Awards 25/26

In Predators, US director David Osit examines the rise and fall of the infamous TV programme To Catch a Predator, and asks some uncomfortable questions of its tangled legacy in the process. “I wanted to make a film that…really tried to unsettle you, to unmoor what your convictions were, and to make you have a different kind of experience with what you were watching,” Osit tells BDE, adding how the public reaction to the film has been what he has hoped for, “that it crawls under your skin.”

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.”

Roger Ross Williams (Stamped From The Beginning) speaks to Geeta Gandbhir about her Sundance-winning feature doc The Perfect Neighbor, which presents a devastating critique of race, inequality and the vigilante-style ‘stand your ground’ legislation in operation in the US today, and which details the events leading up to the murder of Gandbhir’s friend Ajike Owens. The director recalled the conversation she had with Ajike’s mother Pam in terms of the outreach support she could offer after the tragic loss. “I have no money to give you. I'm not a doctor. I'm not a lawyer…but I think I can make a film.”

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.

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.

Director Eugene Jarecki, Stella Assange and lawyer Jennifer Robinson reflect on Jarecki’s documentary which analyses the treatment meted out to journalist and whistle-blower Julian Assange by numerous governments, including those of the UK and US. “I think there is a story here that is so explosive for the public, so revealing and so much about today, that there is going to be a massive appetite for it.” Jarecki says of his film, which won a special jury prize at Cannes 2025, and is now an awards front-runner.

Flemming Fynsk’s intimate portrait of Ginny Williams (1927-2019) brings to life the story of a collector who seemed to have an instinct for female artists who were destined to take the art world by storm. “I'm all about character and heart and originality and I just had this feeling that it's rare to meet a character like her, somebody who's so confident in who she is, and how she interacts with the world. And I had a great desire to capture it,” Fynsk tells 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.

Told in five distinct acts that span the period between the Prague Spring of 1968 and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Klára Tasovská’s I’m Not Everything I Want to Be, the Czech Republic's candidate for an Oscar in the International Feature Film category, chronicles the journey towards both artistic freedom and sexual liberation undertaken by renowned Czech photographer Libuše Jarcovjáková. Her story is told using approximately 3000 still photographs and the diaries she kept from those years.

Joshua Seftel’s new film follows well-known CBS broadcast journalist Steve Hartman and his friend, photographer Lou Bopp, as they visit homes of kids who lost their lives in school shootings. “I felt that this approach Steve was taking was just a beautiful way of reframing the issue and taking it out of the usual political debate,” Seftel tells BDE, “and focusing on the human toll this was taking and the ripple it leaves with these families who no longer have a child, but just have an empty room.”