One category is ready for the moment. This year’s nominated feature length documentaries are not just in competition for a gold-plated statue, but to see which is the most woefully depressing. I would strongly advise keeping some Advil on hand for anyone determined to binge-watch all five prior to making selections in the office Oscars pool. Two of the five films center the atrocity of ongoing wars; two are about injustice surrounding sexual abuse; and one is about never-fully-accounted-for CIA chicanery and psyops in post-colonial Congo. (Gee whiz, couldn’t there be one that wasn’t so heavy? We can’t get a March of the Penguins in the mix?)

In addition to dark vibes, four of the five nominees share an unusual trait. They are all directed or co-directed by the film’s own subjects. As everyone is walking around with a film production studio in their pocket, we can surely expect this trend to continue. (Don’t you feel dumb for wasting time playing backgammon on your phone instead of making an Oscar-nominated film?) Here’s a look at this year’s five picks.

No Other Land

directed by Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, and Rachel Szor

The nominee most likely to win is No Other Land, a film that’s been making headlines since its debut at the Berlin Film Festival in February 2024. It comes from a four person filmmaking team of two Palestinians and two Israelis, and was shot in the West Bank community of Masafer Yatta. Israel classifies that area as an “Area C” zone, which means that, for decades, the Israeli military has claimed the right to use it for military testing. The Palestinians living there have claimed the right to be left alone. As I’m sure you can imagine, these two positions have led to discord.

Our central character is Basel Adra, whose family has been documenting Palestinian resistance for years. He’s joined by an Israeli journalist, Yuval Abraham, who aids where he can, but—as he’s reminded when things get hot—still gets to go home and sleep in a neighborhood that isn’t interrupted by tanks. Their tense onscreen friendship is part of what makes this project so special.

When No Other Land won two awards in Berlin, it led to a moment of political farce after the German minister of culture, who had been caught applauding the film’s success, clarified that she was only clapping for the Israeli half of the team. The movie continued to do well at international festivals, but no North American distributor purchased the film. This lack of distribution led to articles, then chatter about cowardly companies unwilling to touch something so controversial. At the New York Film Critics Circle awards banquet in January, where No Other Land picked up another prize, The Brutalist director Brady Corbet and actor Guy Pearce both lamented the film’s lack of distribution.

New York City’s Film at Lincoln Center, affiliated with the New York Film Festival where No Other Land screened, booked the movie for a one-week Oscar-qualifying run. At least eighteen independent theaters across the U.S. and Canada have programmed it for February, just as Academy members vote. (The International Documentary Association’s website reports that distribution offers were on the table, but only from very small companies.)

This triumph over perceived censorship will be, I believe, catnip for Academy voters, even if the subject of Israel and Palestine is one that makes many people squeamish.

There have been other Palestinian nominees—a similar 2012 documentary called 5 Broken Cameras; two fiction films from Dutch-based Palestinian director Hany Abu-Assad, Paradise Now and Omar, that take a nuanced view on the conflict; and two short narratives. That No Other Land is a joint project with two Israeli directors also provides a little mental cushioning for those who tend to skew closer to the Israeli side. Though 5 Broken Cameras was similarly a co-production, the intervening years have brought some new perspectives on this issue.

But I could be wrong! The movie ends with our two friends, sitting on the ground, exhausted, smoking cigarettes, and wishing for a change to “this bad reality.” A card then explains that filming ended just before Hamas’s attack from Gaza. Are we meant to interpret that as more of the “bad reality,” or is October 7, 2023, the longed-for “change”? This is open to debate, and it is possible this ambiguity might be too much for the Academy.

No Other Land is currently in theaters only.

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Find out why the frontrunner is so controversial—and why everything about Latvia’s entry is a miracle.

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Porcelain War

directed by Brendan Bellomo and Slava Leontyev

The nominee with the most arresting footage is Porcelain War, a film made by soldiers in Kharkiv, a Ukrainian city close to the Russian border. Our primary subjects are a married couple who make delicate sculptures and whose lives are turned upside down by Russia’s full-scale invasion. Slava Leontyev walks away from his kiln and picks up a machine gun, becoming a trainer to other soldiers who, until recently, never would have dreamed they’d be wearing camouflage. (The squad is made up of people with the mundane vocations, like furniture salesmen.)

At home, Slava and his partner continue to make exquisite, small works (which are often placed on the battlefield), and enjoy nature with their tiny dog, Frodo. This is balanced with imagery of sudden violence from drones and GoPro cameras.

Porcelain War is not meant to be nuanced, it is meant to be a portrait of bravery. I get the impression that if you labeled this as propaganda, the directors would not necessarily take it as a pejorative. Some pacifists might blanche, but as a new kind of documentary, thanks to advancements in technology, it is remarkable.

Porcelain War is currently in theaters only.

Sugarcane

directed by Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie

The nominee that is the most cinematic (for lack of a better term) is Sugarcane, a gripping look at the residential schools scandal in Canada. It was recently discovered that hundreds, if not thousands, of Indigenous children were thought to have been abused and killed in church-run schools, with known abusers given no punishment. This is not ancient history; the father of the film’s co-director, Ed Archie NoiseCat, was born in 1959. He is the result of a rape at one such school; he was tossed into an incinerator as an infant but was rescued by a milkman who thought he heard a cat. His is one of four interweaving stories in a small community looking, in its own way, for some kind of healing as these atrocities come to light. (For former tribal Chief Rick Gilbert, it means a trip to the Vatican.)

Despite the ugliness of the story, the location (Williams Lake First Nation in British Columbia), is a spellbinding backdrop, and the sequences cut together poetically. Also, the directors also don’t rush the narrative, allowing for scenes that don’t necessarily advance the journalistic side of the story, but enhance its humanity. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is presented as something of an ally, offering morsels of reconciliation. Recent changes in the Canadian government make the somewhat hopeful conclusion a little more dim.

Sugarcane is currently streaming on Hulu and Disney+.

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Black Box Diaries

directed by Shiori Ito

The nominee that finally had me sobbing was Black Box Diaries, a first-person account from Japanese journalist Shiori Ito, who accused a high-profile colleague of sexual assault and then encountered Japan’s antiquated rape laws and overwhelming legal obstacles. That her assailant was then-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s authorized biographer did not help matters. Despite clear evidence of PTSD (as well as family members who urged her to stand down), she dug in her heels, citing her occupation’s prime directive of exposing the truth. We watch as she prepares a legal suit and publishes a book, which just happens to coincide with the global #MeToo movement. (“There’s this film producer,” she says in one video.)

Ito quickly became a lightning rod in Japan, and with that came cruelty and bullying—but also support from elders in her field, as well as men willing to risk their jobs to go on the record. (A phone call with the doorman at the hotel where the incident happened is where I lost it.)

Japan’s justice system is presented as a disaster, but anyone watching will see parallels to similar stories in the United States and Europe. Patriarchal laws are far from a “foreign” phenomenon.

Black Box Diaries is streaming on Paramount+.

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat

directed by Johan Grimonprez

The nominee of most interest to a history nerd is surely Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, a 150-minute collage that climaxes with the assassination of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba. The film dives deep into how Belgian mining company Union Minière and the CIA worked in—shall we say—creative ways to secure their interests, even using goodwill jazz concerts as cover to gather intelligence. Belgian director Johan Grimonprez takes a deliberately roundabout (dare I say jazzy?) route to make his case, with stops along the way for the Congolese citizen who swiped the King of Belgium’s sword; the United States of Africa movement; and an examination of the region’s uranium deposits and their importance to both the arms and space races.

Texts read in voiceover range from Andrée Blouin to Nikita Khrushchev, and the film’s cadence is set to a beat laid down by Max Roach, a drummer and activist who, along with other jazz greats, offers commentary both scathing and sarcastic. Grimonprez has created a rich and explosive film, truly unlike any other Cold War documentary I’ve ever seen.

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat is streaming for subscribers of the Kino Film Collection, free on Kanopy for those with accounts, and also rentable on platforms like Amazon.