Top Docs: Award-Winning Documentary Filmmakers

2025 TIFF Doc Lineup Rundown with Thom Powers

Welcome to the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival (September 4 – 14), home of the big anniversary! This year’s edition of one of the world’s great film festivals marks TIFF’s landmark 50th anniversary. In addition, renowned curator and all-around documentary powerhouse Thom Powers (host of the Pure Nonfiction podcast) celebrates 20 years as the festival’s lead documentary programmer.
 
Thom returns to “Top Docs” to spotlight TIFF’s extraordinary documentary lineup that will no doubt set the table for the rest of the year in international nonfiction cinema. Running the gamut from established directors to breakthrough newcomers; serious topics to lighthearted fare; cinematically challenging work to crowd pleasers, TIFF’s got ‘em all. In addition, in a special treat, Thom tantalizes us with his terrific new book, “Mondo Documentary” — hot off the press — which shares his perspectives on more than 350 films that he has presented to audiences over the course of his 20 years at TIFF. We also dive into the book’s revelatory introductory essay, “How Did I Get Here.” If life is a journey, sometimes it’s fitting to break out the champagne and celebrate those milestone anniversaries.
 
Thom’s new book “Mondo Documentary” is available directly through Pure Nonfiction Books: https://purenonfiction.stck.me/book/1166355/Mondo-Documentary
 
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The Presenting Sponsor of "Top Docs" is Netflix.

2025 Emmys Rundown with Scott Feinberg

It’s Primetime. Yes, the Primetime Emmys are here, and we’ve got you covered. Culminating our “Top Docs” podcasts featuring the leading contenders for in the documentary categories, we talk to The Hollywood Reporter’s Executive Editor of Awards Scott Feinberg who breaks down the 2025 Emmy nominees in all the major documentary categories, including Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Special; Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Series; Exceptional Merit in Documentary Filmmaking; and Outstanding Directing.
 
The 77th Creative Arts Emmy Awards, including all the major doc categories, will be held on September 6 - 7.
 
An award-winning columnist and podcast host (“Awards Chatter”), Executive Editor of Awards Scott Feinberg has led The Hollywood Reporter’s awards coverage since 2011. He is best known for his “Feinberg Forecast,” through which he assesses the standings of various showbiz awards races, and for Awards Chatter, the interview-centric podcast that he started in 2015.
 
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The Presenting Sponsor of "Top Docs" is Netflix.
 

Emmy Winner Matt Wolf: "Pee-wee as Himself" (Re-release)

In honor of Matt Wolf's big wins at the Emmys this year--not only for "Pee-wee as Himself" as Best Documentary Feature, but for his own win as director of that documentary as well as picture editing for Damian Rodriguez--we are re-releasing our interview with him at Sundance earlier this year.
 
As Director Matt Wolf shows in his  insightful and fun 2-part HBO series “Pee-wee as Himself”, in Pee-wee, Paul Rubens found a persona that allowed him to both reveal and yet hide some core truths about who he was.  
 
Fascinated with television and show business since he was a boy, Rubens combined elements of his childhood’s pop culture with the art world of Southern California in the 70s and early 80s to craft a character that would both conquer the then punkish milieu of Melrose Avenue as well as create a nationally televised children’s TV show.  To achieve this, Wolfe delineates how Rubens deliberately foreclosed both his potential love life as well as cast aside long-held friendships.  Wolfe’s series demonstrates both the costs as well as the benefits of outsized talent and ambition.
 
You can watch “Pee-wee as Himself” on HBO and HBO Max starting Friday, May 23rd.
 
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The Presenting Sponsor of "Top Docs" is Netflix.
 

"Predators" with David Osit

As director David Osit describes his new film, “ ’Predators’ peels back the story of the TV show ‘To Catch a Predator’, which ensnared potential sex predators in a television hidden-camera sting operation and explores the fallout from the show and the legacy of journalism as entertainment that it helped create.”  
 
“Predators” (MTV Documentary Films) is now playing in select theaters, with more added every week.
 
Hidden Gem:  Look into My Eyes.
 
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@predatorsfilm on Instagram
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The Presenting Sponsor of "Top Docs" is Netflix.

Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival 2025

It’s that time of the year! The Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival 2025 runs from October 10-18th.  Ken, who, in addition to his Top Docs duties serves as the Executive Director of the Festival, joins Mike to talk about some of his picks for the Festival including:
“Lost Wolves of Yellowstone”
“The Cowboy”
“Move Ya Body:  The Birth of House”
“Armed Only With a Camera:  The Life and Death of Brent Renaud”
“The Perfect Neighbor”
“Welded Together”
“The Baloonists”
 
And… On October 12th at 2:30, Join Ken and Mike and director Joshua Seftel for a very special live Top Docs featuring Johua’s short, “All the Empty Rooms.”
 
For more info:  https://hsdfi.org/
 
The Presenting Sponsor of "Top Docs" is Netflix.

“Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5” with Raoul Peck

It’s easy to glibly identify what’s happening as “Orwellian”:  that we live in an era of “newspeak,” that we have reached the point at which the depths of the surveillance state of 1984 seems all too possible, maybe even already here. But in his new “Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5”, Raoul Peck (“I am Not Your Negro”, “Exterminate All the Brutes”, “Ernest Cole: Lost and Found”) digs much deeper into these possibilities, demonstrating how Orwell’s words resonated throughout the first half of the 20th century, only to become all that much relevant in our own day.
 
Drawing widely from Orwell’s corpus--not just the later novels, 1984 and Animal Farm but from earlier work and Orwell’s essays as well--Peck gives us a sense of a mind at work, seeking to bring together art and politics to reveal his world’s contradictions.  And by fashioning as a spine to the film Orwell’s final months on the remote island of Jura as well as in sanitariums and hospitals and tuberculosis destroyed his lungs, all while striving to finish his final novel, 1984, Peck creates a sense of the mortal urgency facing Orwell then and us now.
 
“Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5” is now playing in theaters.
 
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The Presenting Sponsor of "Top Docs" is Netflix.

"Mr. Scorsese" with Rebecca Miller

Mr. Scorsese is “Marty” to his friends and “Legend” to admirers and imitators.  But he’s also still that kid, the "minuscule asthmatic”--as lovingly described by his ex-wife, Isabella Rossellini--who fervently loved both the movies he watched in Times Square as well as the characters that populated the Little Italy of his youth.  The results were "Mean Streets", "Taxi Driver", "Raging Bull", and "Goodfellas".  
 
But as Rebecca Miller (“Personal Velocity”, “Maggie’s Plan”, “Arthur Miller: Writer”) compellingly shows, Scorsese’s triumph was not inevitable, nor is it simply the inevitable result of personal history yoked to directorial will. For while Scorsese has an anthropologist’s eye, his films are not documentaries (except for the documentaries, of course!)  Rather, they are the product of his own prodigious preparation combined with a willingness to trust his actors (notably, DiNero and DiCaprio) to improvise–and, in the end, phenomenal editing shaped by deep learning from the French New Wave as well as his decades-long professional relationship with Thelma Schoonmaker.  While his films are often grounded in fully formed literary works, he makes of them what director Ari Aster calls “total cinema”.  And while the visuals putatively reign, the music often seems to take the lead, almost directing the camera’s movements.  And in the end, in complicating the work of what may seem to be one of our most personal filmmakers, Miller suggests that Scorsese's wider purpose is to chronicle “the American project.” 
 
You can watch the 5-part series “Mr. Scorcese” on Apple+
 
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The Presenting Sponsor of "Top Docs" is Netflix.

Hot Springs Live 2025: "All the Empty Rooms" with Joshua Seftel

Today we feature a live event that Top Docs held a few weeks ago at the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival (where our co-host Ken Jacobson serves as Executive Director).  After Ken and Mike talk about the origins of Top Docs and some of the memorable moments over the years, Joshua Seftel, who has previously appeared on the pod for his Oscar-nominated “Stranger at the Gate,”  joins them to discuss his new short for Netflix, “All the Empty Rooms.”  Joshua followed CBS News correspondent Steve Hartman and photographer Lou Bopp as they spent 7 years documenting the bedrooms of children killed in school shootings, rooms their parents have preserved over as many as 17 years as they were on the day of the tragedy.  The film reveals that rather than just memorials to the past, the rooms provide solace mingled with ongoing pain in the present, and intimate the possible lost futures of the victims.
 
You can watch “All the Empty Rooms” on Netflix starting December 2nd.
 
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The Presenting Sponsor of "Top Docs" is Netflix.

"The American Revolution" with Ken Burns and Sarah Botstein

The version of the American Revolution many of us were taught was focussed on the ideals and principles of the revolution:  Independence, democracy, liberty guaranteed by enumerated rights.  And if we were taught about the actual conflict, we maybe heard of a few battles in New England and the mid-Atlantic– maybe there was a setback here and there.  But the whole thing was presented as basically inevitable:  Because of those ideals and principles, and maybe a dose of Providence (as some then thought as well.)  
 
By focusing on the actual conflicts of the era, and the consequences thereof for the greatly divided populace of the Eastern Seaboard of North America in their new 6-part series for PBS, The American Revolution, Ken Burns and Sarah Botstein (Jazz, The Vietnam War, The US and the Holocaust) complicate all of this.  While paying proper attention to the motivating ideals, they delineate the role the desire for the lands of Native Americans played in the war, and they show how the conflicts moved–often via waterways, and usually internecine–from New England, to the Mid-Atlantic, to the South.  And throughout, victory was not just not preordained, but in fact very contingent on the actions both of some outstanding individuals such as Washington (and yes, Arnold), as well as the strategies and agendas of nations as diverse as the Cayuga and Oneida (and yes, The French).
 
You can watch The American Revolution on PBS starting November 16th.
 
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The Presenting Sponsor of "Top Docs" is Netflix.

"Apocalypse in the Tropics" with Petra Costa

For filmmaker Petra Costa, democracy in her native country of Brazil is personal. Two years after Petra was born, the country returned to democratic rule after more than twenty years of military dictatorship. As Petra grew up, so, too, did the country’s democracy. But, in more recent years, as she has meticulously documented in two densely layered and highly personal documentaries — first, in her Academy Award-nominated “The Edge of Democracy,” and now, with her riveting new Netflix documentary “Apocalypse in the Tropics” — Brazil has seen its democratic institutions undermined by a potent mix of right-wing politics and evangelical Christianity.
 
Petra joins Ken on the pod to discuss the close ties between the right-wing former military officer Jair Bolsonaro, who was elected Brazil’s president in 2018, and the highly influential evangelical pastor Silas Malafaia. Witnessing the dissolution of the line between church and state, Petra describes her own deep dive into the Bible to try to explain where the country’s apocalyptic turn may have come from — and where it may be headed. Told with a poetical and penetrating narration, this chilling tale of Brazil’s teetering democracy has clear resonances with events taking place in the U.S.
 
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Hidden Gem:
“El Campeón del Mundo (The Champion of the World)”
 
The Presenting Sponsor of "Top Docs" is Netflix.