The Best Documentaries of the 2020s

Four directors — two Palestinian, two Israeli — filmed Masafer Yatta between 2019 and 2023, and the footage that sticks is Harun Abu Aram, shot in January 2021 as soldiers took a generator, paralysed from the neck down, dead of those injuries on February 14, 2023. Picked up in 24 countries and not in the United States, the collective opened it themselves in New York on January 31, 2025; a month later it won Best Documentary Feature at the 97th Academy Awards.

Two brothers, Nadeem Shehzad and Mohammad Saud, have treated roughly 20,000 injured raptors over twenty years, and Shaunak Sen films their Wazirabad basement clinic for black kites with the same patience he gives the polluted sky the birds keep falling out of. Sundance handed it the World Cinema documentary Grand Jury Prize in January 2022; Cannes added the Golden Eye that May. Ecological collapse, filmed at eye level.

Amin Nawabi told his story to an old school friend, director Jonas Poher Rasmussen, on condition that animation cover his face, and the drawing loosens into abstract smear exactly where the memory becomes unbearable. That Danish co-production became the first film nominated for Best Documentary Feature, Best International Feature and Best Animated Feature at one ceremony, the 94th. Sundance gave it the World Cinema documentary Grand Jury Prize in January 2021.

Associated Press journalists were the last reporters left in the besieged city, and Mstyslav Chernov's footage of the strike on Maternity Hospital No. 3 was the first evidence the outside world saw of it. Made with PBS Frontline, it won Best Documentary Feature at the 96th Academy Awards on March 10, 2024. What lingers is the narration, which keeps circling back to what a camera cannot fix.

Hal Tulchin shot over forty hours of the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival on five video cameras, and after two one-hour specials aired that year — CBS in July, ABC in September — the rest sat in a basement for decades until Questlove cut his first film out of it. Mahalia Jackson's performance is the passage that stops the room dead. Best Documentary Feature at the 94th Academy Awards, and both top prizes at Sundance in January 2021.

Laura Poitras threads Nan Goldin's slideshows into the campaign Goldin founded in 2017, P.A.I.N., and the film hinges on that group's first action: the 2018 protest staged inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art at the Temple of Dendur. Venice awarded it the Golden Lion in September 2022, only the second documentary to take that prize after Sacro GRA. Two lives run in parallel and the seam barely shows.

Fox Rich handed Garrett Bradley a bag of mini-DV tapes — roughly 100 hours she had shot over eighteen years while her husband was in prison — and Bradley cut them against new black-and-white footage of the present. Home video addressed to a man who is not there does work no interview could. Sundance's US documentary directing award in January 2020 made Bradley the first African-American woman to win it.

Twenty-six royal treasures leave the Musée du Quai Branly for Benin, and Mati Diop gives one of them a voice: artefact number 26 narrates its years in a Paris storeroom and its journey home, in a text written by Makenzy Orcel. Sixty-eight minutes long, it won the Golden Bear in Berlin on February 25, 2024. Students then argue on camera about whether twenty-six is restitution or an insult.

Augusto Góngora was one of Chile's best-known cultural journalists, a man whose working life went into keeping the dictatorship years from being forgotten; Alzheimer's is now taking his own memory. Maite Alberdi films his wife, Paulina Urrutia, telling him who he is, again, in their own living room. Sundance's World Cinema documentary Grand Jury Prize in January 2023, then a nomination at the 96th Academy Awards — Chile's second for a documentary.

Pavel Talankin spent two years filming inside School No. 1 in Karabash, where he worked as videographer and events coordinator, while assemblies turned into war rallies and lessons turned into recruitment. Co-directed with David Borenstein, it took a Special Jury Award at Sundance in January 2025, then Best Documentary at the BAFTAs on February 22, 2026, then Best Documentary Feature at the 98th Academy Awards the following month.

Brittany Shyne shot her debut feature herself, in black and white, across farms where Black families have held the land for generations, and the 123 minutes move at the speed of the people in them. One driver sings a lullaby to a crying baby; stay with a scene long enough and something like that arrives. It won the US documentary Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in January 2025.

Craig Foster dived a kelp forest in False Bay, near Simon's Town, almost daily for a year, and the sequence everyone remembers is the octopus clinging to the back of a shark — the same species that took one of her arms, which she regrew over three months. Netflix released it on September 7, 2020, and it won Best Documentary Feature at the 93rd Academy Awards on April 25, 2021.

Churchill, Manitoba sits on a polar bear migration route, and Gabriela Osio Vanden and Jack Weisman film that arrangement at ground level, down to a wildlife officer deciding that one animal has become the nuisance of the title. Its directors say outright it is not a traditional nature documentary, which is the case for it over 2026's other contenders: they hold audience and sidebar prizes, while this took the US documentary Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in January 2026.