Latest in Contenders Documentary

Deadline on Wednesday launched its streaming site for Contenders Film: Documentary, the award-season showcase that took place Sunday with creatives from 20 of the year’s buzziest non-fiction movies. Click here to launch the streaming site. Top filmmakers including Brett Morgen, Sacha Jenkins…

From separating families at the border to promises to build a massive wall between the US and Mexico, the Trump administration took an aggressively hostile approach towards immigrants.  It was these policies that inspired directors Betsy Hershey and Emma Wall to make the documentary Guerrilla Habeas…

Paweł Łoziński started working on The Balcony Movie two years before the Covid pandemic forced people to adopt social distancing, but the air of separation between the filmmaker and his subjects in this documentary feature might feel familiar.  Łoziński’s movie is a kind of moving-picture album: a…

When a woman dies from complications of childbirth, she leaves behind loved ones struggling to deal with the loss. Aftershock, a documentary from Disney's Onyx Collective, brings attention to the U.S. maternal mortality crisis by focusing on the deaths of two women and the family members they left…

In the semi-documentary film Eami, a word that tellingly means both "forest" and "world" to the indigenous Ayoreo Totobiegosode people of Paraguay, the native's increasingly shrinking landscape, due to deforestation, serves as a grounded but dreamlike backdrop for a story that blends elements of fiction…

In The Corridors of Power, filmmaker Dror Moreh takes a bracing look at the factors that kept America — the sole remaining superpower in the immediate post-Cold War era — from intervening in global instances involving genocide, war crimes and other large-scale atrocities. "The idea of the movie…

Navalny has been marketed as an international thriller focusing on the conspiracy to assassinate Russian peace activist Alexei Navalny, but director Daniel Roher says that it was just as important to show him as a human being as it was an icon.  At Deadline's Contenders Documentary awards-season…

In the new documentary Good Night Oppy, the Mars Opportunity rover becomes the scrappy robot that could: an instrument platform that trundles across a rusty landscape millions of miles away, searching for alien life signs, and outlasts its own projected existence by almost 15 years. But none of the…

The stars of the Amazon Studios documentary Wildcat are a man, a woman and an orphaned baby jungle cat they live with in a rainforest in Peru. The subject of this first feature from a filmmaking couple based in Virginia is something more: how to survive psychological damage and suicidal depression to find…

Sidney Poitier wasn’t just an actor, filmmaker or activist. He was a pioneer who smashed stereotypes, and helped change the perception of Black people. The late acting legend’s life, career and legacy are explored in the Apple Original Films documentary Sidney. Reginald Hudlin directed and…

Selena Gomez has been candid about her struggle with mental health issues, including her 2018 bipolar diagnosis. With Selena Gomez: My Mind and Me, she and director Alek Keshishian wanted to create a public account of her long battle to recover her mental wellbeing. Speaking at Deadline's Contenders…

"My only sin is in my skin." That rhyme is among the lyrics in the 1929 Fats Waller song "(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue," an eloquent and haunting evocation of the experience of being a Black man in America.  The brilliant jazz artist and entertainer Louis Armstrong recorded a version of…