It’s tempting to pick nits about the relative merits of prizewinners and other films, and even more tempting to take a handful of the 346 new films as somehow indicative of the festival as a whole, but the truth is that a slate the size of IFFR’s can make proclamations about its strength difficult: two different attendees can carve distinct paths and have dissimilar takeaways. That’s one reason why a festival is more than just the films one watches.
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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.
Documentary is happy to debut an exclusive clip from Beth Lane’s debut feature UnBroken , which won a prize for best documentary feature premiere at Heartland International Film Festival in Indianapolis, Indiana. The documentary chronicles the story of the director’s mother and her six siblings as they escape Nazi Germany, and the modern-day reverberations of their separation from their father, Lane’s grandfather Alexander. Greenwich Entertainment is releasing the film in theaters this Friday, February 21, 2025, at the Quad in NYC, Laemmle Town Center in Encino, CA, and more. On the clip, Lane
Year after year, TIFF Docs tends to be populated by glossy, formally conventional, commercial fare—occasionally punctuated by works from prolific documentarians and festival award winners. Nonfiction works marked by innovation and ambition are pushed to the periphery, a consistent gesture that betrays what the festival regards as “best” in the arena of nonfiction cinema. Here and elsewhere, I couldn’t help but feel the subtle repositioning of the festival in anticipation of the impending launch of TIFF’s official market in 2026. Invitations to seek hidden, artistically driven gems, to interrogate the collapsing of boundaries between fiction and nonfiction remained open across other programs such as Wavelengths and Centrepiece.
The New York Film Festival (NYFF), now in its 62nd edition, is one of the biggest film festivals in the United States and, along with TIFF, the most important second-run festival in North America. This year’s edition found itself in the intersection of a number of conflicts surrounding the ongoing Israeli bombing of Gaza. These events serve as a reminder, despite the protestation of some donors, that no one can truly shut politics out of the festival. As it happens, protest was itself the subject of many of films in the festival.
In The Dialogue Police , protests, Quran burnings, and political gatherings take center stage. This timely doc, helmed by veteran Susanna Edwards, takes a closer look at the specialized titular police unit, established after the Göteborg riots in 2001. Tasked with bridging the gap between protesters and police leadership, their mission is to uphold democratic values and prevent escalation through dialogue. However, maintaining composure in highly charged situations proves to be a demanding and draining responsibility for many within the group. Notably, Edwards’ film resonates with themes
While the origins of Valentine’s Day may be more historical and religious in nature, we use this day to show our appreciation and love for those around us: family, friends, significant others, and even our pets. Here are a few docs suggested by IDA Staff to watch this holiday weekend in the name of love.
In October 2023, as part of the series Making a Production, Documentary profiled the London-based production company Grain Media. As a small independent production company focused exclusively on documentary, they were managing to succeed, with difficulty, in a very challenging climate for documentary. At the end of 2024, the company’s Netflix documentaries The Lost Children and Buy Now: The Shopping Conspiracy achieved global prominence. At the same time, the company had to make its first redundancies, letting go of a handful of its long-serving staff. Documentary caught up with Grain’s founder and head Orlando von Einsiedel to discuss the ups and downs of the last year, and how they reflect what is going on in the global documentary industry.
The National Endowment for the Arts announced radical updates to its parameters for Fiscal Year 2026 funding via press release on Thursday, February 6. Under these new guidelines, funding in the main Grants for Arts Projects (GAP) program will be distributed to “projects that celebrate the nation’s rich artistic heritage and creativity by honoring the semiquincentennial of the United States of America.” In the past, the NEA has not required applicants to adhere to topic-related proposals. This news arrives just one week after Trump signed an executive order establishing a task force to
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.