The Shadow Scholars

Shot inside a Lenovo factory in Wuhan, Factory is a chilling study of life under global capitalism. Hao Zhou captures a world of control, exhaustion, and quiet revolt. where employees work under surveillance and time itself becomes a mechanism of power.

In a cramped police station in India, an all-woman unit attempts to mediate fractured marriages with warmth, pressure, and limited power. Marriage Cops reveals the fragile, improvised systems women build to survive where the law and tradition fall short.

Winner of Sundance’s World Cinema Documentary Grand Jury Prize, Cutting Through Rocks follows Sara Shahverdi — motorcyclist, midwife, and first-ever councilwoman elected in her Iranian village. A vérité triumph by Sara Khaki & Mohammadreza Eyni.

Leonard Peltier spent nearly 50 years in prison for a crime he says he didn’t commit. This searing, award-winning documentary revisits his case and the fight for his freedom — exposing a justice system built to punish resistance and erase Indigenous voices.

Lucrecia Martel’s first documentary is a haunting portrait of land, violence, and resistance. With rare access to trial footage and the Chuschagasta community, Landmarks reframes a 2009 murder within centuries of Indigenous dispossession in Argentina.

As the death toll on Everest rises, legendary mountaineer Mingma Tsiri Sherpa leads an elite team on a life-threatening mission to retrieve the fallen and restore peace to Chomolungma, the sacred “Mother Goddess of the World".

What happened to Elizabeth Bouvia? Reid Davenport investigates the disabled woman’s legacy and public disappearance, reframing the assisted-dying debate into a fight for the right to live. Winner of the U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award at Sundance.

Can a library be decolonized? How to Build a Library follows two visionary women on a quest to restore Nairobi’s McMillan Memorial Library and exorcise its colonial ghosts. A powerful documentary on archives, access, and reclaiming civic space.

Towering rockets rise as wetlands vanish in this sly black-and-white documentary about SpaceX’s conquest of Boca Chica, Texas. With sci-fi aesthetics and observational calm, the film exposes how cosmic dreams begin with the quiet erasure of Earth.

Teenager Ku Stevens runs toward his dreams while retracing the path of his great-grandfather’s escape from an "Indian boarding school". An impressive, urgent debut from Paige Bethmann about memory, endurance, and what it truly means to remain Native.

Shot over nine years, Brittany Shyne’s Sundance-winning documentary is a tender portrait of Black farming families in the American South. A moving meditation on land, legacy, and the strength it takes to hold on.

A Greenlandic woman held in indefinite detention forms a life-changing bond with the filmmaker documenting her case. Walls – Akinni Inuk is a gripping story of survival, systemic injustice, and the quiet freedom found in human connection.

A time capsule of Gaza in 2001, With Hasan in Gaza presents rediscovered footage of everyday life before devastation. Assembled by Kamal Aljafari, one of Palestinian cinema’s most formally daring and poetic voices, the film resists erasure through memory.

Academic ghostwriting is a billion-dollar industry, just not for those doing the writing. Directed by Eloïse King and executive produced by Steve McQueen, this is a gripping documentary about brilliance, erasure, and global inequality.

In Chiapas, three Indigenous women return to the land to rebuild their lives in the wake of profound personal loss. Ana Ts’uyeb’s moving debut honours what it means to find healing and reclaim life.

Oscar-winner Laura Poitras and Emmy-winner Mark Obenhaus turn their lens on legendary journalist Seymour Hersh in a riveting film that unpacks how one reporter exposed the truths behind My Lai and Abu Ghraib — and what it takes to hold power to account.

Image: © The New York Times