Awards 25/26

US filmmaker Craig Renaud talks to BDE about his late brother; docmaker, journalist and eponymous subject of the Oscar-nominated Armed Only With a Camera. Brent was the first US journalist to die while reporting on the war in Ukraine and, at times, the film makes for a very difficult and disturbing watch. “When Brent was killed, it was instinctual, I knew that I had to keep filming…it was a hundred per cent what Brent would have wanted me to do,” Craig underlines. Brent Renaud is also credited as co-director of the film.

Mr Nobody Against Putin by Pasha Talankin and David Borenstein was handed the gong for Best Documentary during the Bafta award ceremony February 22 at London’s Festival Hall. The film, which is also nominated for Academy Award, follows a Russian teacher (Talankin) who documents the Putin administration’s movements in controlling public perception of the ongoing war in Ukraine.

Academy Award-winning Ahmir 'Questlove' Thompson sat down with Geeta Gandbhir to discuss her Oscar and Bafta-nominated The Perfect Neighbor, about the shooting of Ajike Owens, a Black mother of four, by her white neighbour, who claimed "stand your ground" rights in her defence. “It's really about the intersection of racism, polarisation, anger and predatory laws that lead to violence,” says Gandbhir of her Netflix documentary.

Oscar-nominated actress Fernanda Torres talks to Petra Costa, herself nominated for a feature Doc Academy Award in 2020 for The Edge of Democracy, about the latter’s latest work, Apocalypse in the Tropics, nominated in the Bafta Best Documentary category 2026. The film examines the influence of evangelical Christianity on far-right politics in Brazil, especially during Jair Bolsonaro’s term of office (2019-23). In 2025 Bolsonaro was sentenced to 27 years in prison after he was found guilty of orchestrating a coup d'état to overturn the 2022 election results.

The short documentary The Devil Is Busy comprises a day in the life of Tracii, the head of security at a women's healthcare clinic in Atlanta, Georgia, who works tirelessly to protect the women who are forced to fight through protesters to receive their abortion care. “We wanted to take people through what it means to be in the positions of the staff, the women who are working in this clinic day in and day out, because they are really on the front line of what has turned into a battle,” co-director Gandbhir states. “With many of the protesters outside, it’s like a holy war.”

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced January 22 2026 the nominations in the documentary categories of the 98th Academy Awards®. Five films will now advance to each of the Documentary Feature Film and Documentary Short Film categories. Two hundred and one films were eligible for the Doc Feature category, while 117 films qualified in the Short Doc category. In December 2025 the shortlists were whittled down to 15 films within each category.

Fifty years after her grandmother Michaela Madden was kidnapped and held hostage, director Mimi Wilcox connects this very personal story to the infamous tales of heiress Patty Hearst and Swedish Kristin Enmark, the victim most closely associated with the origins of the term Stockholm Syndrome. As Wilcox tells BDE, her Oscar-shortlisted short film has sparked heated debate about whether the syndrome actually exists, or whether it’s a construct dreamed up by authorities and psychiatrists, invariably male, to demonise the behaviour of hostages, invariably women.

Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus’ feature doc, which world-premiered at Venice, explores the investigative journalism career of Seymour Hersh, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who covered the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War and the Abu Ghraib torture scandal during the Iraq War. The filmmakers talk to US filmmaker Kirsten Johnson.

Hilla Medalia’s Oscar-shortlisted short film follows the silent vigil being held in Tel Aviv by a small group of Israeli activists who stand in a public square holding photos of Palestinian children killed in Gaza by Israel. “We did this film very quickly. We started in June and it was already in theatres in LA at the end of September,” Medalia says. “And we did it with no money…it felt urgent and we needed it out.”

In the short doc Classroom 4, thirty students - 15 of whom are imprisoned, 15 coming from a local college - engage in a fifteen-week course on the history of crime and punishment in the US, all as part of the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program. What emerges is a moving and uplifting study in human connection and a deep acknowledgement of shared values, despite the radically contrasting circumstances of the participants. Director Eden Wurmfeld, professor Reiko Hillyer and student Nick Fiveoaks discuss the Oscar-shortlisted film with BDE.