In 2025, documentary film was enjoying a golden age. From the front lines of war to the intimacy of family archives, non-fiction films were commanding audiences, awards and cultural conversation at levels the genre had never reached, driven by streaming platforms hungry for true stories and by audiences increasingly sceptical of a fragmented news landscape.
The year’s most celebrated documentaries ranged from the Oscar-winning No Other Land, an account of life in the occupied West Bank, to intimate portraits of artists and athletes, war correspondents and scientists. The genre’s signature strength, the authority of the real, had become its most valuable currency in an age when everyone could film anything and no one could be sure what to trust.
Directors and programmers argued that the boom was more than commercial: documentary had become the form through which a generation was reckoning with the recent past, with war, empire, family and memory. As the world grew harder to trust, the documentary, at its best, offered the closest thing to certainty: footage that could not be argued with, and questions that refused to be closed.