Oscar Documentary Feature Race Predictions

Susan Lorincz. For many Netflix viewers, the name inspires revulsion.

Lorincz is the white woman who fired a gunshot through her front door, killing her Black neighbor, Ajike Owens in 2023, invoking Florida’s notorious “stand your ground” law. Geeta Gandbhir’s chilling documentary about the case, The Perfect Neighbor, constructed primarily from police body cam and dash cam video, won five awards at the Critics’ Choice Documentary Awards, including Best Documentary Feature.

Those honors and many others, including the documentary directing award at Sundance, have positioned The Perfect Neighbor as an Oscar favorite. For Netflix, which used to dominate the Best Documentary Feature category at the Oscars, it marks an opportunity to get back into serious contention. The streamer won in 2018 for Icarus, 2020 for American Factory, and in 2021 for My Octopus Teacher, but since then, has recorded a single Oscar nomination for Best Doc Feature — for To Kill a Tiger in 2024 — a film it only acquired after it was nominated. 

This year is different.

Not only does Netflix contend with The Perfect Neighbor, but with two other award-winning features: Cover-Up, the exploration of investigative journalist Seymour Hersh directed by Oscar winner Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus, and Apocalypse in the Tropics, Oscar nominee Petra Costa’s examination of the rise of Christian Nationalism in Brazil.

“It’s an honor,” Gandbhir says of the recognition, quickly adding that she hopes the streamer keeps investing in serious, premium documentaries. “We want Netflix to continue to support our colleagues. These films that are not, again, celebrity, that are not, again, salacious, that are not, again, the types we’ve seen as the only things being bought… we’re hoping that the streamers realize that these films are commercially viable political films. Films that tackle hard topics actually do appeal to audiences.”

Netflix, naturally, will face plenty of competition in its pursuit of the golden statuette. Kino Lorber, Oscar-nominated last year for Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, fields strong contenders in Riefenstahl, Andres Veiel’s investigation of German director Leni Riefenstahl, and Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, director Sepideh Farsi’s account of Palestinian poet and photojournalist Fatma Hassona as she endured the Israeli siege of Gaza.

Farsi and her protagonist got to know each other through video calls (the director attempted to get into Gaza to film but couldn’t cross the Egyptian border). Within hours of the documentary being accepted at the Cannes Film Festival, Hassona was killed in an Israeli drone strike.

“This bonding [through video calls], which shaped very quickly and very deeply, all made it so at the same time beautiful and also hard because I worry for her,” Farsi explains. “And when the film was finished and it was selected for Cannes, I thought, ‘OK, we made it.’ And I tell her and she says, ‘Yes, I’m coming. I asked for the visa, everything.’ And literally the news of the selection [for Cannes], I got it the day I was pitching the film in Nyon at Visions du Réel in Switzerland, and they called me from Cannes. They say, ‘We’ve selected your film.’ And then I tell Fatma all of that, and then she gets killed the day after. She’s targeted by the Israeli army.”

Two other films that premiered at Cannes enter the Oscar race as strong contenders: My Mom Jayne, Mariska Hargitay’s HBO documentary about her mother, actress Jayne Mansfield, and Orwell: 2+2=5, from Neon, Raoul Peck’s close reading of the work of George Orwell, especially 1984, and its relevance to today with the global rise of right-wing authoritarianism.

“We are in the middle of an era of ‘Newspeak,’” Peck observes. “Orwell’s analysis was what I would say is the template of everything we’re living through right now.”

Cover-Up from Poitras and Obenhaus, and The Tale of Silyan directed by Tamara Kotevska, premiered relatively late in the year — at the Venice Film Festival. National Geographic acquired Silyan out of Venice, where it dazzled audiences with a mythic tale set in the director’s native North Macedonia, a favorite nesting area of majestic white storks. In the film, a man named Nikola is forced to give up his life of farming and instead goes to work at landfill where he comes across an injured stork picking through refuse.

“Once Nikola captured this stork and he made a decision to take care of it in front of our eyes, it started unraveling something that was just shocking and pure magic and something none of us has seen or witnessed before,” Kotevska says. “We witnessed in real life, in real time, the story of a man saving a stork and a stork saving a man.” 

Oscar winner Mstyslav Chernov returns to contention with 2000 Meters to Andriivka. The film, like his earlier 20 Days in Mariupol, plunges viewers into the war in Ukraine, this time examining the brutal meter-by-meter firefight by Ukrainian forces to retake a town occupied by Russian invaders.

“I keep the perspective very narrow — just in that forest. There is a certain claustrophobic feeling when you’re stuck in that strip of trees that are cut by shrapnel and bombs and machine guns and there is no way out. And I think this is a metaphor for the entire war,” Chernov says. “We, as Ukrainians, are stuck in this war. We can’t get out because Ukraine is under attack. And of course, people are trying to defend their home, and they just can’t stop this war. So, it’s a metaphor of the endless war. It is of a nightmare we cannot wake up from.”

Two films that examine repression in Russia, particularly as it relates to any discussion of the war in Ukraine, are making an Oscar bid: My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow, a 5-hour 24-minute documentary by Julia Loktev, and Mr. Nobody Against Putin, directed by David Borenstein and co-directed by Pavel Talankin.

In recent years, the absence of a U.S. distribution deal hasn’t prevented documentaries from earning Oscar nominations — or in the case of No Other Land, from winning the Academy Award. Many hopefuls find themselves in the same boat this year. Four of them — Coexistence, My Ass!, Cutting Through Rocks, Heightened Scrutiny and Life After are joining forces for a DIY FYC campaign. A similar effort last year yielded Oscar documentary shortlist recognition for Hollywoodgate and Union.

Holding Liat, winner of the top prize for documentary at the Berlin Film Festival, lacks U.S. distribution but is mounting a vigorous Oscar bid. The film directed by Brandon Kramer and produced by Lance Kramer follows the family of an American Israeli woman, Liat Beinin Atzili, in the days and weeks after she and her husband were seized by Hamas on October 7 and spirited off to captivity in Gaza. The film doesn’t cleave along typical “pro-Israeli” or “pro-Palestinian” faultlines, but takes its lead from the parents of Liat, who insisted that Palestinians should not be dehumanized in the rush to retaliate for October 7.

“Liat’s father’s experience and his perspective… was a narrative we did not see out there in the world,” Brandon Kramer notes. “Within days of Liat being taken, he was very vocal in saying that ‘I don’t want my daughter’s or son-in-law’s pain or the trauma that my family is going through to be used to justify further violence against Palestinians.’ And we felt that that was a perspective that was really, really urgent and needed in this moment.”

Come See Me in the Good Light, Ryan White’s documentary about poet Andrea Gibson, earned a leading six nominations for the Cinema Eye Honors. It’s got the backing of Apple TV, but another film without U.S. distribution — Brittany Shyne’s Seeds — constitutes an X factor in this year’s Oscar race. Seeds is one of the most honored documentaries of the year, earning five Cinema Eye Honors nominations and the top prize for U.S. documentary at the Sundance Film Festival, among other awards. 

Kim A. Snyder is coming off a year in which she earned her first Oscar nomination, for the short documentary Death by Numbers. She’s back in contention this year with the feature documentary The Librarians, her compelling look at how many librarians at public schools and libraries in the U.S. have come under vicious attack from people who accuse them, irrationally, of grooming children. Sarah Jessica Parker, who serves as an executive producer on the film, expresses alarm over what’s been happening.

“The safety and wellbeing of these librarians who are pursuing the idea of education, the gateway to information and curiosity — for anybody to step in the way of the opportunity to learn is really tragic,” Parker says. “The consequences of them trying to protect that is incredibly serious.”

Two filmmaker brothers enter Oscar contention with award-winning projects. Andrew Jarecki, an Oscar nominee and Emmy winner, uncovers shocking conditions behind prison walls in his HBO documentary The Alabama Solution, co-directed with Charlotte Kaufman — winner of Best Political Documentary at the Critics’ Choice Documentary Awards. His brother Eugene Jarecki, meanwhile, contends with The Six Billion Dollar Man, a Watermelon Pictures release that takes a fresh look at Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. It won two awards at Cannes — the Golden Globe Prize and the L’Oeil d’or Special Jury Prize.

It’s a wide-open race for Best Documentary Feature this year, making for excitement for Academy Awards watchers and anxiety for filmmakers. Clarity will come when the Oscar shortlists for documentary feature and documentary short (as well as eight other categories) are revealed on Tuesday, December 16.