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.