Special Mentions in the 2026 SIMA awards

Even though the Special Mentions in the SIMA awards may feel like consolation prizes, these are very interesting feature and documentary shorts, on a variety of topics, deserving a large audience. I have arranged them chronologically. 
 

Feature Documentaries

 
Coexistence, My Ass! (2025) dir Amber Fares.  U.S. / France / Canada, 95 min.
 

Coexistence, My Ass! is a profile of Israeli comedian and activist Noam Shuster Eliassi, framed by her one-woman show of the same title, developed during a residency in Harvard in 2019, performed live in her home country. Briskly edited, the film weaves the personal, professional and political life threads of this Israeli of Iranian and Romanian descent. She follows the Latin adage "ridendo corrigo mores"- laughter corrects mores - in her comedy act to skewer Israeli-Palestinian relations, from one side of the ideological spectrum. The daughter of "woke profressive leftists", as she describes her parents, and active in social media and television, Shuster Eliassi is an interesting case study of what it is like to be a leftist in Israel today, before and after October 7, 2023.

Shuster Eliassi’s sharp and very funny satirical comments in the show – the backbone of the film – are illustrated by interviews with family, friends and people in the street, her on-camera confessions and discussions on the filming process, and observational sequences.  A running commentary is the desire of her family, especially her grandmother, to see her married. And after final credits sequences, the audience is treated to a surprise.

 
With this varied footage, plus well integrated archival materials, Lebanese-born Canadian filmmaker Amber Fares succeeds in linking the protagonist’s clearly presented political perspective to Israel’s political developments from 2019, when she began filming Shuster Eliassi, through 2024.  The comedian functions both as a funny and charismatic individual and as a representative of progressive intellectuals, freely criticizing the Netanyahu government in the only democracy of the Middle East.
 

The director, who worked on several Palestinian projects, has discussed the role of her collaborators in a project lasting seven years, noting that October 7 changed the nature of the film. The shift, I would add, is doubly relevant: on the one side, it provides no closure or healing, to the collapse of the Eliassi’s belief in the peaceful coexistence of Israelis and Palestinians – hence ending in a heartbreak – but most importantly, for political scientists and historians and students of Israel, it show the left’s failure to contend with the imperatives of radical Islam, that has misshapen Palestinian life for decades. 
 
The documentary won the World Cinema Documentary Special Grand Jury Award at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. It is one of the 15 documentaries that have been shortlisted for the Academy award for Documentary feature.  
 
 
Loot: A Story of Crime and Redemption (2024). Dir. Don Millar. Cambodia, 87 min.
            

A topnotch piece of investigative journalism, Loot: A Story of Crime and Redemption delivers much more than its title promises.  In tightly edited 87 minutes, this exposé uncovers the illicit trade in Cambodian relics and antiquities and the museums, collectors and dealers complicit in it.  It informs and educates in the Grierson tradition, while following the format and conventions of television journalism: story clarity, solid sources and a well laid out narrative structure.
 
The subject of the investigation and the structuring of the documentary are the same: they gather pieces of a puzzle - the looters, the smugglers, the international art network– and show us how it all ends.  Central to the story is the art collector / antiquities dealer Douglas Latchford, who trafficked on looted artifacts, was indicted by the U.S. government but died in 2020 before the trial.  The legal ramifications of the investigation will keep the audience glued to the screen. 
 

What makes the film work intellectually and emotionally is the way Don Millar, the writer / director / producer in charge of a dedicated team that includes the real investigators as consultants, builds the tension between the Cambodian government’s efforts to recover the loot and the art world’s initially looking the other way. 
 
Like the 2025 Berlinale Golden Bear Dahomey, an experimental documentary about the return of artistic and religious pieces from France to a former African colony, an emotional coda celebrates the arrival of the art back to its home country.  Cambodia, like Benin, reclaims its cultural identity, hence the redemption alluded in the title.
 
Loot: A Story of Crime and Redemption would make a knockout procedural with Hollywood stars.
 
 
Mothers of Chibok (2024) dir. Joel ‘Kachi Benson. U.S. / Nigeria, 88 min.                        
 

Nigerian filmmaker Joel ‘Kachi Benson expanded his documentary short Daughters of Chibok (2019) into a feature documentary. Mothers of Chibok deals with the aftermath of the 2014 abduction and enslavement of 276 Nigerian school girls, mostly Christian, by the Islamist terrorist group Boko Haram, in the town of Chibok, northeastern Nigeria. In the 10^th anniversary of this brutal event, and embedded for one year in the community, the writer/director/producer extends its scope by looking at the daily lives of women, their children and grandchildren, growing peanuts and corn, fighting for their offsprings’ education.  In an observational mode, Mothers of Chibok concentrates of four women (one was the focus of the short), and their travails. 
 

The documentary’s impulse is not the ethnographic portrait of a community but the celebration of a resilient female spirit.  It documents remarkable individuals in their cultural / political context.  Mothers of Chibok, laudable in its objective, falls slightly short of this goa since it studiously deflates the political and religious issues surrounding the Boko Haram attack and its consequences on the village.  This agrarian society – seemingly 100 percent a matriarchy, since men are out of the picture – is nicely captured via drone shots, to connect them to the geography; slow motion, to render the planting and harvesting; blurred footage of a storm descending upon the humble dwellings; and slow-moving family scenes. 
 

The film is organized as a series of episodes, loosely connected, without a dramatic arc or a strong climax; even the return of one of the kidnapped girls, ten years later, tends to fall flat.
 
Supported by Impact Partners, a non-profit U.S. organization, among other institutions, Mothers of Chibok is a well-crafted documentary, with a beautiful score by Cobhams Asuquo, fitting the SIMA awards profile.
 
 
Yurlu / Country (2025), dir. Yaara Bou Melhem. Australia, 82 min
 

Australian director Yaara Bou Melhem made interesting and effective decisions regarding the participation of Maitland Parker, the aboriginal elder at the heart of Yurlu / Country, the heartbreaking story of how now-closed asbestos mines in Western Australia negatively impacted an indigenous community. Parker has writing and producing credits, as the documentary evolved from being initially an investigative journalism piece about the effects of deadly contamination into the courageous fight of an ethnic group to preserve their legacy.
 

Yurlu / Country captures in the title two linguistic ways of addressing a homeland: “Yurlu” is the indigenous name for the home of the Banjima group, in the beautiful Wittenoom Gorge area (think Monument Valley and the Navajos, in a similar geographical and ethnic scale). “Country” embodies a shared land, history, customs, and culture. The emphasis of the documentary is on the first name in the title, while the second one describes how the Banjima yurlu is inhabited by its people.
 

The documentary uses a variety of techniques to approach the subject, mainly to show how the inhabitants have coped with now a wasteland of cancer-producing asbestos tailings, closed off for contamination, but the effects spreading beyond the former mines.  Typical of ethnographic documentaries, there is oral storytelling and ceremonial activities, and a fly-in-the-wall approach to document what will be the last months of elder Parker’s life; the charismatic leader dies during the making of the film, of mesothelioma, an asbestos-related disease. He invited the filmmaker to record his fight against cancer and his advocacy. Archival footage provides not only the historical background about past and present mine-development by Australian companies but also a revealing time-capsule of race relations. The film avoids the pitfalls of Manichaeism, a decision that raises it beyond a good vs evil approach,  making it a solid tool for change.

The fantastic aerial photography (with maps and graphs situating the area) takes a lesson from Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi (1982) to apprehend a landscape that is both beautiful and doomed. The cinematography by Tom Banning and the score by Helena Caska, ominous and tender, enhance the documentary's emotional and intellectual punch.

Yurlu / Country was made with support from Screen Australia and is a powerful rendering of Grierson's approach to making impactful documentaries to inform and educate citizens.

Documentary Shorts

The Reality of Hope (2025) dir. Joe Hunting. U.S., 30 min
 

This documentary short follows the friendship of two members of a VR community called Furality, where participant design, meet and cosplay in universes where they are anthropomorphized animals. One participant, known as Photographotter – real name Jack Parsons - becomes a kidney donor for the other, Hiyu – Alex Davidson. The friendship is filmed using a VR technology: the two protagonists are interviewed in this VR environment, shown as avatars.  The surgery and aftermath are shot in a traditional documentary style. The purpose of the 2D and 3D animation is to give an immersive experience and describe this online community of fans – which has been associated with sexual weirdness, totally absent here. The documentary portion, the longest, is run-of-the mill “slice of life”. The switch from the virtual to the real world is the most interesting shot of the documentary: the avatar becomes the real person in a single frame.
 

Ultimately, The Reality of Hope is an advocacy piece for the substance and depth of relationships established outside of the material world.  A young filmmaker, Joe Hunting, is involved in key aspects of the production, as director, producer, editor and sound designer.  The short – distributed online by the New Yorker magazine and a competitor in the 2025 Sundance festival – will reach an audience whose life experiences behind VR helmets are validated by this feel-good story.
 
            
Sallie’s Ashes (2025) dir. Brennan Robideaux. U.S., 40 min.
 

The observations of 19^th century French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville after visiting the young U.S., consigned in his classic Democracy in America, help to understand the background of this topnotch documentary short: in this new nation, citizens get together to solve issues, from the ground up, without waiting for the government solutions. In Sallie’s Ashes, three remarkable women in their late seventies start an awareness campaign about the dangers of a toxic coal ash pond in Mobile Bay, Alabama. They are up against Alabama Power, the state’s utility company, and the regulatory state organization, that needs to comply with federal environmental regulations.  
 

In good documentaries, especially those relying on an observational approach, sometimes it is lucky accidents, like being in the right place at the right time, exceptional protagonists, a riveting topic, that explain the quality of the work. Sallie’s Ashes is not only a David and Goliath story unfolding in real time – a campaign led by three funny and sharp grandmothers - but also about Sallie Smith, one of the ladies, who takes up the fight as one final project – Kurosawa’s Ikiru – before dying of a metastasized cancer.  The title is poignant in its dual reference to ashes - human and coal - since both fights are intertwined, and Sallie dies in 2023 during the making of the film.   
 

The production team was small, won the trust of the women, and followed them in their grassroots efforts to bring awareness to the dangers of an unlined ash pond 20 miles upstream from Mobile Bay. It interviews them together in an almost “meta” fashion, interacting with the team behind the camera, and then separately, thus building an endearing profile of these fierce and charming grandmothers. The local media including public radio, began to report on the Coal Ash Action Group they founded, and the campaign took off. 

Louisiana-based director/producer Brennan Robideaux, who also edited the film, and producer Allison Bohl DeHart are doing the festival circuit after Sallie’s Ashes premiered in the Telluride Film Festival last August.
 
 
We Were the Scenery (2025) dir. Christopher Radcliff. U.S. / Canada, 15 min
 

This is a smart and moving handling of form and content.  In tight 15 minutes, director Christopher Radcliff summarizes the life of two Vietnamese, the parents of writer/producer Cathy Linh Che, during the Vietnam war, their refugee status in the Philippines, including a stint as extras in the filming of Apocalypse Now (1979) and their relocation to the U.S.  The oral-history type of interviews are illustrated by well-known archival material, whimsically edited, especially in the pithy sequence of the Coppola shooting.  There are pathos and humor in the handling of the human experience, plus a witty use of irony in the title.
 

We were the scenery won the documentary short award at Sundance this year.  Currently streaming on the Criterion Channel, it played the festival circuit in 2025.
                        
 

With Grace (2024) dir. Dima Mwende, Julia Dhar. Norway / Kenya, 29 min.
 

The charm and beauty of this documentary short comes from the match between subject matter and tone, as well as the way it has been put together. Julia Dahr, a Norwegian director, made a 60-minute documentary Kisulu: The Climate Diaries in 2015, about a Kenyan farmer and his family coping with a cycle of drought that endangered their livelihood.  A decade later, she returned and codirected with Kenyan filmmaker Dima Mwende, a 30-minute short focused now on one of the eight siblings, Grace Kisulu.  The documentary uses a very simple but effective structure: Grace, now 13, speaks alternatively to the camera, or as a voice over, perched on one of the trees planted as a sapling in the first documentary. The teenager wrote the first-person narration herself. It is a lively memory of growing up in an affectionate family, with limited means but great affection.  The footage illustrating this recondite paradise, with disaster looming in the form of a prolonged drought, is culled from the first documentary or perhaps materials not used in the final cut, and nicely edited to fit the protagonist’s p.o.v.  
 

This narrative strategy works very well and is nicely complemented by an enjoyable score.  A small, intimate world is realistically portrayed, giving the viewers a slice of life as well as a sense of climate issues affecting the Kisulu’s travails. 
 

Some remarkable documentaries awarded the 2026 Social Impact Media prizes

Ken Burns’observation is an astute reminder about the nature of documentary : “To the general public, the word documentary or nonfiction film is a narrow band. And we think that the feature film is this huge, magnificent spectrum. But if you really look at it, the feature film is governed by a formula and laws of plot that make it, I believe, the narrow band in the spectrum. And it’s the documentary, it’s the nonfiction film, that has so many glorious possibilities.” (1)
 
The 2026 Social Impact Media Awards were announced this week. For several years I have been involved in the process as a pre-screener and a juror for this documentary platform; it is a priceless experience to survey the field of U.S. and international documentaries.
 
I made notes of the films I reviewed from September through November 2025, publishing some of them in this blog already. Below are the reviews I wrote about titles that ended up winners.  I will do a follow up blog on the seven feature and short documentaries that received Special Mentions, also worth noting.
 
Best Documentary and Best Director: Cutting through Rocks (2025), dir. Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni. Iran /Netherlands/ U.S./ Germany/Canada, 95 min.

See my entry of January 30 on the 2025 Academy documentary nominees.
 

Best Cinematography: Champions of the Golden Valley (2024) dir. Ben Sturgulewski. 
U.S. / Germany / Afghanistan , 81 min.

This terrific debut documentary feature by Ben Sturgulewski accomplishes a rare feat: he was in the right place at the right time  – recording a ski race in 2019 in the Hindu Kush mountain range in eastern Afghanistan – for a sports documentary; but the film became something else – bigger and deeper – when the Taliban, the Islamic fundamentalist organization, took over the country’s government and applied sharia law. Sturgulewski was a one-man operation, directing, filming and editing this intended film, bringing out the beauty of the landscape and its hospitable people in a “slice of life” approach, in color and brisk editing.  Forced by the irruption of politics that changed the nature of the project, Sturgulewski added a black-and-white, very stylized opening and closing sequences that frame to the story in the present time – 2022 – as the protagonist Alishah Farhang tells the story in a flashback, now a refugee in Germany.

 As a sports film it is an endearing document of the members of the Bamyan Ski Club, started by Farhang, a shepherd who returned to the village after studying in Switzerland (itself a remarkable feat) and introduced the sport. The locals make their own wood skis and use a rope tow powered by a motorcycle to climb to the mountain top.  Girls and young children also participate in the Afghan Ski Challenge.  The bulk of the documentary follows the preparations for the 9^th edition, structured narratively around Farhang, organizer and coach, and two key competitor participants, and culminating in the day of the race, remarkably shot and edited. 
 
Like Nanook of the North a hundred years earlier, Champions of the Golden Valley makes an unknown world come to life, in a manner that is both engaging and thoughtful. Farhang is the narrator / voice over who weaves the longing for a paradise lost with insights into the experiences of a refugee, cut off from roots, language and culture.  However, and as powerful a testament to the resilience of the human spirit, by the end of the film, the black-and-white footage of the bleak present slowly becomes color as Farhang understands that with his wife and young children, life goes on.
 

Champions of the Golden Valley is remarkable example on how film technique can deeply capture a human story and the soul of a sport; it’s a lesson also on how a smart filmmaker creatively adapts to the unforeseen changes derailing a production. As the film producer Katie Stjernholm noted to Alaska Daily News, when the film was shown in Anchorage a year ago: "Ultimately, with a documentary you basically, like, hold on tight, and you witness something unfold ... The story, in a way, tells itself, and you're the one who's privileged to witness it. That's how it was. The story we wanted to tell was one thing, but the story that happened and the way it evolved, we're just kind of showing up to it. it took us on a wild ride. But I would say that the story we have now is more rich, more fun, more meaningful to audiences."

The documentary played the film circuit, beginning with Tribeca in 2024, with an impact campaign attached to it. (2)

Best Editing: Shuffle (2025) dir. Benjamin Flaherty. U.S., 84 min. Also, winner of the Lens to Action Jury Prize.
            

Shuffle strikes a delicate balance combining two very different threads: on the one hand, it is a self-portrait of writer/director Benjamin Flaherty, as he recovers from addiction; on the other, a medical exposé of the rehab industry, as he follows two young men and a woman, in an out of insurance-covered detox and treatment facilities. 

An interactive documentary shot over three years, Shuffle uses these personal stories to present the big picture of for-profit centers that thrive on a legal loophole: changes in insurance policy as part of the 2010 Affordable Care Act increased the amount health insurance covers for rehab services. Through interviews with an insurance analyst, an FBI informant and a former director of one of these facilities, these three young people become case studies of a “dangerous treatment industry rife with insurance fraud”, as noted in the documentary’s website.
 

The documentary toolbox is skillfully put at the service of a story that is both a straightforward piece of investigative journalism and a compassionate approach to three broken lives (two by the end of the film). The camera deals intimately with the young people and their candid, while disguising the identity of the three others. The use of motion graphics and animated sequences, featuring white chalk figures in black background, makes the exposé easy to understand by the audience. Interestingly, in a moment of self-reflection, Benjamin Flaherty interrogates himself about his role in the story; is he an outsider observing these lives trapped in a cycle of detox and rehab, or by becoming their friend, enabling their predicament? 
 
Shuffle won the documentary feature award at the 2025 SXSW festival, observing that “the director illuminates the insidiousness of the profit-driven, billion-dollar recovery business even as he brings compassion and urgency to his subjects, whose candid revelations are as heartbreaking as they are hopeful.”
 
 
Best Sound: Viktor (2024) dir. Olivier Sarbil. U.S. / Denmark / Ukraine / France, 89 min.
 

What is it like to photograph a war as a deaf man? French-born New York-based director / cinematographer and conflict-zone photographer Olivier Sarbil gives a powerful answer in Viktor. Initially spearheaded by the company of director/ producer Darren Aronofsky, the documentary is a profile of Viktor Korotovskyi, a deaf photographer from Kharkiv, during the first year of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.  
 
What is a remarkable accomplishment is the rendering of a point of view, as in Cutting through Rocks. In these cases, we see how the director supported by an excellent team of collaborator presents – as challenging as it is – the inner world of the protagonist. Sarbil’s approach to Viktor, deaf since age five and an admirer of the Japanese warrior ethos, is to render a particular sonic landscape, combining silence, the protagonist’s voiceover (Viktor wrote and spoke his own narration), and a soundtrack of music and sound effects of daily life and the war zone. This immersive experience, plus the choice of black and white photography and a stylized mise-en-scène with poetic effects, makes Viktor a superb example of the war documentary subgenre.  
 

Sarbil came to this project with an extensive experience working in conflict zones, as seen in his documentaries for television – most notably the Frontline episode Mosul (2017). As he has noted in interviews following the screening of Viktor in festivals, he suffered injuries while reporting from Libya in 2011 that left him hearing- impaired. In Viktor, the experience of deafness is reminiscent of the recent Marlee Matlin – Not Alone Anymore. Both plunge into the task using the language of cinema to make the audience vicariously deaf. 
 
A war reportage anchored on an individual, Viktor offer us both an intimate portrait of a deaf man and a view of the chaos of war. Viktor’s observations about his disability give the viewers a full measure of the man: "Silence is not emptiness. It is not the absence of something. It is the presence of the self, and nothing else ... In this silence, I find my peace". 

            
Stylistic Achievement Jury Prize: Seeds (2025) dir. Brittany Shyne. U.S., 123 min.
 

British philosopher Paul Kingsnorth describes in his latest book, Against the Machine: on the Unmaking of Humanity, the four Ps that grounds a culture: place, people, past and prayer. All four are profoundly captured in Seeds, the debut feature documentary of Brittany Shyne, made over nine years. It is a moving ethnographic documentary, shot in black and white, with the director doubling as cinematographer, sound recordist, writer and producer. She embedded in families of African American farmers in Georgia and Mississippi, who have owned and cultivated the land for over a hundred years. 
 
Seeds is both the portrait of a people, lovingly observed, and a record of a way of life that is passing. Through their daily family and work routines, she and a team at the top of their game - notably editor Malika Zouhali-Worrall, sound designers Daniel Timmons and Ben Kruse, and composer Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe - constructed a series of vignettes, in a virile style that foregrounds the geography, the history and the cultural and religious traditions of the Williams and Head families, where multiple generations are bound by the fruits of the land; the one-word title aptly captures the community's life project. The film eschews a romanticized or ideological view of farming life in the South; its harshness and beauty are on the screen, without a narrator's commentary.

Not unlike Cutting through Rocks, Seeds is an anthropological essay that asks patience, attention and a certain sensibility from the viewers. It is not a journalistic investigation - although interesting facts emerge throughout the film - but an unhurried poetic contemplation. It functions in a territory similar to RaMell Ross' Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018), in its exploration of a black community in the South.

Seeds received institutional support from the Black Public Media, ITVS, the Ford Foundation and the Sundance Institute. In 2025 it won the Sundance prize for best U.S. documentary.

Transparency Jury Prize: Trade Secret (2025) dir. Adam Joffe. U.K. /U.S. Australia, 98 min.    

 

Six years in the making, in a remarkable feat of editing and storytelling, Trade Secret is an exposé about the hunting of polar bears, where conservation and global trade intersect. Three conservationists from Norway, the U.S. and South Africa, try to pierce – à la Michel Moore - the working of government organisms and NGOs like the World Wide Fund for Nature– a key target - to call out their neglect. The use of hidden cameras, embarrassing interviews with reluctant functionaries, travels through several countries, footage of polar bears in pristine habitats, and a musical score with the effects of a thriller, build a knockout narrative … not ending happily.  Albeit with more emotional restraint, Trade Secretfollows the playbook of Michael Moore’s Roger and Me (1980), Bowling for Columbine (2002) and An Inconvenient Truth (2006). Interestingly, the sequences of hunting Canadian Inuits (Eskimos) are an unexpected and loving throwback to Nanook of the North (1922).  They provide an intriguing Native American counterpoint to the agenda of the eco-warriors, bringing nuance to the film’s point of view.
 

It is a tribute to Australian cinematographer Abraham Joffe, a specialist in wildlife documentaries, that the team under his guidance has put together an excellent piece of advocacy filmmaking, trusting the power of a cinema vérité approach. With its compelling message, it invites the audience to be aware and, why not, take action.
 
 
Best Documentary Short: All the Empty Rooms (2025) dir. Joshua Sheftel. U.S., 33 min. 

Reviewed in the January 30 post on Academy Award nominees for Documentary.

 
 
Best Director, Documentary Short: The Quilters (2024) dir. Jenifer McShane. U.S., 32 min.
 

This is an exceptionally good documentary, not just for its unusual angle to handle the prison genre but also for its beautiful execution, especially its editing, cinematography and score. It takes place inside the sewing room of a maximum-security prison in Missouri.  Yes, men sowing quilts. In this program of restorative justice, incarcerated men with life sentences design and craft beautiful pieces for children in foster care. 
 
Director / producer Jennifer McShane and her team pass with flying colors the pitfalls of making a resonant film not only at an emotional and intellectual level, but especially for its humane depiction of how to find a purpose in life in the direst of circumstances. In the sewing room, healing is triggered by beauty. As the director noted in an interview, “this was not about how they got there, but how they’re using their time”. 
 

In 32 pithy and riveting minutes, we learn not only the nuts and bolts of quilting, but also gain insights into these rugged men, talking candidly to the camera about their experiences, regrets and what this program brings them.  The final sequence, over the film credits, is a montage of the finished quilts, stunning in their creativity and symbolism, followed by candid shots of children receiving them. The documentary, like the making of the quilts, has come a satisfying full circle.
 
The Quilters ran the festival circuit and is now streaming on Netflix.
 
 
Best Cinematography, Documentary Short: Imade (2024) dir. Ignacio Acconcia. Spain, 28 min.
 

This remarkable documentary probes with depth and sensitivity a slice of life: having survived a harrowing crossing of the Mediterranean, Imade Ouchgenou, a deaf young migrant, living and working legally in Barcelona, visits his family in Morocco for the first time since he left.
 
The beautiful lessons of Robert Flaherty’s approach to documentary, making an “unknown world known”, are applied in Imade with sensitivity and artistic skill, in 28 minutes. Without a gram of fat and staged for the camera in the style of Nanook of the North, the film brings us “inside” the world of a deaf man, by means, yes, of a sharp sound design like the SIMA finalist Viktor; and it shows us the gentle way he connects to the outside world. What emerges is a poignant and uplifting portrait that balances loneliness and isolation with the family love that sustains Imade, through video calls.  
 

The scene of the protagonist’s return to his hometown – mostly a long take of him walking towards his parents and siblings’ home – is remarkable for how it captures, in gestures and sign language, the human experience of returning to one’s roots, culture and language.
Imade makes a deep impact as a human story that purposefully avoids social and political commentary, relying instead on a song in Arabic, heard at the beginning and end of the film, to describe the longing for home and the hard life of the emigrant. 

Writer / director Ignacio Acconcia González, born in Argentina but raised in Barcelona, dedicates the film to his parents and their emigrant experience. The film received support from a Catalan foundation and state funds and has done the festival run in 2025. 
 
 
Best Sound, Documentary Short: Fenice (2024) dir. Sterling Hampton IV. U.S., 12 min.
 

Fenice combines the esthetic of Tik Tok and the music video with the voiceover of its protagonist Sabrina Lassegue – a model and activist, pursuing a career in directing and acting – recounting a traumatic experience of rape as a teenager. The film’s Italian title Fenice means “phoenix”; the mythical bird that regenerates from its own ashes carries openly the symbolic impulse of the film: the protagonist’s decision to transform her sexual trauma into an advocacy campaign, so that others can engage in the healing process.
 
The use of slow motion, swish pans, animation, a reenactment repeated as a pattern, an intense score, rhythmic visual and sound edits, make this short a first-person advocacy piece designed for the social media consumer. Pathos trails behind the bells and whistles of what is mostly an advertising campaign for a social cause.
 
 
Systemic Change Award: How to Sue the Klan. The Legacy of the Chattanooga Five (2024) dir. John Beder. U.S., 35 min. 
 

The public broadcasting landscape, still hospitable to television journalism in spite the disruptions brought by the coming of streaming, is the natural destination of this excellent expository documentary short. Well executed in all departments – especially in handling its narrative arc – it deals with a historical event whose legal consequences are relevant today.  And it does so by following the playbook of the English documentary tradition, informing, educating and entertaining.  
 
It is a tall order for a story that was remembered mostly in legal circles connected to human rights activism.  In 1980 five African American women were shot with bird pellets by four members of the Klu Klux Klan in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The ensuing trial yielded light sentences. But the victims filed a civil case for damages, using an 1871 statute, in a strategy designed by the Center for Constitutional Rights, and they won.  The event is reconstructed with television news and a number of interviewees, including the children and grandchildren of the women, and the two key lawyers, Randolph McLaughlin and Betty Lewis, who represented them, both very articulate in describing the nuances of the case, four decades later. 
 
The story is neatly tied to the present day, with the lawyers recounting how this case is a precedent today involving racial violence. Director and producer John Beder, a filmmaker based in Chattanooga, found a supporter on and off camera in civil rights attorney Ben Crump, whose work is featured in the Netflix series Civil (2022). 
 

Ethos Jury Prize: Children No More: “Were and Are Gone” (2025) dir. Hilla Media. Israel/ U.S., 36 min. Reviewed in the January 30 blog on Academy Award nominees.
 
 
Notes
 
(1)  Quoted in Liz Stubbs, Documentary Filmmakers Speak (2002), p.83.
https://archive.org/stream/Documentary_Filmmakers_Speak/Documentary_Filmmakers_Speak_djvu.txt
 
(2)  https://www.championsofthegoldenvalley.com.
 

Three 2025 documentary nominees for the 98th Academy Awards

I have seen only one of the five Academy Award nominees for Documentary Feature Film, Cutting through Rocks, so I don’t know how it compares to the other four, and cannot speculate about the winner.  All I can say is that this vérité documentary, shot in Iran, hits the ball off the park.

The challenges of the observational documentary are phenomenally overcome in Cutting through Rocks, filmed over eight years by the Iranian-born U.S.-based married couple of Mohammadreza Eyni and Sara Khaki. It is not just that they stumbled upon a remarkable woman in a remote town in northwest Iran, or the success they had with building her story into a coherent narrative about a quietly defiant woman in a conservative Muslim society.  It is that they understood how to make this documentary work also as an absorbing example of ethnographic filmmaking. 
 

Gaining the full trust of the protagonist Sara Shahverdi, her nine siblings, extended family and the villagers (400 of whom she brought to life as a midwife), the directors capture the dynamics of a traditional society based on patriarchal structures, consolidated over centuries, including early marriage, barebones education, no property rights for women, etc. All this comes brilliantly to the forefront in a courthouse sequence where the legal system is the sharia law, and in the scenes where Sara, an avid motorcycle rider, teaches young girls how to do it. Religion and law are cemented together, and these Iranian filmmakers impeccably show how women are the subject -  if I may - of systemic discrimination
 

Viewing Cutting through Rocks, one has the impression of being in the rural world of Abbas Kiarostami, the children’s universe of Majid Majidi, and even in Marjane Satrapi’s black-and-white drawings of faceless women clad in chadors in her graphic novel Persepolis.  The filmmakers share with Satrapi the perspective of Iranians now living abroad, the West-meets-East gaze in a loop. A fascinating documentary about a people, a place and a culture, it goes beyond straightforward advocacy by choosing to reveal rather than condemn.
 
In light of the horrific repression unleashed by the Iranian theocratic regime these past weeks, the question comes urgently to the forefront about the conditions of production of a documentary, like this, similar to those of fiction films made in Iran since 1979; some of them may be shown abroad, in festival or theatrical releases, like A Separation (2011), The Fig of the Sacred Fig (2024), and the work of Jafar Panahi, but are heavily censored in the country, with various forms of punishment meted to their directors.  The documentary lists its production company Gandom Film as based in Iran.  In the political and cultural climate of this nation, a documentary like this, challenging the sharia law, the patriarchy and the subjugation of women, is unimaginable to this reviewer.  
 

Clocking at 95 minutes, Cutting through Rocks (the title is a knockout metaphor connecting the opening scene to the film’s subject) is the first feature documentary of Mohammadreza Eyni and Sara Khaki, filmmakers who have participated in prestigious workshops like Sundance and Tribeca; they received funding from U.S. and international sources, including Chicken & Eggs Film, IDFA’s Bertha Fund and the Doha Institute in Qatar.  It won the award for best international documentary at Sundance this year and completed the festival run before its theatrical release on November 21 in New York.
 
I have also seen two of the five nominees for documentary shorts: All the Empty Rooms and Children No More: “Were and Are Gone”.  Compelling for different reasons, the subject is children whose lives have been cut short by violence and war. They are an emotional cross to the jaw. 
 

The strategy of the 33-minute All the Empty Rooms is to push statistics, headlines and locations about school shootings (Columbine, Uvalde, Saugus) into life: the audience is compelled to contemplate – in its deep etymological meaning - the unfathomable horror of innocent lives snuffed by gun violence in school shootings in the U.S.
 
Over seven years, veteran television documentary producer and director Joshua Sheftel followed CBS News reporter Steve Hartman and photographer Lou Bopp in their mission to record the bedrooms of eight children and teenagers killed in school shootings.
 

A producer of “feel good” stories, and after covering school shootings since 1997, Hartman felt the urge to shift his uplifting angle, putting the focus on children.  In this immaculately crafted documentary, the goal is to restore, as he notes, his and the audience’s empathy. One astute strategy to accomplish this is to avoid mentioning “gun”, “gun control”, and provide minimal context – only year and school. There is emotional restraint but immense warmth in the way parents and siblings talk to Hartman about their loved ones, while the photographer captures with delicacy the echoes of these children through toes, clothing, furniture and whimsical objects.  The score by Alex Somers and the sound design by Peter Albrechtsen help create a climate of sorrow and loss.
 

The documentary’s goal and climax are encapsulated in the reporter’s final reflection: “I wish that we could transport all Americans to stand in one of those bedrooms for just a few minutes. We’d be a different America.”  
 
Independently financed, All the Empty Rooms is connected to the photo series Hartman and Bopp put together and showed on “CBS News Sunday Morning” and “60 Minutes” in 2024.  The film is streaming on Netflix since December 1.
 

Children No More: “Were and Are Gone” focuses on the work of Israeli peace activists organizing vigils in Tel Aviv for the Palestinian children killed in the Gaza war.  Like All the Empty Rooms, this 36-minute Israeli documentary goes for the emotional jugular of the audience with photos of innocents trampled by violence, but it is explicit in its anti-Jewish impulse. The paradox, of course, is that this pro-Palestinian advocacy unfolds in the only democracy in the Middle East and was directed and produced by Israelis. Imagine the possibility of an Iranian documentary, sanctioned by the mullahs, about the death of Mahsa Amini in police custody in 2022, and the ensuing crushed protest “Woman, Life, Freedom”.
 
Since March of 2025, a group of leftist activists gather in silence in public spaces, holding photos of these young Palestinian casualties of war when they were alive, with an inscription about their age and date of death. The data, trustingly noted by one of the organizers, is corroborated - quotes - by the Hamas ministry of health.  The deaths are de facto laid only on the Israeli military, without any Hamas responsibility, and described as an Israeli strategy of genocide.
 

As an observational documentary, following the travails of these activists, it works as an effective tool to awaken the humanity of the viewers and enlist their sympathy. Understandably, no sane person is for war and destruction.  And the photos are heartbreaking.
 
But there is more than the referential meaning in this well-structured narrative, since Children No More cannot be extricated from its political circumstances. Established Israeli director Hilla Medalia astutely provides some counterpoint as context. She films the reactions of passersby, who call out the protestors for eliding who started the war, and forgetting about the compatriots held hostage.  It is not Israel, they argue, who slaughter, murder and preach genocide.  The documentary does not show any thoughtful engagement with views contrary to its point-of-view.
 
As a result of politics or conviction, the film ends up adopting the narrative of the enemies of the Jewish nation. In this sense, Children No More financed outside of public Israeli film organizations, functions as a work of political propaganda. It becomes part of the larger conversation – as were the German and American documentaries of the 1930s and World War II – about the power of film to persuade.