Awards 25/26

Emmy-winning docmaker Carla Gutierrez (Frida) talks to Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni about their acclaimed feature doc about Iranian Sara Shahverdi, who, as the first elected councilwoman of her remote Iranian village, fearlessly breaks patriarchal traditions by training teenage girls to ride motorcycles and by stopping child marriages. “We wanted to see this conflict. And also we wanted to experience how the society was reflecting on Sara's offer to bring the change in the society,” says co-director Eyni.

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 his documentary Zodiac Killer Project, which world-premiered at Sundance 2025 and is now competing for the Feature Doc Academy Award, Charlie Shackleton ruminates both over his abandoned investigation into a notorious (and unsolved) murder as well as the limitations of the true crime genre. “It does increasingly feel that absolutely the only thing you can get made is true crime or celebrity documentary. And it feels really suffocating,” Shackleton laments to BDE.

In Alison McAlpine’s multi award-winning Perfectly A Strangeness, now nominated for a Short Doc Oscar, three donkeys discover an abandoned astronomical observatory in the desert. When the director first encountered the huge observatory domes in La Silla, in the Chilean desert, she was reminded of the ancient standing stones she saw on the Scottish island of Orkney. “These huge metallic giants, even when they were closed, they felt to me like they were living because of the sounds,” she tells BDE.

Third Act (which premiered in Sundance) is an intimate and loving portrait of Robert A. Nakamura, the pioneering Japanese-American filmmaker often called “The Godfather of Asian American film,” who died earlier this summer. “Initially, we set out just to make a simple biography of my dad, a portrait of an artist celebrating his achievements and career,” Tadashi Nakamura tells BDE. “But anyone could make that biopic. What is the film that only I could make, as his son, in that moment? That was an open-ended question and the challenge.”

Using footage shot by inmates themselves on cellphones, Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman show how squalor, violence and degradation have become commonplace in American jails. At the heart of the documentary is Robert Earl, a long-term prisoner with little chance of parole who has become a leader and spokesperson for the other inmates. “I do feel when we talk to him, it’s as if we are talking to Nelson Mandela when he was on Robben island,” Jarecki tells BDE of their campaigning doc.

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.

The Tale of Silyan works on many levels. It tells the tale of an injured stork being nursed back to health by kindly farmer Nikola, while also highlighting the financial plight of the rural Macedonian farming communities. It is also a story of economic migration as Nikola’s wife, daughter and grandchild are forced to move to Germany. It furthermore recounts the myth of Silyan, a prodigal son who, after turning against his father, was turned into a stork. “This is a story I grew up with,” Kotevska tells BDE of Silyan’s punishment. “My grandparents told it to me while we were observing the storks as kids.”

Producer Jessica Hargrave talks to Business Doc Europe about her highly emotional documentary Come See Me in the Good Light, directed by Ryan White, about the witty, warm and fast-talking word-poet Andrea Gibson, who is facing a terminal cancer diagnosis. “I have never been in a situation like this before when I know almost certainly that I was going to lose someone as I walked toward them,” Hargrave reflects. “It’s a very unusual experience…it helped us recognise the urgency of life.”

It’s 50 years now since the end of the Vietnam war. A still largely unchronicled aspect of the conflict is the plight of the “Amerasian” children born to Vietnamese mothers but abandoned by their American GI fathers. Sang, the subject of Weronika Mliczewska’s new doc Child of Dust (sold by Rise and Shine and an Oscar contender) is one of these lost souls. The director talks to BDE.