Latest in National Geographic

In the battle to protect their territory in the Amazon rainforest, the indigenous Uru-eu-wau-wau people really only have one significant weapon in their arsenal: media attention. Without it, landgrabbers will keep penetrating further into their land in the Brazilian state of Rondônia. The Territory, which just made…

EXCLUSIVE: National Geographic's award-winning documentary Torn is about to make its streaming platform debut. Disney+ announced it will premiere the film, directed by Max Lowe, on February 4. Torn tells the story of world-renowned mountain climber Alex Lowe, who was killed in an avalanche in the Himalayas in 1999. He…

EXCLUSIVE: National Geographic is making the Oscar-shortlisted documentary The First Wave available for free for 48 hours, beginning tomorrow. Matthew Heineman's film, shot in a Queens hospital as New York City endured the initial explosion of Covid, can be seen without commercial interruption on NatGeo.com and…

New York City has recorded more than 1.1 million cases of Covid since the pandemic began almost two years ago. The disease has claimed almost 35,000 lives in the city alone. But statistics only go so far in telling the story. The documentary The First Wave, directed by Matthew Heineman, shows what it was really like…

"And the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature goes to… My Octopus Teacher… to American Factory… to Icarus." The Motion Picture Academy has enveloped Netflix nonfiction features with love again and again in recent years, rewarding the streamer with three trophies since 2018, not to mention half a dozen nominations…

When New York City became the epicenter of the country's Covid outbreak in 2020, many residents—those of means, anyway—fled to second homes or other points far from the city. But not New York-based filmmaker Matthew Heineman. He suited up in PPE on the frontlines of the Covid battle. The Oscar-nominated director…

The First Wave director Matthew Heineman said his Covid documentary was both frightening and inspiring. Heineman followed medical personnel at Long Island Jewish Medical Center in the Queens borough of New York for four months in 2020. He spoke at Deadline’s Contenders Film: Documentary event about the experience. "I…

Becoming Cousteau director Liz Garbus said her documentary about ocean explorer Jacques Cousteau shows that he recognized the dangers of climate change decades ago. Garbus spoke with Deadline's Matthew Carey at Contenders Film:  Documentary. "We saw him start talking about it as early as 1971," Garbus said. "When he…

EXCLUSIVE: Tragedy struck in the Tibetan Himalayas on October 5, 1999, when an avalanche claimed the life of two Americans, including Alex Lowe, a mountaineer considered perhaps the foremost climber in the world. It was an incalculable loss for the climbing community, but something worse for the family Lowe left…

Death is a common theme, it seems, in each of the six-part limited documentary series National Geographic previewed at Disney+ Day. “There is a real risk you could die,” one expert tells Chris Hemsworth in the trailer for the actor’s sojourn into biohacking and self discovery, Limitless. The series follows…

EXCLUSIVE: Over his 87 years of life, Jacques-Yves Cousteau was variously an officer in the French navy, a pilot, an inventor, an author, an ocean explorer, and filmmaker. It's in the latter two roles that he is best remembered, plying the seas aboard his beloved Calypso, documenting the exotic world beneath the…

Free Solo filmmakers Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin dealt with a mountain of challenges as they worked on their latest white knuckle documentary, The Rescue. The National Geographic release tells the gripping story of the attempt to rescue 12 young members of a Thai soccer club and their assistant coach who…