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.