Julia Porter Steele

A glorious testament to the power of art to carry us through, Matthew Heineman’s latest documentary American Symphony follows two of the most creative American artists working today, husband and wife Jon Batiste and Suleika Jaouad, through one of the most intense years of their lives. Batiste, deep into the creation of a symphonic masterwork that will be performed for one night only at Carnegie Hall, is nominated for an unprecedented eleven Grammys the same week Jaouad discovers the leukemia she battled a decade earlier has returned. A profound exploration of the ways art sustains us through the high and the low notes of our lives, American Symphony is a deeply intimate and inspiring portrait of two unforgettable souls—and of the symphony that is life itself.

Read the interview with Heineman, Jaouad and Batiste here.

Hollywoodgate picks up in the aftermath of the United States’ chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. The Taliban—now in control of the country—enter an American base in Kabul called Hollywood Gate and there find a portion of the over $7 billion in sophisticated American weaponry left in the country. Director Ibrahim Nash’at is witness as the new head of Afghanistan’s air force, Malawi Mansour, orders his soldiers to inventory everything and repair all they can. The men go to work restoring the weaponry and training themselves to use it. Among them is Muhktar—a former Taliban fighter aiming to build a military career—who dreams ofavenging the war. Hollywoodgate follows Mansour and Mukhtar as the Taliban transform from a fundamentalist militia into a heavily armed military regime preparing for war beyond Afghanistan’s borders.

Read the interview with Nash’at and producer Talal Derki here.

In August 2020 a plane traveling from Siberia to Moscow diverted to Omsk when a passenger onboard became deathly ill—Alexei Navalny, the leader of Russia’s opposition, a man many had long feared would be killed for his refusal to be silent. But how was Navalny poisoned? And who was responsible? These questions are at the core of Navalny, a fly-on-the-wall documentary that unfolds with the pace of a thriller. The film brings together Navalny and journalist Christo Grozev as they painstakingly assemble the identities of the would-be hit men—and then crack the case wide open. Shot in a small German town as Navalny recovers, director Daniel Roher’s documentary is also a study of Navalny the man: a masterful media strategist and a leader utterly committed to his homeland. Navalny offers extraordinary access to a politician who is resolute in his insistence on reform—a leader who will not be cowed by anything, including his own poisoning. As Navalny ends, Russia’s would-be president returns to his country, ready to sacrifice everything to bring change. Winner of the 2023 Academy Award for best documentary.

Read the interview with Roher here.

Of Medicine and Miracles offers a clear and celebratory look at the power and promise of medical innovation as it tells the story of a revolutionary new treatment for cancer and the first child that the treatment saved. Director Ross Kauffman weaves together the odysseys of Dr. Carl June, the researcher who pioneered the use of altered T cells to treat disease, and Emily Whitehead, a young girl battling a rare form of leukemia. At the heart of both stories is the invention of CAR T cells—a patient’s own T cells, which are removed, genetically altered so they can better destroy cancer cells, and then injected back into the patient. Intimate in its scope and immense in its significance, Of Medicine and Miracles offers an inside look at a paradigm shift in medicine that has implications for treating all forms of disease, not just cancer.

Read the interview with Kauffman and producer Robin Honan here.

The Rescue chronicles the enthralling, against-all-odds story that transfixed the world in 2018: the daring rescue of twelve boys and their coach from deep inside a flooded cave in Northern Thailand. Using a wealth of never-before-seen material and exclusive interviews, directors E. Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin keep viewers on the edge of their seats as they bring alive one of the most perilous and extraordinary rescues in modern times, shining a light on the high-risk world of cave diving, the astounding courage and compassion of the rescuers, and the shared humanity of the international community that united to save the boys.

Read the interview with Vasarhelyi and Chin here.

Every day visitors from outer space arrive on our planet. Most days they’re tiny specks of cosmic dust but sometimes they’re boulder-sized meteorites and on very rare occasions they’re massive asteroids that hurl themselves into the earth’s crust. In Fireball, Werner Herzog and Clive Oppenheimer team up to explore the stories of these ancient, extraordinary concretions of the cosmos. Herzog and Oppenheimer travel the globe, talking with scientists who tell of the miraculous crystals and organic compounds that have been found in billions-year-old meteorites. The pair, who last collaborated on 2016’s Into The Inferno, visit vast craters left behind by asteroids millennia ago, join meteorite hunters on the ice in Antarctica, chat with astronomers in Hawaiʻi searching the sky for incoming hazards, and marvel at ultra-magnified images of micrometeorites with a citizen scientist in Norway. Fireball is an odyssey to understand the primordial matter that falls to earth from the heavens—and the meanings that humans derive from that matter.

Read the interview with Herzog and Oppenheimer here.

On October 2, 2018, journalist Jamal Khashoggi walked into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul and disappeared. In the ensuing days, the world watched horrified as a grim scene unfolded: The Saudi government insisted that Khashoggi had left the consulate until the Turkish government revealed that it had recordings of the journalist’s murder and dismemberment inside the building at the hands of a Saudi hit squad. Unable to deny the grisly truth, the Saudi government then tried to pin the murder on underlings—while more and more of the evidence pointed directly at Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and international governments looked the other way. Now, from director Bryan Fogel, comes The Dissident, a documentary that plays out at the highest levels of power as it exposes the story behind the story of Khashoggi’s murder. A tale of money, tyranny and technology run amok, The Dissident looks at the brutal intersection of spyware, propaganda and repressive regimes. Taut and terrifying, Fogel’s film builds toward a devastating truth: No one who goes against powerful forces in these times is truly safe.

Read the interview with Fogel here.

In 2017 Kim Jong-nam—the half-brother of North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un—was assassinated in Malaysia’s international airport. The brazen murder happened in broad daylight, filmed by security cameras. Footage showed two young women approaching Jong-nam from behind, covering his eyes with their hands, and pressing VX—the most lethal nerve gas on earth—into his eyes. He stumbled away and was dead within an hour. The story that came next was even more bizarre: The women who killed Jong-nam claimed they had been hired to pull a video prank and had no idea what they were actually doing. The Malaysian government scoffed and put the women on trial for murder. But was their story true? And would anyone believe them? Assassins—with a calculating dictator, a nefarious plot, a very public murder and two women fighting for their lives—lays bare a wildly improbable tale of manipulation and subterfuge in the age of social media.

Read the interview with director Ryan White and producer Jessica Hargrave here.

Alex Honnold’s extraordinary climbs have revolutionized the sport of “free soloing”: climbing without a rope. At the outset of Free Solo, we meet Honnold as he’s preparing to achieve his lifelong dream: ascending the face of the world’s most famous rock, the 3,200-foot El Capitan in Yosemite National Park—an utterly unprecedented undertaking in the free soloing world. The film chronicles his determined, meticulous preparation for the climb and the unexpected sweetness and challenge of falling in love along the way. Directors E. Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin capture both deeply human moments and the edge-of-your-seat thrill of witnessing one of the greatest athletic feats in history. With masterful, vertigo-inducing camerawork, Free Solo follows Honnold up El Cap on a climb that sets the ultimate standard: perfection or death. Winner of the 2019 Academy Award for best documentary.

Read the interview with Honnold here.

Read the interview with Vasarhelyi here.

Read the interview with Chin here.

Director Bryan Fogel's Icarus is a wild ride that starts in one place and ends somewhere else entirely. Fogel, an amateur bike racer, sets out to investigate doping by injecting himself and seeing if he can evade detection. Early on he teams up with Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov, the director of Russia's national antidoping laboratory, who delights in showing Fogel how to achieve his aim. As the two grow closer, stories break that place Rodchenkov at the center of Russia's state-sponsored Olympic doping program. Forced to flee for his life, Rodchenkov goes into hiding with Fogel's help. The director, his own quest to evade detection far behind him, works to keep Rodchenkov out of danger as the two prepare to reveal the biggest international sports scandal in living memory. Winner of the 2018 Academy Award for best documentary.

Read the interview with Fogel here.

In 1980 three 19-year-old strangers made the astonishing discovery that they were identical triplets. The three had been separated at birth, adopted and raised by different families. Reunited by chance, they became overnight sensations, interviewed by Tom Brokaw and Phil Donahue, clubbing at Studio 54, even appearing in a Madonna movie. But the brothers’ joyous reunion set in motion a chain of events that, years later, unearthed an extraordinary and disturbing secret: The triplets and their families had been part of a secret study that had deliberately separated the boys—and numerous other twin sets—as part of a quest to answer the basic nature-versus-nurture question at the heart of human behavior. Director Tim Wardle's gripping documentary Three Identical Strangers won the documentary storytelling award at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. 

Read the interview with Wardle here.

A testament to the immense complexity of nature, The Biggest Little Farm follows two dreamers and a dog on an odyssey to bring harmony to both their lives and the land. When the incessant barking of their beloved canine leads to an eviction notice from their tiny LA apartment, John and Molly Chester make a choice to start a farm on 200 acres in the foothills of Ventura County. The land they’ve moved to is weathering a nightmare, however, suffering the worst drought in 1,200 years and decades of commercial farming that has depleted the soil of crucial nutrients. To create the utopia they seek, the Chesters will have to restore the entire ecosystem. The Biggest Little Farm chronicles eight years of backbreaking work and outsize idealism as they attempt to do just that by planting over 200 crops and working with animals of every type. When the land finally begins to awaken, the Chesters are thrilled — but they soon learn that nothing in nature is simple and they will have to open their hearts to a far greater understanding of its intricacies and wisdom.

Read the interview with John Chester here.

Read the interview with Molly Chester here.

Reversing Roe takes viewers through the battles that have led the United States to the place it now finds itself—on the verge of overturning the landmark 1973 Supreme Court case that legalized abortion across the nation. The documentary offers a range of voices from the war: impassioned lawyers and politicians seeking to preserve a woman’s right to sovereignty over her body, embattled doctors determined to care for their patients, zealous activists intent on criminalizing abortion, and social historians who place abortion within the wider world of American politics and religion. Layered through the interviews is the back story: the brutality of the “coat hanger” era of illegal abortion, the rise of modern feminism and women’s political power, and the emergence of forces hostile to a woman’s ability to determine her own future.

Read the interview with directors Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg here.

In 1999 Milos Forman cast Jim Carrey to play cult comedian Andy Kaufman in the biopic Man on the Moon. When Carrey heard that he had the part, he was in Malibu looking out at the ocean. What would Kaufman say? Carrey wondered before deciding that Kaufman would communicate telepathically. At that moment, a pod of thirty dolphins broke the surface of the sea—and Carrey’s odyssey into Kaufman began. Throughout the shoot of Man on the Moon, the man the world knew as Jim Carrey disappeared, replaced by Kaufman. As the shoot progressed and reality began to flip, much of what was happening was captured on film by Kaufman’s former girlfriend, Lynne Margulies, and his former writing partner, Bob Zmuda. Nearly two decades later, Carrey revisits that time in Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond. The Margulies and Zmuda footage is intercut with the actor as he reflects on just how radically the experience of making the film began to reshape his own ideas of identity. 

Read the interview with Carrey here.

The heroine of director David France's riveting documentary is Marsha P. Johnson, the irresistible, indomitable icon of the transgender world. Marsha, born Malcolm, arrived in Greenwich Village in the 1960s. There she teamed up with Sylvia Rivera, born Ray Rivera. Together the radical duo fought arrests, condemned police brutality, organized street kids, battled the intolerant majority within the gay community, and launched the Stonewall Riots. In 1970 they formed the world’s first trans-rights organization and ignited a powerful and lasting civil rights movement for gender nonconforming people. But in 1992 Marsha's body was found floating in the Hudson River. The police ruled her death a suicide and refused to investigate. Now, a quarter century later, a dynamic activist named Victoria Cruz has taken it upon herself to  pursue leads, mobilize officials, and  get to the bottom of Marsha's death. 

Read the interview with France here.

Restless Creature offers an intimate portrait of prima ballerina Wendy Whelan as she prepares to leave the New York City Ballet after three decades with the company. As the film opens, Whelan, one of the greatest dancers of the modern age, is 46, battling an injury that has kept her from the stage and facing the prospect of her impending retirement from the company. What we see, as we journey with her, is a woman of uncommon strength, resilience and good humor grappling with change and questions of her own identity. "I look at this moment in a ballerina’s life as the last of the sacraments," she says, "just as profound as all the others but the least clearly understood." 

Read the interview with Whelan here. 

Read the interview with directors Adam Schlesinger and Linda Saffire here.

One of Us chronicles the journey of three mavericks who have gone in search of personal freedom at a very high cost. The documentary follows three individuals who have chosen to leave the insular world of Hasidic Judaism: Etty, a mother of seven, abandoning a violent marriage and divorcing her husband; Ari, a teenager on the verge of manhood who is struggling with addiction and the effects of childhood abuse; and Luzer, an actor who, despite having found success in the secular world, still wrestles with his decision. Shot over three years, the film offers intimate access to all three as they deal not only with questions of faith but with the consequences of leaving the only community they have ever known. 

Read the interview with directors Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing here.

Into the Inferno heads just where its title suggests: into the red-hot, magma-filled craters of some of the world's most active volcanoes. The film teams director Werner Herzog with esteemed volcanologist Clive Oppenheimer; it follows the two men across the globe as they explore not only the volcanoes themselves but also the belief systems that human beings have created around the fiery phenomena. Inferno is vintage Herzog, offering extraordinary locales, outré characters, improbable stories, and, through it all, a chance to go deep inside a mesmerizing subject and emerge with new understanding. 

Read the interview with Herzog here. 

Read the interview with Oppenheimer here.