Forget about the original “The Dating Game,” not to mention “The All-New Dating Game” and “The Celebrity Dating Game.” This is director Violet Du Feng’s “The Dating Game,” which just had its world premiere at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Of course, this is a documentary not a Chuck Barris game show and, like Violet’s previous film, the sublime “Hidden Letters,” which was shortlisted for an Aca...

To unwind, Dr. Maurizio Bini, who runs a clinic in a public hospital in Milan, takes long walks in the mountains and picks mushrooms. But even in these calming moments, work is not far from his mind. In “Gen_”, director Gianluca Matarrese’s thoroughly entrancing new documentary portrait (a world premiere at this year’s Sundance Film Festival), Dr. Bini and his colleagues run a clinic that serves t...

Continuing our coverage live from Sundance, we are once again joined by Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss ( Boys State , Girls State , The Mission ) to discuss their new film, “Middletown”, which depicts a charismatic high school teacher in Upstate New York who in the 1990s led a “Breakfast Club”-like group of his students to investigate the town dump–which almost certainly had stored dangerous refuse...

Joining us for the 4th year in a row, Variety’s Senior Awards Editor Clayton Davis is back on “Top Docs” to break down this year’s Oscar races for Best Documentary Feature and Best Documentary Short and to offer his predictions for who will walk away victorious on March 2nd. With this year’s feature doc race the closest thing to a real toss-up in years, you don’t want to miss Clayton’s analysis an...

Rounding out our coverage of the 2025 Academy Award nominees, we are joined by producers Bill Morrison (“Decasia”, “The Dockworker's Dream”, Dawson City: Frozen Time) and Jamie Kalven (of the Invisible Institute) to discuss their Oscar-nominated short, “Incident,” which depicts the police shooting of Harith “Snoop” Augustus and it’s immediate aftermath from several angles.     Using body camera an...

Ema Ryan Yamazaki attended Japanese elementary school, then an international school before heading to New York for her college education.  In “Instruments of a Beating Heart”, her Academy Award Nominated short, she reveals some of the differences she found between national pedagogies, and some of the key learnings which have made her who she is.   Told through the efforts of 1st-grader Ayame to pa...

In Smriti Mundhra’s (“St. Louis Superman,” “Indian Matchmaking”) recently Oscar-nominated documentary short, “I Am Ready, Warden,” John Henry Ramirez speaks direct to camera and says, “If you all are seeing this, it means the state of Texas has murdered me…” For the audience, it’s a punch to the gut, a spoiler, and an announcement of what’s at stake in this life-and-death story.   Director Smriti...

When documentary filmmaker Kim A. Snyder began her directing career, she didn’t set out to make a string of films about school shootings and their aftermaths. But, from “Newtown” (2016) to “US Kids” (2020), and now with her Oscar-nominated short documentary “Death by Numbers,” Kim has brought critical attention to the issue and built deep relationships with the young survivors of those shootings....

One of the most haunting moments in director Mstyslav Chernov’s harrowing new documentary “2000 Meters to Andriivka” — a follow up to his Oscar-winning “20 Days in Mariupol” — is a rather prosaic conversation about handmade cigarettes between the filmmaker and a Ukrainian soldier as they huddle in a foxhole while artillery shells explode around them. What makes this scene so chilling is its very o...

The 15th UN General Assembly of September 1960 may not seem like the most avant-garde topic for a cinematically adventurous documentary, but don’t tell that to director Johan Grimonprez. His stunningly creative “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat,” recently named to the Oscar Shortlist for Best Documentary Feature, is a cinematic high point of 2024 and also one of the year’s most thoroughly engaging hist...

Continuing our Academy Award coverage, today we speak with Alexis Bloom about her documentary, "The Bibi Files," which has been Oscar-shortlisted.     "The Bibi Files" features never-before seen police interrogations of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, his wife Sara, their son Yair and many of their friends, associates, and people who have sought their influence. The results of th...

Road trips — and road trip movies — are as American as apple pie. And now, currently streaming on Netflix , we have director Josh Greenbaum’s poignant and very funny documentary “Will & Harper,” which tags along on a cross country road trip with close friends Will Ferrell and Harper Steele as the two navigate Harper’s recent transition as a woman. Since meeting during their first week on staff...

Due to a rare form of autism, 14-year-old Makayla has grown up with plenty to say but lacking the ability to say it — until  now. Thanks to a groundbreaking therapy, she has found her voice and is making up for lost time. In Julio Palacio’s deeply moving Oscar-shortlisted documentary short, “Makayla’s Voice: A Letter to the World,” Makayla uses a letter board to communicate with her family and to...

The first thing you should know about double bassist Orin O’Brien is that she doesn’t think she’s anything special. The second thing you should know — as director Molly O’Brien’s thoroughly endearing Oscar-shortlisted documentary short “The Only Girl in the Orchestra” makes perfectly clear — is that Orin O’Brien is very special, indeed. The first female musician hired full time by the New York Phi...

“Hello, 2025!” And as the doc calendar turns to a new year, we turn our attention to the 2025 Sundance Film Festiva l. The 41st edition runs from January 23 – February 2 in Park City and Salt Lake City, Utah (and online from Jan. 30 – Feb 2). To help get us fired up, we welcome back Basil Tsiokos, Sundance Senior Programmer, Nonfiction, for his fourth visit to “Top Docs” to preview this year’s ste...

Frida Kahlo is everywhere. From pajamas imprinted with her likeness to exhibitions of her work, Frida’s image and art are omnipresent. But what about Frida’s own perspective on life, art, politics and love? Taking inspiration from Frida’s letters, illustrated diary and other writings, filmmaker Carla Gutiérrez’s stunning documentary portrait “Frida” offers a new perspective on this remarkably dura...

Welcome 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 17th. 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 Frontrunners, Runners Up and D...

Today’s pod features one of our special “Anatomy of a Scene” episodes.  Emily Kassie and Julian Brave NoiseCat join us once again to discuss their feature documentary, “Sugarcane”.   Emily & Julian were first on the show when we recorded them live from Sundance.  We wanted to have them back on to dig in deep on a scene from the movie that spans continents, involves world leaders, and features...

For Palestinian villagers in the rural southern West Bank community of Masafer Yatta, life under the Israeli occupation is terrifying. The Israeli military can show up, without warning, waving orders to demolish your house; those resisting can be arrested or even shot. Among the Palestinians who call Masafer Yatta home is filmmaker Basel Adra. Basel’s extraordinary new documentary “No Other Land”...

RJ Cutler (“The War Room”, “The September Issue”, “Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry”) joins Mike and Ken once again to talk about his latest documentary, “Elton John: Never Too Late.”   As RJ tells us, the film “ Tells the story of two monumental decisions in the life of Elton John. The first, a decision he makes [to come out] in an interview in 1976 to Rolling Stone Magazine. And the se...

Today our guests are Errol Morris, director of the new MSNBC documentary “Separated”, and Jacob Soboroff, executive producer, upon whose 2020 book, “Separated: Inside an American Tragedy,” the documentary was based.    We had Errol on the show last year to discuss his Oscar-shortlisted portrait of John le Carré, “The Pigeon Tunnel”, which with its implicitly self-reflective focus on the ability of...