Netflix Is Back In The Documentary Race With A Slew Of Projects, But Competition Is Still Strong

For three years, Netflix has gone without a Best Documentary Feature Oscar nomination for one its originals, a surprising dry spell for a streamer used to dominating the category. But it looks like the drought is about to end.

The platform has fielded an exceptional slate of contenders in 2024, many with a strong shot at making the Oscar Documentary Feature shortlist — the first step toward an Academy Award nomination. The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, Daughters, Will & Harper, Mountain Queen: The Summits of Lhakpa Sherpa, Power, The Greatest Night in Pop, Martha, Skywalkers: A Love Story, Yintah — they all present a solid opportunity for Netflix to compete for the top documentary prize.

“I feel very honored to be a part of this incredible slate of movies,” says Josh Greenbaum, director of Will & Harper, a kind of buddy comedy about the friendship between actor Will Ferrell and his pal Harper Steele, who came out as trans. “As a doc filmmaker, I applaud their support for our artform. Our industry, by and large, is going through a change — not just the doc space, but the narrative space as well. And, so, to have a company like Netflix clearly show that they believe in nonfiction and believe in documentaries means the world to me as a filmmaker. And I know I share that feeling with the directors of all these incredible films.”

Will & Harper, Mountain Queen, Daughters, and The Remarkable Life of Ibelin all earned places on DOC NYC’s shortlist of the year’s best documentaries. Between them, they claimed 16 Critics Choice Documentary Awards nominations, with Will & Harper, Daughters, and Ibelin all competing for the CCDA’s Best Documentary Feature.

Ibelin, about a young man with Duchenne muscular dystrophy who found connection with others in the online gaming community of World of Warcraft, won an audience award at Sundance, and honors for Benjamin Ree’s direction. Ree says he screened the film for Netflix and other distributors shortly before the world premiere at Sundance and the streamer jumped on it.

“It’s great Netflix has bought so many quality documentaries this year,” Ree says, pointing to a benefit of drafting so many Oscar contenders. “I think that will create this synergy effect where if you watch one documentary you like this year on Netflix, you are more likely to watch another one.”

Netflix acquired Daughters out of Sundance, where it won both the Festival Favorite Award and the Audience Award for U.S. Documentary. The film, directed by Natalie Rae and Angela Patton, goes inside a Washington D.C.-area prison where incarcerated men get the rare chance to participate in a daddy-daughter dance with their daughters.

“This film does such a beautiful job of bridging the idea that fathers need their daughters and daughters need their fathers, and this unjust system that we call the criminal justice system, that it really separates families and tears them apart,” declares executive producer Kerry Washington. “The film is about the need for us to pause these systems and treat each other like humans.”

It was out of the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival that Netflix acquired Mountain Queen, directed by Lucy Walker. The film’s protagonist, Lhakpa Sherpa, overcame the patriarchal culture of her native Nepal to summit Mount Everest an astonishing 10 times.

Walker, a two-time Oscar nominee, calls the Netflix acquisition “an incredible dream come true in this documentary climate… because the story is very much about Lhakpa not having been seen in her life and fighting for a cause that was about inspiring other women and girls and showing the world what women and girls were capable of.”

Netflix may end up dominating the Oscar documentary shortlist, but by no means does it have the field to itself. It faces stiff competition for Academy recognition from National Geographic’s Sugarcane, directed by Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie. That film — about the appalling treatment of Indigenous children at Indian residential schools — leads the Critics Choice Documentary Awards with eight nominations. Black Box Diaries, the MTV Documentary Films’ release directed by Japanese journalist Shiori Itō, has emerged as a strong contender, as has Kino Lorber’s Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat from veteran director Johan Grimonprez, and Amazon Studios’ Frida, the documentary about artist Frida Kahlo, directed by Carla Gutiérrez.

Other solid contenders: Mati Diop’s Dahomey, winner of the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, and Ernest Cole: Lost and Found, Raoul Peck’s film that shared the top prize for documentary at the Cannes Film Festival. Queendom, Agniia Galdanova’s documentary about the remarkable Russian drag performance artist Jenna Marvin, has emerged as something of a surprise contender, recently named to shortlists of the year’s best by DOC NYC and the IDA. And Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story, about the late actor who was paralyzed in a horse riding accident, could earn recognition for filmmakers Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui.

Many of this year’s hopefuls are noted for the director’s integration into the storyline. Itō, director of Black Box Diaries, pursues justice after she becomes the victim of a sexual assault by a prominent Japanese TV journalist. “I think it helped a lot that I was journalist so I could investigate my own case when police weren’t doing anything,” she says. “Also, it helped me mentally, psychologically, that I could distance myself from the case, thinking I’m covering someone else’s case.”

In Hollywoodgate, director Ibrahim Nash’at risks his life to document the Taliban’s consolidation of power after the exit of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. He supplies narration for the film and is glimpsed on camera, sometimes when Taliban fighters are threatening to kill him if he steps out of line. “Any shot that had me in it, we were putting on the side, never keeping it as part of the edit,” he recalls. “[But] we discovered that the story we were trying to build was a Shakespearean drama about power — and the Taliban won at the end, and you cannot have a Shakespearean drama about power with the bad guys winning. So, we had to include my character as a secondary character and as a tool.”

Filmmaker Jazmin Renée Jones has won acclaim — and a place on the IDA’s shortlist of the year’s best features — with her directorial debut, Seeking Mavis Beacon. Jones appears on camera throughout with her co-producer Olivia McKayla Ross (dubbed an ‘e-girl investigator’), as the two try to solve the mystery behind the woman featured on packaging for the Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing software.

Porcelain War, the Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner directed by Brian Bellomo and Ukrainian sculptor-turned soldier Slava Leontyev, documents how Leontyev and his artist wife, Anya Stasenko, continue to make art despite the Russian invasion of their country.

No Other Land, another strong Oscar contender by a collective of Israeli and Palestinian filmmakers, features two of its directors on camera — Palestinian Basel Adra and his friend, Israeli Yuval Abraham. The film, set in the occupied West Bank, examines how Palestinian villagers face constant pressure from the Israel Defense Forces and Israeli settlers intent on dispossessing them of their land.

No Other Land is “not just about the friendship and to show that the relationship can be ‘nice’ between Israelis and Palestinians,” Adra says. “No, it’s to show the power imbalance.” Adds Abraham, “Our film, that we worked on for five years, speaks about forms of structural violence.”

No Other Land lacks U.S. distribution despite winning awards around the world, from the Berlinale to Sheffield DocFest in the U.K., Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival in the U.S., and many other festivals. Some critical favorites have resorted to a self-distribution model in search of audiences and Oscar traction, including Union, the film directed by Brett Story and Stephen Maing that documents the first successful unionization drive at an Amazon facility, and Carville: Winning is Everything, Stupid, directed by Matt Tyrnauer. The latter film, about the Democratic political strategist James Carville, has aired twice on CNN, but lacks a formal theatrical partner.

For this year’s hopefuls, winning may not be everything, exactly. They’d be thrilled to earn an Oscar nomination. But to get that far, they’ve first got to make the shortlist of 15 finalists, to be announced on December 17.