The 79th edition of the French festival offered some nonfiction gems for those willing to look beyond its headline titles
Retrospectives
A new program on Cinema-ye Azad, an underground filmmaking movement that emerged in Iran in 1969, foregrounds its relationship to documentary practice
Želimir Žilnik discusses six decades of work from his early films to Eighty Plus , and their piercing, political critiques of Yugoslavia and modern
A BAFICI retrospective on Pere Portabella highlights the Catalan filmmaker’s longstanding affinity for documentary practice
In this interview, Crumb director Terry Zwigoff looks back on his documentary films and how he turned production obstacles into creative opportunities
A new Raymond Depardon retrospective presents the full breadth of the French filmmaker and photojournalist’s keen-eyed documentary impulses
DOK Leipzig 2025: Doc Together, ‘The Thing to Be Done,’ ‘Elephants & Squirrels,’ and ‘A Scary Movie’
The world’s oldest documentary festival continues its commitment to an equitable world, from supporting exiled filmmakers to its programming
Bernardo Ruiz reflects on his decades-long career, “humblecore” independent filmmaking, and the first retrospective of his work
For decades, Katja Raganelli’s documentaries safeguarded the stories of female filmmakers when the industry tried to erase them
Frederick Wiseman is a pillar of American documentary, yet much of his work has historically been difficult to view in a high-quality format. For the first 40 years of his expansive career, Wiseman shot each of his deep-diving, sometimes epic-length explorations of various institutions on 16mm, not transitioning to digital until the late 2000s. Over the course of five years and in collaboration between Wiseman’s company Zipporah Films and the Library of Congress, the Harvard Film Archive, the late DuArt Film Lab, and Goldcrest Post, 33 of his features—from his debut Titicut Follies (1967) to State Legislature (2006)—received 4K restorations. Beyond being a vital work of preservation for one of our most important documentarians, the effort has precipitated one of the biggest repertory cinema events of the year in cities on multiple continents. Amidst these retrospectives, we sat down to speak with Wiseman over the phone about the restoration process, his literary influences, and how newer audiences have received his work.