Editor’s Note: In December 2025, Documentary asked IDA members and past contributors to the magazine to pick the “Greatest Docs of the 21st Century.” Documentary tabulated the results and released both a Top 25 list compiled of all the top vote-getting docs, and a curated Singular Picks list made up of projects that garnered a single vote across all ballots. This essay is a companion piece to that endeavor.
Historically, I have been suspicious of lists. Lists are intended to order, in both senses of the word: to inventory and to command. I was skeptical that there could exist a collection of films I had to watch before dying, or a stack of books that were categorically the best. How could anyone make such objective statements about works of art, or translate the words and images that touch our hearts into numbers? It seemed absurd that these lists, somehow at once authorless and holding authority, could claim to know anything about my life.
Magazines, from trade publications like Variety to the pop culture enthusiast’s Entertainment Weekly to the prestigious journal Cahiers du Cinéma, published lists that made sweeping assertions about the medium’s essential, greatest, and most influential works. I noticed that certain films tended to populate these lists with regularity, and wondered about the purpose of publishing variations of the same statement over and over again. In my mind, these lists resembled rigid, unimpeachable monuments or sculptures that towered over the tastes and consumption habits of audiences. They demanded observance and worship, solely on the basis of their size and prestige, rather than qualities that a list might aspire towards: representation across gender, geography, form, genre, and so on.
Film scholar and critic Elena Gorfinkel, expressed similar sentiments in her widely-circulated manifesto “Against Lists” in Another Gaze:
Lists aggregate the already known and consolidate power. Lists count and account and ceaselessly weigh and measure ‘genius’ and ‘greatness’ as if they are empirical substances. Lists convert numerical appearance into that seeming empiricism of the prodigious. And who in the longue durée has been bestowed those plaudits? Lists won’t create new canons – especially not of lost women, queer, trans, Black, Latinx, global south, decolonial, and anti-colonial filmmakers.
Gorfinkel warns against the list’s limited capacity to expand canons, to reflect the sentiment of a historical moment, to open our worlds and imaginations. She suggests, instead, directing our time and attention to films not on our lists, redefining our spheres of value, and freeing ourselves from the habit of producing evidence of our consumption. “Look closely,” she instructs. “Who exactly produces this flurry of lists?”
My hesitation has always been a matter of survey methodology: how prompts are given, how responses are collected, and importantly, how respondents are identified in the first place. What grants someone the authority to assert an opinion on what is the best, or the most important? The issue, however, is that critical authority is unstable. We might attempt to locate it in one’s professional background or academic qualifications, but these credentials are applied unevenly, and authorities with similar expertise will land on vastly different opinions. Judgments change over time as our political views develop and our experiences expand. From the outside, it seems as though the more exhaustive and rigorous a list intends to be, the more vulnerable it is to injury and pressure.
Eventually, I was recruited to participate in the activity I had once scrutinized. They were smaller in scale and scope, limited to a particular time, format, or mode, though they nevertheless forced me to reconcile my participation with my prior suspicion. As I read the instructions for each one, I appreciated their new forms, which were experiments in ways to catalog, or games involving more players to see how expanding the arena might change the outcome. Unlike Sight and Sound’s prestigious, decennial “Greatest Films of All Time” poll, the questionnaires that landed in my inbox displayed more creative, inspiring ambitions: adventure and discovery were prized over certainty and thoroughness.
What grants someone the authority to assert an opinion on what is the best, or the most important? The issue, however, is that critical authority is unstable.
At the end of last year, IDA surveyed its members and Documentary contributors for their “Greatest Docs of the 21st Century” project. With 25 entries gathered from over 300 contributors, the poll counted not just critics, academics, programmers, and filmmakers, but also other industry workers, including impact producers, cinematographers, editors, an agent, an exhibitor, and a composer. The language provided freedom to interpret the meaning of “documentary,” and what “greatest” conveys in the context of a mode with formal, political, and ethical expectations.
For MUBI Notebook, I was asked to program a fantasy double feature among other critics, pairing a new release in conversation with an older film to draw out intriguing, unexpected resonances. Rather than a conventional end-of-year round-up, this task demanded that respondents offer additional context to their choices. The compiled results made no claims about what films were most underrated, overrated, or anticipated, but rather highlighted each critic’s interests, idiosyncrasies, and preferences as subjective.
Inspired by Sight and Sound’s poll, the Belgian magazine and streaming library yanco and Kurzfilm Festival Hamburg compiled the list “‘Greatest’ Short Films of All Time,” consisting of 105 entries. To preface, they acknowledge the debate surrounding the creation of an artistic canon for the format and ask, “Should the list comprise the most culturally and aesthetically valuable shorts? Is it supposed to help us understand cinema as an art form? Does it foster our grasp of cinema history? Do we actually need this kind of ranking?” By interrogating the logic of its motivations and mocking the superlative in its title, the initiative reinforces a case for its existence, promoting dialogue during a time when critical thought is increasingly discouraged and venues for discussion continue to disappear.
In contrast to colossal lists of hundreds of entries, these more flexible lists reminded me of the work of American artist Alexander Calder, who crafted hanging mobiles of sheet metal that responded to the wind, interacting with the slight currents of air around them. He fashioned wood and wire into figural sculptures that were playful yet analytical, rendering humans and animals with amusing geometric shapes. Calder transformed our understanding of sculpture as kinetic, interactive, and ready for any breezes or disturbances. Where many sculptures were heavy and imposing statues, frozen in time with prescribed ways of viewing, his lightweight mobiles demonstrated that new methods of engagement were possible. Without being fixed to the ground, his works could be observed unfolding in time from all angles, nimble and ever-evolving to welcome questions about their making.
By designing a poll that accommodates unconventional answers, Documentary exposes the weakness of traditional understandings of authority, where it can only be held by individuals in specific professions
For lists, the sense of play and agility could manifest through the surveying of an alternative voting body or through the allowance of capacious definitions. By designing a poll that accommodates unconventional answers, Documentary exposes the weakness of traditional understandings of authority, where it can only be held by individuals in specific professions. If a documentary’s greatness is measured by its ability to enact social change, wouldn’t an impact producer be well-positioned to assert their judgment? Or if great documentaries are shaped in post-production, distilling hundreds of hours of footage into the most narratively compelling two, wouldn’t an editor be equipped to note that? In the survey’s embrace of non-critics and non-filmmakers, the results put forward a plurality of authorities, distributing power within the documentary community.
Another way that this project pushes against the already known is the addition of a supplement titled “Singular Picks,” featuring films that only received a single vote across all ballots. To subvert their own list, editor Abby Sun was inspired by Sight and Sound’s list of one-vote wonders titled “Hidden Gems,” published a year after their 2022 edition of “The Greatest Films of All Time.” In it, texts outside of the canon are afforded space, an opportunity to spotlight hybrid and experimental works such as If From Every Tongue it Drips and My Winnipeg, episodic series such as How to With John Wilson, and short films such as Mobile Men and Kony 2012. The pairing offers an ongoing dialectic between center and margin, displaying other methods, subjects, and approaches available to the community beyond feature documentaries.
Of course, the complementary list was curated by the survey’s editors and organizers, but there’s no suggestion that their project is exhaustive or definitive. To borrow from the name of the film journal that published Gorfinkel’s essay, why not call for another list? A list that is organized by qualities other than greatness, that reaches beyond the ordering of films from most to least votes, that remains sensitive to all that lists have historically accomplished and failed to accomplish. Here, though, is a start: in torching conventional list-making wisdom and notions of authority, Documentary proves that the practice may be worth renewing.
