Countdown to the Oscars: Best Documentary Feature

Welcome to this year’s edition of Last Cinema Standing’s Countdown to the Oscars, where we will break down each of the 23 categories, analyze the films, and make some guesses at their awards prospects.

Best Documentary Feature

The nominees are:

Bobi Wine: The People’s President

The Eternal Memory

Four Daughters

To Kill a Tiger

20 Days in Mariupol

It would be wrong not to acknowledge the tragic death of Russian opposition party leader Alexei Navalny, the subject of last year’s Documentary Feature winner. Director Daniel Rohrer’s Navalny is a powerful chronicle of the bravery required to stand up to an oppressive regime. The film digs deep into the first attempt on Navalny’s life carried out by the Russian government. For a time, he and his family flee the country, but he is resolute. He will return and attempt to lead his countrymen out of the darkness of the Putin regime.

At many points, the film played like a eulogy for its then-living subject. When Navalny is arrested at the airport upon landing in Russia and imprisoned, we know this may be the last time we see him alive. He knew it, too, which is why he included a direct address to the camera with a message in the event of his death. You have probably seen it go viral online over the past couple weeks.

He said: “If they decide to kill me, it means that we are incredibly strong. We need to utilize this power to not give up.” At their best, the Academy Awards serve as a platform for these kinds of necessary messages. It’s up to us to listen and take action. 

Bobi Wine: The People’s President

The story at the heart of Christopher Sharp’s and Moses Bwayo’s Bobi Wine shares much in common with that of Navalny. The playbook of dictatorships does not change much from country to country. The film tells of popular Ugandan singer Bobi Wine, who runs for president in an attempt to oust the ruling dictator Yoweri Museveni.

His campaign is beset by threats of terror and harassment at the hands of the government, and finally, Wine is arrested on obviously bogus charges. Those who saw Navalny will recognize this series of events. Despite all of this and despite the dangers to his family and himself, Wine never stops trying to spread his message of unity and love. The film offers a fascinating insight into the heart of a man willing to put his country before himself and democracy before all else.

The Eternal Memory

Few documentarians are doing it like Chilean director Maite Alberdi right now. Her 2020 Documentary Feature nominee The Mole Agent was a fascinating, funny, and innovative look at aging and ways we treat the aged. For The Eternal Memory, she carries over the theme of aging but tackles a much more pointed subject to even greater emotional effect.

Augusto Góngora was among Chile’s most prominent journalists and an outspoken critic of dictator Augusto Pinochet. Almost a decade ago, he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Since then, his wife of 23 years, Paulina Urrutia, has rarely left his side. The Eternal Memory is a love story that pulls no punches in portraying the horror of accelerated cognitive decline, but Alberdi never forgets the heart and humanity of her subjects. This is a gorgeous tribute to the power of love and a poignant study of what happens when that love begins to slip through your fingers.

Four Daughters

Two of the four daughters referenced by the title are no longer with the family at the center of this story. We will not really meet them until later. For much of this film’s runtime, the part of the daughters will be played by a pair of lookalike actresses. They will participate in reenactments with the two remaining daughters and the matriarch of this family. These reenactments will often be painful reimaginings of some of the worst moments of these women’s lives. Sometimes, it will be too much to bear.

Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania delivers one of the most unique and engaging documentaries of recent times, presenting the story of two young women who leave their family to join the Islamic State and the wreckage of the lives they leave behind. Ben Hania, a previous nominee for Best International Feature for The Man Who Sold His Skin, has a remarkable facility for getting her subjects to confront their innermost thoughts as though the camera isn’t even there. By the end, we feel that we have been nothing more than a fly on the wall to one of the strangest and saddest domestic dramas ever.

To Kill a Tiger

This is a movie about the gang rape of a 13-year-old girl and a culture that wants to make it her problem. Why was she out unsupervised? Why was she at the party in the first place? Couldn’t she just marry one of the attackers to keep the peace? The assault happened in a village in rural India, where the cultural norm is to handle these things within the community, which generally means forgive and forget. Boys will be boys. Or, men will be men. Whatever, it’s her fault.

It would be tempting to look at this as a case of a backward culture that needs to get with the times and join us in the 21st century. But, did anything I described sound very different from: Well, what was she wearing? It’s not different, and it’s a global problem, in this instance exacerbated by the cultural mores. The girl’s father, Ranjit, refuses to accept that things must be this way, and he decides to put his livelihood and the lives of his family on the line to fight for justice. It is an arduous, frustrating journey, and director Nisha Pahuja’s camera captures every remarkable moment.

20 Days in Mariupol

This is not just the most important documentary of the year but one of the most important documentaries ever made. The footage gathered and presented here by Associated Press reporter Mstyslav Chernov and the PBS Frontline team represents the definitive account of the early days of the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine. The images contained within the film are a brutal, disturbing, and honest account of one city’s calculated destruction at the hands of an attacking force.

Much of what we know of what happened in Mariupol comes from the footage captured by Chernov and team, who were among the last reporters with boots on the ground as Russian forces besieged the city. Occasionally, the film cuts to the news reports made possible by the very images we have seen the filmmakers gather. The film makes it clear that this war is a crime against humanity. Women and children are not only dying. They are being killed. Willfully and wantonly by a war criminal. If not for the images captured here in full color, it would be difficult to believe such inhumanity could be taking place. But it is, and these images can neither be forgotten nor ignored.

Editor’s note: Hollywood has largely proven itself hypocritical on and ill-equipped to deal with the genocide currently underway in Gaza. If there is any justice, next year, we will get equally compelling documentaries about what is going on in the Middle East right now, but in Hollywood, justice is often just for the movies.

The final analysis

Any of these films would be a handsome winner, but the firsthand power of 20 Days in Mariupol, combined with its ongoing political relevance, will be virtually impossible to overlook for voters. If you’re looking for potential spoilers, Bobi Wine has the power of Disney behind it and To Kill a Tiger can boast star executive producers Mindy Kaling and Dev Patel. In a more open year, these might be compelling factors, but nothing is more compelling than Chernov’s film.

Will win: 20 Days in Mariupol

Should win: 20 Days in Mariupol

Should have been here: American Symphony

A note about my favorite snub: Director Matthew Heineman is one of the finest documentary filmmakers working today. From Cartel Land and City of Ghosts to The First Wave and Retrograde, he has been unafraid to put himself on the frontlines of some of the most important fights in the world today. For American Symphony, he teamed with Netflix to bring to the screen the story of one of our most interesting contemporary musicians and his wife’s battle with cancer. It’s a tender, heartfelt project that dives as deep into the artistic and creative process as any film to come before it. Heineman will absolutely win one of these things someday.

Countdown to the Oscars: Best Documentary Feature

We’re counting down the days until the Academy Awards! We’ll be here, breaking down each of the 23 categories, talking a bit of history, and trying to figure out who is going to win all those gold statues. So check back throughout the next three weeks for Last Cinema Standing’s Countdown to the Oscars.

Best Documentary Feature

The nominees are:

All That Breathes

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed

Fire of Love

A House Made of Splinters

Navalny

This was the “Slap” category. Lord only knows why Chris Rock of all people was brought on stage last year to present Best Documentary, but he was. We all know what happened next. No need to rehash it. But unfairly lost in all that commotion, there was Questlove, winning an Oscar for his wonderful music documentary Summer of Soul. I don’t know whom the Academy has tapped to present the award this year, but I think it would be a nice gesture to give the opportunity to Questlove and allow him the chance to stand on a stage untainted by others’ drama.

That victory was part of a larger batch of excellent nominees last year, and the trend continues this year with five amazing films nominated for Best Documentary Feature. One of these was one of the best films of the year of any kind. Two are concerned with wide-ranging effects of the war of Russian aggression. And, the other two deal with humankind’s place in the natural order of things. Each of these documentaries is intelligent, thoughtful, and of the moment. There would not be a bad winner in the bunch. 

Navalny – There is a fine line between bravery and stupidity. We know Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny is not stupid, so the only conclusion left to draw is that he is one of the bravest people on the planet. Daniel Roher’s film documents the lead up to and the immediate aftermath of the attempted assassination by poisoning of Navalny. The political candidate seems to have granted Roher access to everything, and no question is off limits. Thank god he did because Navalny serves as the most pointed and detailed account yet of the apparently equally bumbling and evil Russian leadership.

The tragedy of watching Navalny now is that while we may not know the specifics of what happened to the man – the movie covers it, but I won’t spoil it here – we do know quite a lot of what is going on in Russian politics right now. Navalny truly seems to believe in the power of a movement, not necessarily led by him, to change his nation for the better. He devotes his life to it and will likely end up giving his life to it. He knows this because as we said, he is not stupid.

All That Breathes – In watching Shaunak Sen’s captivating documentary about two brothers who operate a bird hospital in New Delhi, India, I was reminded of the religious proverb: Whoever saves one life saves the entire world. Nadeem Shehzad and Mohammad Saud have rescued and rehabilitated thousands of birds in their lives, and as ecological conditions worsen, they will be called upon to save thousands more. They cannot possibly save them all, but in watching them operate out of the makeshift hospital in their garage, we are heartened to see them save even one life.

Sen’s camera is observational, and he keeps explanatory voiceover to a minimum. We watch as the brothers venture out, or sometimes are called out, under polluted, darkening skies to rescue sick and injured black kites. We watch them operate, sometimes in the dark because the power has gone out. We are enthralled by the rhythms of their lives. But, Sen is not interested only in the work of these two men. He is interested in the ways the modern world encroaches on the natural world and the ways in which the natural world adapts. The opening shot of the film is an empty lot, absent humans but teeming with life. Nature will absolutely find a way. Sen’s film suggests it is on us to make that way harmonious.

Fire of Love – As much a feat of montage as reportage, Sara Dosa’s film about husband and wife volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft is by turns a riveting science documentary, a heartbreaking love story, and a philosophical inquiry into what makes humans test the limits of nature. Any of those would have been an interesting film on its own, but what makes Fire of Love such a tremendous accomplishment is the way Dosa blends all of those thematic threads into a single narrative about two people obsessed with the mysteries of the world around them.

The Kraffts loved the volcanoes they studied, and it is Dosa’s good fortune and ours that they were meticulous about documenting their observations and discoveries. Dosa’s film is culled from hundreds of hours of archival footage the Kraffts shot as they traveled the world in search of their own brand of enlightenment. The narration by Miranda July is perfectly restrained, sharing just enough insight into the couple’s actions to get us through but never so much as to be overbearing. Dosa lets the footage speak for itself, and it speaks volumes.

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed – Laura Poitras’ chronicle of Nan Goldin’s decades-long fight against the injustices of the world is not only the best documentary of the year, rather it is one of the best films of the year period. I placed it at No. 2 on my year-end best-of list, and here weeks later, I have not second-guessed that decision once. To borrow a phrase, it truly is a heartbreaking work of staggering genius. 

Goldin’s battle against the Sackler family and the opioid epidemic is but one part of this immense film. In other sections – structured by the filmmaker to mirror many of Goldin’s own exhibitions – we see the famed photographer’s advocacy for those stricken with AIDS, we see her speak out on domestic abuse, and we watch as she calls for changes to ways we talk about and treat mental illness. It is without doubt one of the great lives lived in the 20th and 21st centuries, and Poitras’ film is a valuable window into that life.

A House Made of Splinters – The first thing you notice in Danish director Simon Lereng Wilmont’s crushing documentary is the universality of childhood. Set in a shelter for neglected children less than 20 miles from the frontline in war-torn Ukraine, the children dance, they celebrate holidays, they act out, they develop crushes, and any of the other thousand things kids all over the world are doing regardless of circumstance.

But, Wilmont’s film is not sentimental. It is a tough, unflinching look at the cycles of alcoholism and neglect that land children in this place, from where the lucky will be taken in by foster families and many will be sent to state-run orphanages. The children are fully aware of their circumstances, and they talk frankly about their parents’ alcohol abuse and their desire to find loving, stable homes. Some as young as 5 or 6 confess to each other they have shared alcohol with their parents. You see the cycle beginning anew, right before your very eyes, and as the movie makes clear, no matter how many children are saved, there are more who will need shelter.

The final analysis

A convincing case could be made for just about any of these films. I would be most skeptical of A House Made of Splinters, only because its limited availability through much of the season means fewer voters will have had the chance to watch it. It is impossible not to be moved by the stories of these Ukrainian children, though, so if enough voters see it, a win is not out of the question. Nominated producer Monica Hellström was twice nominated last year for the groundbreaking animated documentary Flee.

Fire of Love was a minor box office success, raking in nearly $2 million, which is big money for a documentary. Its widespread availability on Disney+ also means voters will have had it available to them for quite a while now. To anyone who watches it, its charm is undeniable, its artistry unmissable.

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed ranks second in terms of box office, with just under a million dollars. It’s still playing on a few screens in Los Angeles, and if you’re in the area, it is absolutely a worthwhile in-theater experience. Poitras is the only previous winner nominated this year, having won the award in 2014 for her Edward Snowden documentary Citizenfour. A second statue would make Poitras just the eighth person and second woman after the legendary Barbara Kopple to win two Documentary Feature Academy Awards.

But for the win, I actually think it comes down to All That Breathes and Navalny. Sen’s film is the closest thing to a feel-good movie in the lineup, and its lowkey, unassuming grace stands out on a list of darker, heavier films. This is not to say All That Breathes doesn’t tackle a number of serious topics – it does – but rather it does so in such a quiet, uplifting way that it leaves the viewer with hope rather than despair.

That said, I’m placing my bet on Navalny. It is the film of the moment and gives viewers a unique view into a regime that threatens to upset the balance of global politics. There are sequences in the film that will stick with audiences long after the credits have rolled, and its call for the developed world to battle tyranny is pressing and passionate.

Will win: Navalny

Should win: All the Beauty and the Bloodshed

Should have been here: Retrograde

A note about my favorite snub: No one is making documentaries like Matthew Heineman. From Cartel Land to City of Ghosts to The First Wave and now this, he puts himself in the heart of every battle he covers, unafraid to stand in harm’s way if it means sharing the stories that need to be shared. He will be standing on that stage one of these days.

Next time: Original Screenplay

Countdown to the Oscars: Best Documentary Feature

The Last Cinema Standing Countdown to the Oscars is your guide to the Academy Awards. We will cover each of the categories in depth, talk about history and what the award truly means, and predict some winners. Check back all month as we make our way to the big show, one category (each as important as the next) at a time.

Best Documentary Feature

The nominees are:

Ascension

Attica

Flee

Summer of Soul

Writing with Fire

A wrongly overlooked music festival. A tale of bravery and survival against the backdrop of war. An in-depth accounting of one of the darkest chapters of modern American policing. A meditation on the illusion of upward mobility. A tribute to resilience in the face of overwhelming odds. Often, there is a through line guiding the nominees in the Documentary Feature category. This year, that through line is simply that they are all great films.

An eclectic slate of nominees highlights a magnificent year for documentary film, in general. The quality of the films not nominated this year – including The First Wave, The Rescue, Faya Dayi and Procession – is evidence of the strength of this group. I have no strong argument against any of the four films I have seen – Writing with First was unavailable to me at the time of this writing – which is a lovely change of pace after one of the worst winners in the history of the category last year. But, let’s not talk about that again.

Summer of Soul – Questlove is an Oscar-nominated filmmaker. That’s pretty cool to think about. It makes a certain amount of sense. The Grammy-winning The Roots musician is a polymath and an artistic soul. There was never any reason to doubt he could make a great documentary, but what he has produced with Summer of Soul transcends the genre. It is simply a great, great film.

Intercutting new interviews with long-lost archival footage of the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, Questlove (né Amhir Thompson) creates a stunning portrait of a movement and a moment. The film is a celebration of black excellence, as well as a critique of the media forces that kept this excellence hidden for so long. The film’s very existence forces us to question why it took one year to get a Woodstock documentary and more than 50 to get this picture. Every element of the filmmaking is superb, and on top of all of that, the music is just so damn good.

Flee – The presence of Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s animated feature in this category is evidence of how far the documentary branch has come over the years. It is not a perfect branch by any means – the 1994 omission of Hoop Dreams will always loom large over its history, as well as countless other inexplicable snubs – but it was only 33 years ago that The Thin Blue Line was disqualified from competition for relying too much on reenactments. Keep in mind, that film literally saved a man’s life.

Now, we get Flee, a film whose great strength lies in its use of animation to reenact a private history to which we could never otherwise gain access. Though set three decades ago, the story of a family of refugees escaping war and persecution remains sadly relevant, and their struggle to reach a new land remains disappointingly reflective of too many families’ struggles today. Through the life of one man, we gain a greater appreciation for the lives of many, which is what the best documentaries accomplish. This is rightfully among the best.

Attica – I admit to ignorance of the details of the Attica Prison Uprising prior to watching this film. Like many people, I suspect, my memory of its importance comes mostly from Al Pacino’s invocation of the prison during a pivotal moment in Dog Day Afternoon. With this film, director Stanley Nelson takes 50 years of history and makes it feel like a vital piece of the conversation of today.

The filmmaker uses modern-day interviews with several of the former prisoners who participated in the uprising to give context to news footage and archival video of the incident. The slow burn of tension in the standoff and negotiations builds to a harrowing climax when the government forcibly retakes the prison, resulting in the deaths of 33 mostly black and latino inmates and 10 prison employees. All but four were killed by police gunfire. If you have watched any news in the past 50 years, you know what happened to the officers who used excessive force to slay nearly 40 people. Not a thing.

Ascension – A truly fascinating piece of reportage, first-time feature director Jessica Kingdon’s film is a damning indictment of the Chinese Dream, which bears a striking resemblance to the “dream” of another nation that thinks itself all powerful. Kingdon eschews typical narrative structure, instead opting for a series of vignettes to depict the many facets of the Chinese economy. 

At times, the film is shocking in the sheer scope of certain operations within the nation, but where it truly shines is in its patience to linger on the details of life in the Chinese system. Factory work is a combination of mind-numbing repetitiveness and breakneck speed. The business world is all fake pleasantries and shiny facades. Service with a smile comes with the caveat that only certain teeth should be shown in that smile. And, on and on.

Writing with Fire – I intend to watch this film before the show but feel safe in projecting it as running fourth or fifth in the category, given it was the most surprising nominee of the bunch. The first Indian feature to be nominated for Best Documentary, Sushmit Ghosh’s and Rintu Thomas’ film captures the day-to-day lives of the women who run the Khabar Lahariya news agency. I look forward to watching the film, which will debut on PBS the day after the Academy Awards ceremony.

The final analysis

The Documentary category has been home to some great features among the nominees over the years, but recently, I have found the winners less than inspiring. Icarus was a fine winner in 2017, though it beat out the far superior Faces Places. I remain in the minority with serious reservations about 2018’s Free Solo, while American Factory is interesting but not transcendent in the way of Honeyland or The Edge of Democracy, which it beat in 2019. Did I mention already that last year’s My Octopus Teacher is one of the worst winners in the history of the award?

The last truly great film to win this award came in 2016, when Ezra Edelman’s O.J.: Made in America took home the prize. I named that film the second-best of the decade, and I stand by that. I bring up all this history to say every one of this year’s nominees that I have seen is better than every previous winner going back to Edelman’s film. So, no matter what wins, a great film will be rewarded.

Summer of Soul is the frontrunner, having won most of the significant critics awards leading up the Oscars and being generally beloved. Music documentaries tend to do very well in this category with recent winners such as 20 Feet from Stardom and Searching for Sugar Man, as well as the aforementioned Woodstock in 1970. 

It is conceivable that the triple-nominated Flee will find enough support to snatch a victory here, but it seems more likely it will go 0-for-3, which is a shame for such a great piece of work. The sneaky pick would be Attica, for which Nelson actually did beat Questlove for the Directors Guild Award for achievement in documentary. The subject matter is right in the Academy’s wheelhouse, and Nelson is a modern master of the historical documentary format who certainly deserves to be rewarded by his peers.

Anything could happen Sunday, and anything would be deserving, which is a refreshing change of pace. Based on all the buzz and its box office popularity, I am going with Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised), but if it lands another way, we cannot say we will be surprised.

Will win: Summer of Soul

Should win: Summer of Soul

Should have been here: The First Wave

Next time: Best Original Screenplay

Countdown to the Oscars: Best Documentary

O.J.: Made in America is the best film of the year and is nominated for Best Documentary at the Oscars.

Welcome to Last Cinema Standing’s Countdown to the Oscars, our daily look at this year’s Academy Awards race. Be sure to check back every day leading up to the ceremony for analysis of each of the Academy’s 24 categories and more.

Best Documentary

The nominees are:

13th

Fire at Sea

I Am Not Your Negro

Life, Animated

O.J.: Made in America

The first thing that sticks out right away about this group is the presence of three nominees dealing directly with the issue of racial inequality in America. Coming off of last year’s #Oscarssowhite controversy the Academy seems to have course-corrected in a big way, not only here but with three films about the black experience in America nominated for Best Picture and with six black performers nominated in the acting categories. One year does not mean all is well on this front, and there is much more work to be done, but this wonderful group of nominees suggests that work can get done.

This is not to suggest these films are simply token nominations, far from it. O.J.: Made in America of course was my No. 1 film of the year, while both 13th and I Am Not Your Negro appeared on my list of honorable mentions. Each is a magnificent portrait of black life in America, and each comes from a distinct and memorable point of view. In addition, with Life, Animated, four of the five nominated filmmakers this year are black. I cannot confirm quickly this has never happened, but I would go so far as to guess it is incredibly rare. So, due kudos to the Academy. Keep it up. We’ll be watching.

O.J.: Made in America (directed by Ezra Edelman) – With a runtime of seven hours, 47 minutes, this is the longest film ever nominated for an Academy Award. I have seen it twice and would watch it again in a heartbeat. It is absolutely riveting from its first to its final moments. After the smashing success of the Serial podcast and the Making a Murderer documentary series, true-crime stores are more popular than ever, with everyone racing to get theirs out the door.

We have seen The Jinx from HBO already, and my understanding is there is a JonBenét Ramsey docuseries and a Menendez Brothers docuseries in the pipeline. All of these projects have had or will have varying degrees of critical or popular success. O.J.: Made in America is part of this boom but also stands apart from it, as Edelman raises true crime to the level of high art, like Truman Capote with a video camera.

No stone is left unturned, no detail is too small, and no person is above reproach in the recounting of one of the most famous crimes in American history. But this is not solely the story of O.J. Simpson and the murders of Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman. That story we know well. This is the definitive statement on the racial climate in America that created Simpson and led to the Trial of the Century. Never before have the pieces been laid out so clearly, so thoroughly and so brilliantly.

The myriad feats of this film – from the mountains of research to the gargantuan editing task – make it remarkable this film was even made. That the finished product is one of the most engrossing, fascinating, rewarding documentaries ever produced is an absolute miracle. The resurgence in popularity of the Simpson trial, with this film and the fictionalized TV series, should spur Academy members to watch this despite its daunting runtime. They will not be disappointed, and I cannot see how they could vote for anything else.

13th (directed by Ava DuVernay) – It starts with one clause in the 13th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which outlawed slavery “except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” It was so easy for all of us to miss, but it was always there, staring us in the face: Slavery shall not exist, except … How dastardly! How insidious! How perfect a way for the powerful to remain powerful by keeping the enemies to their power in chains.

DuVernay, the magnificent director who gave us Selma and Middle of Nowhere, does not miss the importance of this clause and uses her film to trace it step by step to the world we find ourselves in today. Every presidential administration, every congress, and indeed every corporate leader has in some way contributed knowingly and willfully to the widening gap between black and white life in America. From the cinema to the schools to the halls of government, no institution is without blood on its hands.

The film carefully connects the dots for the audience, constructing a richly detailed timeline of oppression. DuVernay once again proves herself to be a master filmmaker, here putting her gifts to use in crafting a visually arresting work of montage that draws direct parallels to the overt segregation of the mid-1900s to the covert segregation still in place today. If 13th has a flaw, it is that it covers too much material in too short a runtime. Another 45 minutes to an hour would have given the film more room to breathe and the audience more time to soak in its message. In truth, though, I would watch a 10-hour film from DuVernay on this subject, such is the magnitude of her talent.

I Am Not Your Negro (directed by Raoul Peck) – If O.J.: Made in America plays like a grand opera and 13th like a piercing cry of protest, I Am Not Your Negro is closer to a fireside chat with one of the smartest, most eloquent, and most important figures in the Civil Rights Era. Author and activist James Baldwin died in 1987, outliving his most famous friends by nearly two decades and leaving behind a body of work that adds up to an essential truth about this country.

Peck bases his film on Baldwin’s final, unfinished work, Remember This House, which was meant to cover the lives and assassinations of his friends, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr. Peck gives voice to Baldwin’s remarkable prose and employs a jazzy, fluid style that brings Baldwin’s ideas fully to life.

I Am Not Your Negro is unique and beautiful because it could only come from Baldwin, and Peck wisely does not impose too much directorial will on the film, allowing Baldwin to be the star. The ideas are universal and wide ranging, but their power comes from Baldwin, who saw it all, wrote it down, and had the foresight to know what it meant. It is disheartening to see how little has changed from the era when change was the order of the day. In fact, we are slipping backward. If Baldwin were here today, though, the film seems to argue, he would tell us not to lose heart but rather to steel ourselves for the fight to come.

Fire at Sea (directed by Gianfranco Rosi) – Rosi’s sumptuous film is a cinema vérité look at the European migrant crisis seen through eyes of the people on the small Italian island of Lampedusa. While their little island is one of the frontlines in the migrant crisis, the inhabitants of Lampedusa seem generally unaffected, though not unperturbed, by the international emergency taking place on their shores. They go about their lives, making lunch, listening to the radio, taking out their boats, and wandering the island much as if no migrant ever were to land there.

Rosi’s camera simply watches, though in simply watching he produces some of the most beautiful cinematography of the year in any film. The power comes from the repetition and the slowly dawning realization the people on this island stand in for all of us. There are few countries in the world untouched by the migrant crisis, yet we go about our daily routines generally unmoved. With everything going on in this nation and the world over, who has the energy to be so emotionally involved anymore?

Then, Rosi unveils his greatest coup, and we are left wondering how we cannot be involved. He tags along with a patrol sent to rescue a stranded migrant boat, and for 20 or so uninterrupted minutes, the full depth of this crisis is laid bare. Dozens dead, dozens more sick or dying, they crammed onto a boat not suited for this trip and risked everything because no matter what was on the other end of their journey – homelessness, poverty, prison, or deportation among the likeliest outcomes – it would be better than what they left behind. Yet, here we sit, here we know, and here we do nothing.

Life, Animated (directed by Roger Ross Williams) – If we were going to play a game of “One of these things is not like the other things …” this would be the one not like the others in this group. Against three vitally important, energizing films about race and one about the European migrant crisis, the story of a family’s struggle to understand autism certainly feels low stakes. That may be true for the rest of us, but for the Suskind Family at the film’s center, the stakes could not be much higher.

Based on journalist Ron Suskind’s book of the same name, Williams’ film charts the highs and lows of having a son with autism, dealing honestly and openly with a subject few people fully comprehend. The crux of the story is that Owen Suskind learns to communicate by watching Disney animated films, most of which he has memorized. We are told the exaggerated emotions and facial features of the characters in an animated film are easier to interpret for a person with autism.

The obvious problem here is the sense the whole film is some kind of pro-Disney propaganda piece, and there are times when it feels that way. However, the film does not shy away from showing us all the life events such as finding a job and navigating sexuality that have no cognate storylines in Disney. Life, Animated does not rise to the level of the other films in this category – its story is too personal and too specific to be universal – but as a wonderful piece of documentary filmmaking, it is not so out of place.

The final analysis

In all likelihood, this comes down to the three films about race in America, though I would never underestimate a film about the power of film, particularly Disney. But to confine our analysis, O.J.: Made in America has the gravitas to win and has picked up almost every major award out there. 13th has on its side timeliness, relevance, and DuVernay, whose snub for Selma stands as one of the more stinging omissions in recent Oscar history. I Am Not Your Negro meanwhile has captured the zeitgeist and set box-office records in the theaters where it is showing.

Any of the three would make a deserving winner of which the Academy could be proud. All represent the kind of achievement this category is made to recognize. In some ways, though, apart from its length, O.J.: Made in America is the most traditional of the three in its form and presentation, something that could make it more palatable to voters. I am obviously biased here by my love for the film, but I genuinely do not see how the others, as wonderful as they are, stack up, and I hope and believe the Academy will see it the same way.

Will win: O.J.: Made in America

Should win: O.J.: Made in America

Should have been here: Weiner

Tomorrow: Best Documentary Short