Stream the Fantastic 2024 Oscar Nominated Documentaries

The last few years have been boom times for two different documentary formats that you will find on streamers. The former is more like reality TV than anything else, often about a salacious crime or a recent sensational story, sandwiched between interviews with primary sources and experts and archival material. The second of these genres, the celebrity documentary, is the brighter of the two. It is usually well shot and offers a semblance of intimacy with the subject… who gives the camera significant access to her life, but more often than not it is a Executive producer of the project or has some type of silent right of approval.

This year’s list of nominees for Best Documentary Feature is a resounding rejection of mass appeal. Together, they mark a return to a pre-streaming era with movies about people you don’t yet know (and a Ugandan pop star turned politician). And although these nominations have not come without controversy, with some in the industry claiming they are a resentful response to a certain kind of success, are exactly the films we need right now, each advancing the art of nonfiction storytelling in different ways. They are all available to stream and are worth your time.

Sometimes a documentary is so inventive that it reminds you how truly expansive this form can be. I have thought about four daughters a lot since I first saw it in December (in a solitary 10:30am screening at the only New York theater to show it).

Without revealing too much, four daughters sits in a canon with films like The act of killing and Under the sun, Both embrace the artifice of cinema as a narrative medium and turn it on its head. If documentary is a genre that exists somewhere on a spectrum between journalism and entertainment, in each of these masterpieces it is in the tension between performance and reality that we find the truth.

Walk into four daughters as blindly as possible if you want to feel the full weight of its impact in real time. It follows a Tunisian family (Olfa and her daughters, Eya and Tayssir) and asks them to relive the worst moment of their lives, choosing actors to share the screen (and the burden). They will play many different roles: friend, therapist, journalist, shadow. They ask questions. They try to understand. They try to help us understand. They try to help Olfa, Eya and Tayssir understand and process their own stories. The seven become a closed circuit and, at times, the lines between them blur: they turn the past into a performance and, in fleeting moments, a broken family seems almost whole.

Yeah four daughters arrives at the truth through acting, bobi wine, On the contrary, it is a deeply journalistic project that tells the story of the struggle of a pop star turned democracy activist in Uganda. bobi wine meets his eponymous character at the beginning of his political career and follows him on his journey to overthrow President Yoweri Museveni, who has been in power since 1986. It’s a difficult film to watch: Wine and his supporters suffer tremendous violence at the hands of of an autocratic government. They are repeatedly arrested, beaten, tortured and sometimes killed. Co-director Moses Bwayo himself was shot at point-blank range during filming. And yet, through it all, Wine, his family and the Bwayo chamber remain steadfast.

At a time when democracy and press freedom face threats around the world, bobi wine is as much a film about the rest of us as it is a film about Uganda. As I watched, I thought about movies like Navalny, which captures Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s fight against Putin (winner of the Oscar for Best Documentary last year, and recently resonant after his death), and A thousand cuts, about former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s crackdown on the media. Wine’s struggle may seem hopeless, but hope is ultimately what drives him and this film forward.

Produced by Associated Press and Frontline, 20 days in Mariupol tells the story of the Russian invasion through the camera of Ukrainian journalist and filmmaker Mstyslav Chernov and his AP colleague Evgeniy Maloletka, who are the only international journalists left in Mariupol when the conflict begins. Chernov conducts on-the-fly interviews with civilians as they watch Russian tanks roll into their city and disrupt their lives; some see Chernov as their last remaining link to the rest of the world, while others are skeptical and distrustful, almost accusatory. Although the least formally inventive of the category, Chernov’s rich, introspective narration is what grounds a film that could easily have been a compendium of harrowing news footage. And make no mistake: the fact that 20 days in Mariupol exists at all is remarkable. It tells a story that autocratic forces do not want told: a graphic document that captures the reality of war and Russian oppression as it is. Dead adults, dead children, dead babies. Houses and hospitals bombed. Chernov himself puts it best, somewhat cynically, talking about all the war he has covered in Ukraine and elsewhere: “We keep filming but everything stays the same. Even worse”.

kill a tiger tells the story of 13-year-old Kiran (not her real name) and her parents as they fight for justice after surviving a violent assault. It is a portrait of resilience and, in this sense, it reminded me a little of Bobi came. While Bobi Wine uses his platform as a musician to enter politics and drive change at the national level, kill a tiger It is a fight for national change that starts from the community up. Like Wine, farmer Ranjit is willing to sacrifice everything for what he loves, and he is guided by the belief that change at the local level could help slowly change the minds and hearts of his fellow villagers. Even when his situation seems hopeless, Ranjit clings to the hope that a victory for his daughter can be a victory for other women and girls, and it is with this determination that he is able to move forward.

I had an extraordinarily difficult time finding a place (either streaming or in theaters) to watch this movie and, frankly, I was a little confused. Now, having seen it at a packed screening at 7pm on a Friday in February, I understand why: In a live Q&A, director Nisha Pahuja explained that she doesn’t want to use the film’s participants nor to their stories to sell tickets or promote the project (and in fact, the film itself begins by asking viewers not to post identifiable photographs of Kiran). Living in an age where you can watch almost anything at any time, there’s something quite radical about that approach. kill a tiger is a film with a mission and asks its viewers to take responsibility for being thoughtful members of their world.

The film was recently acquired by Netflix and will air this weekend, just in time for the Oscars. We will see if Pahuja’s requests to maintain Kiran’s privacy will be respected now that the documentary will be on the world’s largest streaming service.

Available on Netflix Friday or free streaming via the National Film Board of Canada

Chilean journalist Augusto Góngora and his partner, Paulina Urrutia (Pauli), navigate their Alzheimer’s together. Góngora made his name covering the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, and the film cuts between the past and present, interspersed with home videos and footage from his decades-long career. There is a strange poetry in seeing a man who spent his life preserving Chile’s national memory lose his own. If this were fiction, it would be too direct.

The eternal memory It is interesting to consider it together with the preselected american symphony: Musician Jon Batiste composing an orchestral piece while his wife (author and writer Suleika Jaouad) undergoes cancer treatment.. Both films are love stories that allow the viewer to enter the private world of a couple trying to balance illness with creative practice. In The Eternal Memory, Pauli is a working actress who juggles her caring responsibilities and takes Augusto to rehearse with her. In different people’s hands, Augusto’s Alzheimer’s could make for a much darker film, and although The eternal memory It doesn’t shy away from the weight of their illness, it’s a film that is still full of joy and light, with Augusto and Pauli dancing, singing and filming their way through difficult things.