168 Documentaries to Compete for the Oscar

By Glenn Charlie Dunks

The Academy has announced the long (long, very long) list for this year’s Best Documentary Feature category. 168 titles have qualified for members of the doc branch to whittle down to a 15-wide shortlist and then a nominated five. That figure is higher than last year, which had 144 eligible titles and which culminated in a win for Daniel Roher’s Navalny. 

If you were to ask me right now what titles I expect to find on this year’s shortlist, I might say the following: Against the Tide (Sarvnik Kaur), American Symphony (Matthew Heineman), Anonymous Sister (Jamie Boyle), The Eternal Memory (Maite Alberdi), Four Daughters (Kaouther Ben Hania), Lakota Nation vs United States (Laura Tomaselli, Jesse Short Bull), Little Richard: I Am Everything (Lisa Cortés), The Mission (Jesse Moss, Amanda McBaine), Occupied City (Steve McQueen), Silver Dollar Road (Raoul Peck), Smoke Sauna Sisterhood (Anna Hints), A Still Small Voice (Luke Lorentzen), Still: A Michael J Fox Movie (Davis Guggenheim), To Kill a Tiger (Nisha Pahuja) and 20 Days in Mariupol (Mstyslav Chernov). But the whims of this branch can change on a dime, so we won’t know until the shortlists announcements later this month.

You can scroll through the entire list below beginning with After Sherman through to Your Fat Friend. I have linked to reviews of titles where we have them, but also included ten short capsules for other titles that I have seen and been unfortunately lax in actually writing about.

After Sherman
Against the Tide
AKA Mr. Chow
Alexander
American: An Odyssey to 1947
American Symphony
Americonned
And Miles to Go Before I Sleep
Anhell69
Anonymous Sister
Another Body

Anselm
It's not quite Pina, but then not much is. Wenders' camera glides around, above and through the works of its otherwise unknowable subject. This use of form, accentuated by 3D and incorporating archival footage in fun ways, offers a fuller picture of Anselm Kiefer than a dozen standard bio-docs that follow Wikipedia and don't actually engage with the art itself ever could. It’s quiet and less likely to sweep a viewer up like Pina did or even another of Wenders’ works of artistic endeavour, Buena Vista Social Club, but it is resonant.

Apache Blues: Welcome Home
Apolonia, Apolonia
Bad Press
Batata
Bella
Bella!
Beyond Utopia
Bobi Wine: The People’s President
Bye Bye Tiberias
Canary
Carlos
Carterland

Close to Vermeer
Does a nicely subtle job of balancing the art with business, which is something all too rare in these sort of classical art world docs that rather grotesquely focus far too much on commerce. Here, its subjects don't just talk about Vermeer in reverence; they get choked up, emotional and visibly moved. It's a connection that means by its final stretches, as artworks get taken down and put up on walls, I too was moved.

But, I will also say, besides that, Suzanne Raes' doc does feature one bit of incredible editing: when in one scene two art scholars and historians observe a contested Vermeer, claiming it doesn't have the quality of even his most modest of works and that it is, basically, bad art and a piece of shit. Snap cut to the artwork’s American owner, slick and besuited, walking into the room and pontificating about it to their bemusement. Good work.

Common Ground
A Compassionate Spy
Cup of Salvation
De Humani Corporis Fabrica
Deep Rising
The Deepest Breath
Deserters
Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy
The Disappearance of Shere Hite
Dosed: The Trip of a Lifetime
Downwind
Eat Bitter
The Echo
El Juicio
Elis & Tom – It Had to Be You
The Eternal Memory
Every Body
Fantastic Machine
Finding Her Beat
Fioretta
For the Animals
Four Daughters
Full Circle
Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project
Grandpa Was an Emperor
Have You Got It Yet? The Story of Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd
Here. Is. Better.
High & Low – John Galliano
The Holly
Holy Frit
I Got a Monster
If You Let Me Go
Imagining the Indian
Immediate Family
In the Company of Rose
In the Rearview
In the Shadow of Beirut
In Viaggio: The Travels of Pope Francis
Incompatible With Life
Into the Spotlight
The Invention of the Other
Invisible Beauty
The Issues with Tissue: A Boreal Love Story
It Ain’t Over
Joan Baez: I Am a Noise
Joonam
King Coal
Knights of Santiago

Kokomo City
Not necessarily a fan of some of how this was shot, as if unsure what to actually focus on. And its lack of any sort of narrative or even editing logic does D Smith's subjects a disservice. This may be why I preferred Zackary Drucker and Kristen Parker Lovell’s The Stroll (not on the long-list), although it seems reductive and even a little bit churlish to compare the two. Especiaally when the stories here are just as fascinating. It’s a miracle that any films would (wisely!) give its subjects the space to tell them. It should be celebrated for that.

The Lady Bird Diaries
Lakota Nation vs. United States
Land of My Dreams
The Last Rider
The League
Lift
Little Richard: I Am Everything
The Lost Weekend: A Love Story
The Melt Goes On Forever: The Art & Times of David Hammons
Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros

The Mission
At the Q&A after my screening of this movie, its filmmakers (Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine of Boys State) spoke and I noted what they said about National Geographic, the film’s eventual distributor. They said that National Geographic would need to allow the film to interrogate the part their publication played in the sort of missionary ethnography that The Mission’s subject, John Chau, undertook. I don’t think The Mission does that. It also doesn’t really interrogate John Chau or his collaborators, letting them off the hook in a misguided effort to give this young man the benefit of the doubt in death.

The filmmakers appear to want to project something bigger upon him and his story, when really he was just doing the very thing that had been drilled into him by a hypocritical church and its predatory youth wing. Offers morsels of greater understanding around colonialism, but doesn't dig into them enough. I've seen the insidious ways the church leverages the desire of the young to be accepted and incorporates this into their recruitment and their teachings. The Mission seems to see him as naive rather than a genuine villain, which seems like a giant misreading of what he actually tried to do to the Indigenous people of North Sentinel Island.

Mission Peace: The Staunch Moderates Documentary
The Mother of All Lies
Motherland

The Mountains
The epitome of "men will spend several years making a whole movie instead of going to therapy." Boys, just go to therapy. I don't feel as if the film answered any of its own questions. This is something that is not helped by its central figure and director (Christian Einshøj) not wishing to turn the gaze upon himself. And, like, hi mum. Why not speak to her? An odd one. Watch Sam Now instead.

Mourning in Lod
Mr. Jimmy                           
Music Is My Life – Dr. Joseph Shabalala and Ladysmith Black Mambazo
My Name Is Happy
Nam June Paik: Moon is the Oldest TV
1946: The Mistranslation That Shifted Culture

North Circular
Director Luke McManus manages to tap into a well of history with an eye firmly on the now, exploring class and society through the songs that populate the Irish culture. Another film that chose rich blacks and silvers to tell its story for which it is entirely appropriate. The sort of film you can put on and be completely surprised it is over some 86-minutes later. Like a cold night in at the pub, not so coincidentally I am sure.

Occupied City

Orlando, My Political Biography
I admire the swing of Paul B. Preciado’s film about queer, trans and non-binary bodies and the way Virginia Woolf’s words in Orlando continue to resonate nearly 100 years later. I admire the swing, but found the film left me cold. Having said that, it has the sort of genuinely queer aura of not giving a single fuck about whether I or anybody ‘gets’ it or not, so it’s probably much better than my mere reaction to it can possibly ‘get’. It is its own thing and that is fabulous.

Our Body
Pacific Mother
The Padilla Affair
The Painting
Pay or Die
Periodical
Photophobia
Pianoforte
Pictures of Ghosts

The Pigeon Tunnel
As somebody who is not particularly well-versed in the writings of John le Carré (aka David Cornwell), I was surprised as how much I enjoyed this. As is often the case with biographies of this sort, Errol Morris’ The Pigeon Tunnel less a dictated history of events but instead a conversation. And it helps that for this conversation, Morris has himself a man who at the time of filming was still whip smart, his lips curling ever so devilishly when he knows he's said something particularly witty. Like his books, it gets at the author through some less-than-direct means but in doing so tells a more captivating story. The title does have a meaning, although I kind of wish Morris had not tried to be so knowingly aloof with it and becomes a bit of a creative whiff.

Plan C
Radical Wolfe
Razing Liberty Square
Reality Winner
Refuge
A Revolution on Canvas
Rewind & Play
A Rising Fury
Robert Irwin: A Desert of Pure Feeling
Rojek
Sam Now
Samuel and the Light
The Secret Cities of Mark Kistler
Shot in the Arm
Show Her the Money
Silver Dollar Road                 
Sly
The Smell of Money

Smoke Sauna Sisterhood
A remarkable Estonian feature (also their International Feature submission) that never forgets to look impeccable even when being unobtrusive. Anna Hints’ first feature is full of beautifully composed images of women in solitude with nature. The camera lingering on their bodies, tangled in cross-legged knots, dripping with sweat, and running naked into the icy waters without shame or indignity.

A Song Film by Kishi Bashi – ‘Omoiyari’
Songs of Earth
Sound of the Police
Splice Here: A Projected Odyssey
Stamped From the Beginning
State of the Unity    
Stephen Curry: Underrated
A Still Small Voice
Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie
A Storm Foretold

Subject
It is all just a bit convenient, isn’t it? There is a conversation to be had about documentary and non-fiction’s exploitation of ‘subjects’ (and many have been having it already for years), but there's a ~vibe~ here that feels off. I don’t really know how best to explain it, other than that. Similar, perhaps, to last year’s Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power where a filmmakers own thesis gets in the way of allowing them to see beyond it. Although I enjoyed it when it was jumping around through documentary history, it gets curiously less interesting once it lands on individual stories in episodic format (although the content therein is certainly worth examining). A curiosity.

Symphony of the Holocaust
Taylor Mac’s 24-Decade History of Popular Music
32 Sounds
This Much We Know
They Shot the Piano Player
Thy Neighbors
Tito, Margot and Me
To Kill a Tiger
Total Trust

20 Days in Mariupol
The sort of movie where you are thankful it is only 90-minutes long because it’s so hard to keep watching. I didn’t care much for how it was assembled, which is perhaps a symptom of it being the first film by journalist Mstyslav Chernov. But the images he captures are arresting, haunting and speak to the catastrophic destruction heaped upon Ukraine.

26.2 to Life        
Twice Colonized
Umberto Eco: A Library of the World
Uncharitable
Unconditional
Under the Sky of Damascus
Unfinished Business
Unseen
Unzipped: An Autopsy of American Inequality
Victim/Suspect
We Dare to Dream
What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat and Tears?
While the Green Grass Grows
While We Watched
Who I Am Not
Wild Beauty: Mustang, Spirit of the West
Yoshiki Under the Sky
You Were My First Boyfriend
Your Fat Friend

Comments

[NATHANIEL R]

Thank you for covering this. I have also updated the charts to reflect this list (and my predictions for the 'finalists'

[Cláudio Alves]

I'm so happy ANHELL69 is eligible. It's one of the most haunting films I've seen all year.

[Kris]

Partly wishful thinking, partly the locks like American Symphony, Going to Mars and the Michael J Fox movie, these are my guesses for the 15:
American Symphony
Apolonia, Apolonia
Beyond Utopia
Bobi Wine: The People’s President
The deepest breath
The Eternal Memory
Four Daughters
Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project
Kokomo City
Motherland
Silver Dollar Road
Smoke Sauna Sisterhood
Still: A Michael J Fox Movie
To Kill a Tiger
20 Days in Mariupol