Get to know four of the five Academy Award nominees that you can now watch on DocPlay.
If you’re an Oscars completist, or just love watching great non-fiction cinema, you’ll want to consider signing up to streaming platform DocPlay right now.
Known for its library of top-tier documentaries, DocPlay just dropped four of the five nominees for Best Documentary Feature at this year’s Academy Awards. Read on to know more about these titles + two bonus films to pique your interest.
Black Box Diaries
Journalist Shiori Itō embarks on a close-to-a-decade investigation into her own sexual assault, a quest that would become a landmark case in Japan. The sheer gutsiness of Itō, who also directs this documentary, makes her an immediately compelling subject to follow as she challenges the country’s archaic systemic issues to make her seemingly untouchable offender answer for his crimes. But it’s also a powerful piece of bareknuckle journalism in the vein of prior nominees Collective and Citizenfour, the kind that proves how building a case and interviewing the right people can make for some of the most engrossing cinema.
No Other Land
One of our 20 Favourite Films of 2024, this documentary depicts the destruction of Palestinian villages on the West Bank by Israeli authorities. The directors, Palestinian activist Basel Adra and Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, are also the film’s subjects, and an unlikely friendship forms as the pair captures the grim realities of this war.
“People must understand that this is unnormal, that this is insane and they should be against it,” Adra told Flicks last year. “When you live in this situation, you either choose to be silent or pay a price. My father chose not to be silent. I am proud that they raised me this way.”
Porcelain War
A remarkably different story of the Ukraine war compared to last year’s Oscar-winner 20 Days in Mariupol, this documentary follows three Ukrainian artist-activists who stay behind to defend their country and culture—armed with guns, cameras, and the “fragile yet everlasting” art of porcelain figurines. Filming almost everything themselves, the movie captures what the Washington Post describes as “a testament to how life’s beauty—all the world’s fertility an artist is trained to see—endures among privation and death.”
Soundtrack to a Coup d’État
The most stylistically audacious film of the nominees, Johan Grimonprez’s two-and-a-half-hour doco dives deep into the events leading up to music icons Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach crashing the UN Security Council in protest. Their motives are tied to a dense slab of how-did-I-not-know-this history involving the Cold War, the Danish colonisation of the Congo, the Civil Rights Movement, the hunger for uranium, and the prominence of jazz. It’s a lot—informative, angering, fascinating, upsetting, groovy—but Grimonprez effortlessly swirls these massive topics into a seductive, sensory experience that lives and breathes jazz through its visuals, its editing style, its typography, and—of course—its killer soundtrack.
Sugarcane (the other Oscar-nominee)
The only 2025 nominee for Best Documentary Feature not streaming on DocPlay is this heartbreaking NatGeo investigation into a native residential school in Canada that sparks a reckoning at the Sugarcane Reserve just nearby. “Sugarcane handles its heavy subject matter without despair,” the Hollywood Reporter praises, adding that the film “affirms that if we are to ever rectify the past and present-day violences of colonialism, we have no choice but to act.”
Hollywoodgate (bonus DocPlay title)
Director Ibrahim Nash’at’s feature may not be one of the nominees, but it did make The Academy’s shortlist for Best Documentary Feature, made available to stream on DocPlay the same day as the Big Four.
Flicks editor Steve Newall, who caught it at NZIFF, describes the film as a “fascinating on-the-ground account made by a solo documentarian with rare (and strict) permission to capture events as the Taliban helps itself to matériel abandoned by US forces fleeing Afghanistan—everything from cough drops to Black Hawk helicopters. Hollywoodgate‘s observational camera follows Taliban air force commander Mawlawi Mansour as he embraces newfound airborne capabilities, and within its regime-enforced parameters is at turns tense, surprising, and revealingly banal.”
