As a reviewer for a couple of documentary grants, the process is a lovely way to learn more about what stories my peers are exploring, what styles and forms are standing out from the pack, and to make some extra cash to subsidize the financially marginal existence that many of us filmmakers lead. Reviewing grant applications, like everything else, has been complicated by generative artificial intelligence (GenAI, for short). After six years of reviewing projects, this year I am regularly encountering the use of audiovisual GenAI in samples for the first time—notably, mostly in projects that
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It’s only us; there’s no them. That’s the provocation at Tribeca’s 2025 Immersive exhibition, titled In Search of Us, mounted in partnership with Onassis ONX and Agog. The exhibit seeks to challenge the act of othering that is so entrenched in media landscapes with “us vs. them” ideologies. About half of the show is comprised of documentary or documentary-adjacent work. This dispatch includes review of four exemplary nonfiction works.
Maintenance Artist, directed by Toby Perl Freilich, is a fascinating look at Mierle Ukeles—an undeterred feminist and advocate for the working class who constantly defied labels. Just prior to the film’s documentary competition debut, Documentary caught up with Freilich to learn how she ended up collaborating with this unconventional and unusually empathetic character.
This article is a condensed and slightly adapted version of a talk I delivered on June 8, during the Skjaldborg documentary film festival in Patreksfjörður, Iceland, titled “The Press Playbook: How To Get Your Doc in the Spotlight.” What follows reflects both the structure and tone of that session—direct, personal, and grounded in real-world practice.
The documentary world lost a bright light on April 12, when Andrea Blaugrund Nevins died of breast cancer. Nancy Kates details her legacy as a tenacious, compassionate filmmaker who brought her optimism to every project.
Documentary is happy to debut an exclusive clip from directors Vickie Curtis and Doug Anderson’s 'Comparsa'(2025). Is is the story of teenage sisters Lesli and Lupe in Ciudad Peronia, Guatemala as they rally other neighborhood teens to participate in a Comparsa, or series of performances similar to a carnival, to protest violence against women and children in their community.
It is all too easy to overlook nonfiction film at Cannes, where documentary is, if you go by institutional classification, largely a vehicle for chronicling the history of cinema. This year, the most compelling documentaries were found in the parallel festival showcases. The winner of the Œil d’Or (Golden Eye for the best documentary at Cannes) Imago, from Deni Oumar Pitsaev, was in Critics’ Week. Likewise, ACID had the most formally challenging documentary this year at Cannes, Sepideh Farsi’s Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, and it was Directors’ Fortnight that premiered a Ukraine documentary with stunning and often inventive cinematography, Militantropos, by the Tabor Collective.
Documentary is happy to debut an exclusive clip from longtime creative and life partners Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle’s Playing With Fire: An Ecosexual Emergency, the third film in the pair’s trilogy of queer environmentalist documentaries. Forced to evacuate a fire in the Northern California redwood forest sanctuary where Stephens and Sprinkle live, they channel their energy into their “ecosexual” art, a conceptual activist framework that reframes human relationships to nature to emphasize reciprocity. Playing With Fire premieres at Frameline, San Francisco’s LGBTQ+ film festival, this Friday.
Suzannah Herbert’s Natchez is a multilayered, character-driven look at the titular town in Mississippi (U.S.), which is wholly dependent on a declining industry. In this case, the manufacturing is of whitewashed tales that have turned into hardened history. For generations, Natchez has been financially dependent on its antebellum tourism industry, in which hoop-skirted docents in grand mansions regale visitors with, as one knowing character puts it, a “Southern construct” that’s “used to sell tickets.” Just prior to the film’s Tribeca Documentary Competition premiere, Documentary caught up with Herbert (Wrestle) to learn all about her stellar sophomore feature. Last week, Tribeca announced that Natchez won not only the best documentary feature prize but also special jury awards for cinematography (to Noah Collier) and editing (Pablo Proenza).
Close to the start of her hypnotic documentary The Memory of Butterflies, director Tatiana Fuentes Sadowski describes the moment that inspired the film. While looking through a selection of propaganda images taken by a company operating in the Amazon during the late 19th-century rubber boom, Sadowski came across a posed portrait of two young Indigenous men. In the image, the pair stands hand in hand dressed in Western clothes, stiff suits and ties, gazing at the camera with solemn, unreadable expressions: Omarino and Aredomi. Documentary spoke to Sadowski shortly after the film’s premiere at the Berlinale, where the documentary jury awarded the film a special mention, about the ethics of colonial archive, cinematic speculation, and sound as a threshold. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.