Docs about Politics

The world’s oldest documentary festival continues its commitment to an equitable world, from supporting exiled filmmakers to its programming

IndieCollect’s Sandra Schulberg reflects on the life of fellow co-founder Jill Godmilow, the iconoclastic filmmaker, beloved teacher, and influential

Working with over 1,000 hours of archival footage, Ian Bell and Alex Megaro connect their record of Seattle’s 1999 mass protests, WTO/99, with present

Petra Costa’s new documentary Apocalypse in the Tropics explores the “fatal marriage” between Christian nationalism and authoritarian politics

In this interview, Lee Anne Schmitt discusses how Evidence uses childhood objects and family memories to investigate the propagation of conservative

In Tatyana Tenenbaum's Everything You Have Is Yours, we see dancer Hadar Ahuvia as she develops her performance by the same name, the culmination of years spent celebrating her own Jewish identity while also challenging Israeli tradition. After its theatrical run in NY, Documentary spoke to Tenenbaum about adapting her work in dance documentation to documentary, dance film tropes, and political activism in a nonverbal art form.

With The Encampments, directors Kei Pritsker and Michael Workman forge a counter-narrative to the mainstream media. Embedded with the encampment at Columbia University, which became a particular focal point in this controversy, they let the students speak for themselves. The Encampments pulled in the largest single-theater opening ever for a documentary (it was also the second-highest opening PTA) before expanding to over 50 markets last weekend. Amid the film’s early theatrical success, we sat down with Pritsker over Zoom to discuss the making of the film, its context in current political events, and adjusting the distribution timetable.

Despite the fact that CPH:DOX has emerged as a highly successful and thriving destination for the documentary industry every spring, this year’s event was shrouded by global economic and political turmoil. If previous year’s editions rehashed familiar complaints about financing and distribution woes, this year’s threats were both more urgently physical and existential. American documentary filmmakers looking for life preservers in Europe in the face of the “MAGA-ification of U.S. gatekeepers”—as Variety called it in a festival report—found the consensus in Copenhagen was that it wasn’t going to be easy.

No summary could ever do justice to what Belgian filmmaker Johan Grimonprez has created through his audiovisual-textual collage Soundtrack to a Coup d’État (2024). The year 1960, famously called the “Year of Africa,” serves as the political, social, and cultural matrix on which Grimonprez builds his manifold narrative—moving back and forth in time and space, layering sound, image, and text with texture and depth. Now an Oscar nominee, the documentarian comes well-prepared, armed with the quintessential skills of an avid researcher and a seasoned orator, opening new tabs in our minds with each question while anticipating potential criticisms with humility and curiosity. Documentary magazine sat down with Grimonprez to discuss Soundtrack to a Coup d’État in his format of choice: a dialogue.

The lineup of the 2025 Sundance World Documentary section was more expansive in its geopolitical interest than last year’s. This year the dissenting subtext assumed functional pointedness, with each work making a broader statement against hostile governments. The theaters went packed and audiences cheered as the snow-clad Park City lent an otherworldly, almost mythical safe space to the independent makers and their works. Although there is speculation of the festival moving out of state in 2027, it is difficult to imagine a setting more suited to Sundance than Utah. The inconveniences, like the high altitude and the extreme dry weather, somehow added to the charm and made me feel, albeit perversely, like I had earned the right to be an attendee.