Alanis Obomsawin is one of the most important artists in the history of Canadian cinema, a major influence both on the country’s mode of documentary filmmaking and on the way its film business incorporates the voices of people from the First Nations. In 2022, Richard Hill and Hila Peleg curated the exhibition 'Alanis Obomsawin: The Children Have to Hear Another Story.' We spoke with Obomsawin about the exhibition, her films, and her practices of listening and storytelling.
Indigenous Media
Documentary is happy to debut an exclusive clip from Edivan Guajajara, Chelsea Greene, and Rob Grobman’s environmental documentary We Are Guardians (2023), which kicks off a U.S. theatrical screening tour this Friday in Los Angeles. The film, produced by Academy Award winner Fischer Stevens’s Highly Flammable in collaboration with Appian Way, Leonardo DiCaprio’s production company, is a comprehensive examination of the ongoing deforestation crisis in the Amazon Rainforest.
Now a quarter-century old, the Museum of Modern Art’s Doc Fortnight has developed into one of the most sharply curated showcases for nonfiction film in the United States. In a climate of festivals fixated on acquiring flashy premieres, MoMA’s programmers instead focus on finding the new and recent titles that interest them most to give New York a taste of the international doc scene. This year, many of Doc Fortnight’s picks significantly repurpose existing media to new ends: Eight Postcards From Utopia, B.F. Skinner Plays Himself, John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office, Give it Back: Stage Theory, Henry Fonda for President, and An Unfinished Film.
Sundance is a unique crossroads of industry and independence, where you are able to be surprised by films that you didn’t see coming—films that often end up disrupting the film industry’s ideas of marketability, contending for awards and being placed on all sorts of year-end lists, if they’re able to find the right support. As Sundance Film Festival looks to a future away from Park City, looking into questions of location, land, capital, culture, and evolution, I find myself attracted to the films in the 2025 lineup that seek context and answers to these same questions: Move Ya Body: The Birth of House, BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions, Seeds, Free Leonard Peltier, and Khartoum.
Lisa Jackson is an Anishinaabe documentary maker working across multiple genres—film, XR, and installations—to share Indigenous stories and knowledge. Her most recent work, Wilfred Buck’s Star Stories, is a dome presentation bringing to life four star stories, gathered and told by renowned Cree astronomer, star knowledge expert, and author Wilfred Buck. It also features excerpts from her 2024 documentary Wilfred Buck, which explored the astronomer’s life, work, and philosophy. Documentary talked to Jackson about creating for different genres, reciprocity, and using technology in the context of sharing Indigenous knowledge. Star Stories, created in collaboration with the Macronautes, premieres at the 2025 Berlinale in the Forum Expanded section.
This year’s Flaherty NYC Series, MAKA: Many Eyed Vessel , will mark the 25th edition of the Flaherty Seminar’s annual fall program in New York City
Morzaniel Ɨramari, an Indigenous documentary-maker from the Amazon rainforest, is traveling with his third film, Mãri Hi - The Tree of Dream, in order to raise awareness about his people’s current plight. He is the first filmmaker from among the Yanomami, an ethnic group of roughly 35,000 foraging agriculturalists stewarding a Nebraska-sized swathe of the Amazon, who live in equilibrium with nature. During Bolsonaro’s reign, through a calamitous combination of state neglect and an influx of illegal miners hungry for gold, the Yanomami suffered what President Lula da Silva terms “an attempted genocide.”
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home. Older Than the Crown, from
IDA's Logan Elevate Grant, which is made possible through the generosity of the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, aims to uplift emerging filmmakers
When Yolŋu filmmaker Ishmael Marika first found a 1970s recording of his grandfather speaking to his fathers as a small child, he was overwhelmed. He