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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.

When making Deepfaking Sam Altman (2025), documentary director Adam Bhala Lough (Telemarketers) found himself in deep doo doo. Despite months of trying, he still hadn’t gotten access to an interview with Sam Altman (CEO of OpenAI) for a film Lough had promised about AI. So he took a page from Altman’s own MO. The resulting film follows Lough setting about on his journey, working with deepfakers in India, meeting with lawyers, and ultimately spending a lot of time chatting and bonding with the resulting AI chatbot, called SamBot. For this edition of The Synthesis, we spoke with Lough about the film, his use of AI, and its implications for documentary.

Pinny Grylls and Sam Crane’s Grand Theft Hamlet (2024) is the latest in a wave of documentaries shot entirely inside Grand Theft Auto or other video games. Playing a game is often no longer a solitary exercise but a social one, and we can understand games not as experiences separate from the “real” world but as an extension of it. Within that new paradigm, it makes sense that we’re seeing more documentaries explore game spaces as if they are physical ones. Professional filmmakers and computer engineers alike recognized games’ potential as playgrounds for formal experimentation years before this trend.

Last year, national and international press widely reported on what The Globe and Mail described as “the most tumultuous year in the festival’s history,” complete with sweeping personnel changes, social and financial pressures, and the temporary closure of their flagship Ted Rogers Cinema. Though Hot Docs managed to pull through for its 32nd year with a new executive director (Diana Sanchez, formerly of TIFF) and a replenished staff (some of the programmers, including department head Heather Haynes, returned after their prior exodus), what frightened this hamstrung fixture of Toronto’s flailing film scene was dismally clear. Social issues don’t entirely permeate the programming, nor do their chosen films observe such issues in totality, but Hot Docs has always strived to stay in tune with urgent matters of the present, especially through films that align their audience’s point of view with what will one day be the right side of history.

Amid the past few decades of Holocaust-focused works, queer artist Kinga Michalska has found a unique approach to “the Holocaust memory documentary” in their native Poland. Their feature-length debut, Bedrock, is a psychological journey through the contemporary sites of former concentration camps and mass graves. It also poses the rhetorical question: What does “never again” really mean? Bedrock premiered in the Panorama section at the Berlinale, where Documentary spoke with Kinga Michalska.

This year, the Pare Lorentz Documentary Fund theme will be: Migration in and to the Americas. While based in the United States, IDA has long championed documentary filmmaking across borders and worldwide. IDA has members in over eighty countries, and nearly half of our staff and board come from outside the US. Cross-cultural, transnational dialogue is at the heart of who we are and what we do. Supporting documentaries means defending both freedom of expression and freedom of movement. Increasingly, those in power seek to close borders, narrowly define who belongs, and exclude others, often

We received yet another threat to free speech and expression by documentary filmmakers, this time, the call comes from Hungary. Our friends at the Hungarian Documentary Association have published the statement below on May 15.

Founded in 2008, Doc Alliance is a collaborative network of seven key European documentary festivals—CPH:DOX, Doclisboa, FIDMarseille, Ji.hlava, Vision du Réel, Dok Leipzig, Millennium Docs Against Gravity—dedicated to promoting arthouse non-fiction cinema and supporting emerging filmmakers. For over 15 years, the initiative has played a pivotal role in strengthening the continent’s documentary scene by fostering inter-festival collaboration and increasing exposure for independent work. Spearheading many of its recent efforts is Galya Stepanova, the network’s coordinator and one of the driving forces behind its growing industry profile. Ahead of this year’s Cannes Film Festival and its Marché du Film (May 13–24), Documentary magazine sat down with her to discuss the Doc Alliance Award, long-term strategic goals, and how the network is adapting to better serve new voices and cross-border exchange.

Twelve days before Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse (2024) was set to broadcast on April 15 across PBS stations nationwide as part of its strand American Masters, the filmmakers were told that a 90-second sequence—which shows the famous artist discussing an anti-Trump cartoon he created for the 2017 Women’s March newspaper—would be cut from the documentary.

With over three decades of learned experience from Disney, Oscars, Fox Sports, GSN, and the NFL in the areas of programming and production, Erik’s skillset is rich and vast. The depth of his industry experience, accompanied with an extensive education from CSU Fullerton, UC Santa Barbara, UCLA, Emory University, and Berklee College of Music, makes him a powerful force of creativity.