Top Docs: Award-Winning Documentary Filmmakers

 Surrounded by a Bohemian cast of characters, she was conceived and grew up in an avant-garde theater in Paris; she aspired to be a painter. What could be more romantic than that? In “Apolonia, Apolonia”, director Lea Glob’s epic and fascinating portrait of Apolonia Sokol, romantic ideals intermingle with the hard realities of what it takes for a talented young woman without a trust fund or family...

The only movie to win an Academy Award for Best Picture with an X rating, “Midnight Cowboy” is one of those movies that once you see it, you never forget it. It broke taboos and made American movies relevant again; it both reflected the changing times and was revolutionary. And it had Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman in the indelible roles of Joe Buck and Ratso Rizzo. The late Nancy Buirski’s final f...

This holiday season, discover another side to “The Painter of Light”!  In our final installment of "Live from Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival", Miranda Yousef joins Mike to discuss her feature documentary, “Art for Everybody”.  From an early age, Thomas Kinkade struggled with the impact of his impoverished youth, torn between emulating van Gogh’s critical regard and seeking the economic succ...

Welcome to the 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 21st. 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...

It’s Emmy time. Yes, finally, after a long delay, the Emmys are almost here. “The Hollywood Reporter”’s Executive Editor of Awards Scott Feinberg joins Mike and Ken to break down the 2023 Emmy nominees in all the major documentary categories, including Outstanding Documentary Program; Outstanding Series; Exceptional Merit in Documentary Filmmaking; and Outstanding Directing. Besides his Emmy predi...

Director Lisa Cortés’ (“The Remix: Hip Hop X Fashion”, “ Invisible Beauty ”) electrifying and groundbreaking documentary about Richard Penniman (aka “Little Richard”) proves the point that the stories passed down about the origins of rock and roll have been whitewashed. The so-called “Architect of rock and roll”, Little Richard was ripped off, copied, and otherwise taken for granted by a white mus...

One is a beloved bandleader and soon-to-be Grammy nominee; the other, a “New York Times” bestselling author. But, as Matthew Heineman’s (“ Retrograde ”, “ The First Wave ”, “ Cartel Land ”) intimate and heartfelt new documentary “American Symphony” makes clear, life is not always so glittering for high-profile couple Jon Batiste and Suleika Jaouad. Batiste must consider the possibility that his am...

Building on the smoke sauna tradition of Southern Estonia (included by UNESCO on its “Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity”), filmmaker Anna Hints brings together a group of Estonian women to share the smoke sauna experience and to share some of their most personal stories. The result is Anna’s masterfully constructed and emotionally layered Sundance award-winning do...

Both were born in 1945 in Germany during the last year of WWII. Both became giants of the modern German art movement: Anselm Kiefer as a painter and sculptor; Wim Wenders as a filmmaker whose landmark films include “Wings of Desire”, “Paris, Texas” and “The American Friend”. The two had met in 1991 and discussed the possibility of doing a film together, but it wasn’t until the two collaborated on...

In 1990, at the age of 26, in the wake of a heart attack which, in the words of one expert, “liquified” the core of her brain, Terri Schiavo entered a “persistent vegetative state”.  As “Between Life and Death: Terri Schiavo’s Story” shows, over the next 15 years her husband Michael and her immediate family would fight over her fate: in the press, in the courts, in legislatures, and ultimately in...

Like a black hole, North Korea is a place where light cannot escape. Fed nothing but government propaganda, North Koreans can only access the outside world by slipping across the border to China, the first stop on a harrowing journey that, if successful, eventually leads to South Korea. Against this bleak backdrop, filmmaker Madeleine Gavin’s gripping Sundance-winning documentary “Beyond Utopia” s...

The second season of Netflix’s “High on the Hog” is almost here, and Executive Producers Karis Jagger and Fabienne Toback joined Mike to discuss their celebrated series.  The subtitle of the series is “How African-American Cuisine Transformed America” and much like the strong first season, the show explores the impact of Black Cuisine on American culture, economics, politics, and more.     Mike as...

As the first of our series of conversations from the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival, Mike spoke with Li Lu about her new 3-part series, “A Town Called Victoria”.  The film explores the aftermath of a mosque burning in this small Texas town.  Lu provides a nuanced portrait of the town itself, one torn between support for and fear of the victims, a divide that builds upon and reveals the raci...

There’s nothing “sly” about Sylvester Stallone. His iconic screen characters, most notably, Rocky Balboa (“ Rocky ” and four others) and John Rambo (“ Rambo: First Blood ” + four others), are about as direct as they come — and, seemingly, so, too, is their creator. But, Emmy award-winning director Thom Zimny (“ Bruce Springsteen: Wings for Wheels: The Making of ‘Born to Run ’”) reveals that, even...

In “The Pigeon Tunnel”, Errol Morris has crafted a career-culminating work.  Morris skillfully deploys and redeploys: the revelatory recreations that he has been known for since “The Thin Blue Line”; an interview with a slippery subject that surpasses that even of “The Fog of War” subject Robert McNamara;  and the intellectual curiosity on display in “Fast, Cheap, & Out of Control.”  He sharpe...

Two young, idealistic, talented design students from Stanford set out to create a replacement for smoking tobacco, a vaporizing device that will save millions of lives.  Instead, they end up building the perfect addiction machine, and, with their wildly effective marketing campaign, they hook a plethora of non-smokers, including teenagers.   RJ Cutler (“The War Room”, “Billie Eilish: The World’s a...

Inspired by the adventures stories of his youth as well as a “radical” interpretation of Jesus’ “ Great Commision ” , 26-year-old American John Chau set off to the distant North Sentinel Island to tell the people there–supposedly completely isolated and putatively unfriendly to visitors–of his Savior.     Directors Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss ( Boys State ) join Mike to discuss not only what dro...

From the opening moments when David Beckham strolls through a country field wearing a beekeeper’s outfit, you know you’ll be witnessing another side to one of the world’s most famous people.  In “Beckham”, a 4-part series on Netflix, director Fisher Stevens (producer of  “The Cove” and “Tiger King”, and an actor on stage and screen for 40 years, most recently playing Hugo Baker on “Succession”) re...

Mike is joined by Ken who, when he’s not Co-Creator and Co-Host of “Tod Docs”, serves as the Executive Director of the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival.  Mike and Ken discuss some of the highlights of this year’s lineup including the Gala Films, a number of other features that include standouts from Sundance, a World Premier, and some of the Oscar-qualifying shorts.     The 32nd Annual Hot Sp...

There’s nothing invisible about the beauty, strength and savvy of pathbreaking model and fashion industry icon Bethann Hardison, whose story is at the heart of the eye-opening and captivating new documentary “Invisible Beauty”. Hardison, who directs the film with Frédéric Tcheng (“Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel”, “Dior and I”, “Halston”), became a top model at a time when black was deemed n...

The Toronto International Film Festival (September 7 – 17, 2023) is one of the world’s top showcases for documentary film. No doubt, numerous films from this year’s lineup will be among the most acclaimed and talked about of the Fall awards season and beyond. DOC NYC co-founder Thom Powers, who has been TIFF’s Documentary Programmer since 2006, joins Top Docs to discuss this year’s selections, tre...

Closing out our Emmy coverage, today we feature Ken Burns (“Brooklyn Bridge”, “The Civil War”, “Jazz”) and Lynn Novick (“Frank Lloyd Wright”, “Baseball”, “Hemingway”) discussing their thrice-Emmy nominated “The U.S. and the Holocaust”.  As Ken tells us, this PBS series addresses the “Holocaust, one of the low points of humanity and what Americans knew and what they didn't know, what they did, and...

The legacy of slavery and the contributions of Black American are intrinsic to nearly every aspect of what makes America America.  It’s a simple enough thesis, but the makers of the documentary series of  "The 1619 Project"–based on the original essays published in The New York Times–bring it to life with stories from history, of course, but also those of contemporary people whose lives and experi...

As Director Davis Guggenheim explains, Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie is “the story of a short kid from Canada who drops out of high school to become a movie star, and he does. Then a few years later, he wakes up with this crazy diagnosis, in a Florida hotel room, and the movie's about what does he do with that?”    Davis sat down with Ken & Mike to discuss how his team arrived at deploying mon...

It’s not easy being an elephant these days. Devastating droughts (exacerbated by climate change), encroaching development, and relentless poachers force elephants across Asia and Africa to go on the run, literally, in the pursuit of food, water and, a place to call home.   Executive Producer Lucinda Axelsson (“Elephant Diaries”, “Elephants of Samburu”, “Meerkat Manor”) of the fascinating National...