‘You cannot unsee it’: what happened next for this year’s Oscar documentary nominees? | Oscars 2026

The year 2025 was a banner one for nonfiction film, with several extraordinary documentaries that provided windows to unfathomable acts of courage, heart and vulnerability. Less so, unfortunately, for nonfiction cinema, it’s a difficult time for the production of politically challenging documentaries, whether in and about the US or abroad, and many projects struggled to find distribution after torturous paths to completion. (Cutting Through Rocks, the first Iranian documentary ever nominated for an Oscar, still has no streaming distribution and is only available in select theaters.)

Nevertheless, five incredible films make up the Oscars documentary slate this year – films that demonstrate how individual actions can challenge immense systems of oppression; how national agendas trickle into the idiosyncratic, marginal every day; and how one can find transcendence in the smallest of daily miracles. The very existence of these films feels improbable: one is composed almost entirely of police footage acquired through legal action. Another was filmed on contraband cell phones within Alabama state prisons. There’s a remarkably candid approach to processing terminal illness; an unprecedented record of Vladimir Putin’s propaganda efforts, filmed by a schoolteacher in rural Russia and smuggled out of the country; and an extremely rare glimpse into small-scale women’s rights efforts in north-west Iran.

All five nominated films premiered over a year ago, in January 2025, at Utah’s Sundance film festival. In the months since then, as they have found staggered and limited releases around the world, life has gone on for those both in front of and behind the camera. Here are where things stand for each film heading into Oscar weekend:

The Perfect Neighbor

The presumed Oscar frontrunner, Geeta Gandbhir’s film on the murder of Ajike “AJ” Owens is a tremendous feat of editing; the 96-minute film, available on Netflix, is composed almost entirely of bodycam footage from police officers in Ocala, Florida, where a woman named Susan Lorincz shot and killed Owens, a mother of four, through a locked door in June 2023.

Gandbhir and her team whittled around 30 hours of police footage (bodycams, security cams, cell phones) filmed over two years – Lorincz, angered by neighborhood children playing outside, repeatedly called the police – into a devastating, sober portrait of racialized gun violence in the US. Lorincz, the film demonstrates, was fatally emboldened by Florida’s so-called “stand your ground” law, an NRA-backed measure from 2005 that removes a person’s legal duty to retreat from a perceived threat before using deadly force. (Similar laws, which disproportionately harm people of color, exist in 37 other states.)

Lorincz was sentenced to 25 years in prison for manslaughter in November 2025, two months before the film’s Sundance premiere. Since then, the film-making team and Owens’s family have embarked on an advocacy campaign to overturn stand your ground laws in Owens’s memory through their organization Standing in the Gap. “Had we not gone forth with the film and the Standing in the Gap fund, she would have been just another dead Black person,” Pamela Dias, Owens’s mother, told the Hollywood Reporter in December.

Lorincz, meanwhile, remains incarcerated in Florida. She has maintained that she felt Owens threatened her life and, according to a handwritten letter filed with a Florida court last September, is mulling a defamation suit against the victim’s family. “Ajike Owens and her children were trespassing,” Lorincz stated in the letter. “There were multiple ‘no trespassing signs’ on the property. Ms. Owens did in fact scream, threaten to beat me multiple times while trespassing.” (As seen in the film, this was disputed in real time by all witnesses.)

Though Lorincz was convicted – by an all-white jury in the birthplace of stand your ground laws, no less – justice is “bittersweet”, as Gandbhir told the Daily Show’s Michael Kosta. According to the director, an Owens family friend prior to the tragedy, her four young children – all under 14 at the time of her death – have supported the film, which was “devastating” for many in the multiracial neighborhood community to watch. But “they believed in what we were doing”, Gandbhir said. “They understood why we were trying to share the film. Their hope is that this doesn’t happen to another community.” There is only one family from the film that remains on the block in Ocala; the rest of the community has moved.

The Alabama Solution

Few films have been so immediately galling, so unbelievably infuriating, as the Alabama Solution, Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman’s harrowing film of Alabama’s hellish state prison system. The film, made in secret over six years for HBO, depicted or discussed the inhumane treatment of Alabama’s disproportionately Black incarcerated population in the name of public safety, including but not limited to: severe beatings, rampant drug abuse, inedible food, filthy and rodent-infested dorms, forced labor and murder.

Its lead subjects – Robert “Kinetik Justice” Earl Council, Melvin Ray and Raoul Poole, who organized a statewide prisoners’ strike in October 2022 – recorded the bulk of the film via contraband cell phones, despite the risk of physical harm or indefinite solitary confinement, with the hope of raising awareness of a system without accountability. (The film takes its name from Governor Kay Ivey’s response to the federal mandate for reform: “An Alabama problem deserves an Alabama solution.”) In January 2026, days before the film was nominated for an Oscar, the three men were transferred to solitary confinement at Kilby state prison, with no ability to contact loved ones and no reason given by the Alabama department of corrections (ADOC), according to lawyers. They remain there today.

Meanwhile, efforts to reform ADOC, which was put under federal investigation for unconstitutional conditions over a decade ago (that lawsuit remains ongoing), have moved forward. Just this week, the state’s senate judiciary committee held a public hearing on legislation, inspired by the film, that would establish independent oversight of the state’s prisons. The bipartisan bill is co-sponsored by Larry Stutts, one of the legislature’s most conservative members, who said the documentary sharpened his focus on the issue. (He has defended SB 316 on biblical grounds.) “The movie has raised a lot of public awareness about it,” he told AL.com. “You cannot unsee what you’ve seen,” he said, including “a culture of violence and corruption in the whole system”.

The legislative hearing comes a week after Jarecki went on the Tonight Show and extended an invitation to Ivey and state attorney general Steve Marshall to screen the film in Los Angeles ahead of the Oscars, along with some family members of the 1,500 people who have died within the state’s correctional system since they began production, “in the hope that there can be some kind of realistic meeting of the minds, or [Ivey] could say: ‘Look, I’m going to stop denying this is a problem’”. Ivey declined. Marshall, who appears in the film, told CBS 42 in Birmingham that he received the invitation a day before, “which obviously shows that this was not a legitimate offer to have dialogue but instead is part of the agenda-driven effort of this film”. Marshall went on to claim that he was never interviewed for the film (he was), nor that any family member of the incarcerated men talked to him about the film (they did).

Marshall went on to tout “progress” made in Alabama prisons in regards to staffing and a new $1.3bn, 4,000-bed state prison in Elmore county, paid for by cuts to the state’s education budget and Covid-19 relief funds. That facility, called the Governor Kay Ivey correctional complex, is slated for completion in October.

Mr Nobody Against Putin

Films about opposition movements to Putin’s regime in Russia tend to do well at the Oscars – in recent years, both Navalny, on the late pro-democracy leader Alexei Navalny, and Mstyslav Chernov’s war record 20 Days in Mariupol deservedly took home the award for best documentary for their sweeping portraits of the people’s resilience to the regime’s war and cruelty. But I have never seen anything quite like Mr Nobody Against Putin, which documents the authoritarian government’s propaganda efforts in microcosm, at a primary school in the Ural mountains.

Filmed far away from Moscow by Pavel Talankin, the school’s event coordinator, videographer and “Mr Nobody”, the film is an extraordinary document of cultural regression and indoctrination in real time, as grenade-throwing classes and “denazification” curricula replace sports and history. We are only able to see it because Talankin, who had spent his whole life in Karabash and whose mother was the school librarian, fled the country in 2024 under threat of life imprisonment thanks to updated anti-treason laws. He remains an exile in Europe, providing Russian-language interviews in support of the project and small efforts of increasingly fragile, dangerous resistance.

Still, many in Karabash have been able to see the film, thanks to bootlegged or pirated copies. “Parents didn’t really know what was being taught in these classes,” Talankin told the Guardian days after Mr Nobody won the Bafta for best documentary. “Some people have written to me with gratitude, others have said we will break your knees next time we see you.

“I hope it will help these children in the future to understand that they were the victims of all this,” he added. “This film is primarily aimed at Russians, showing them what is happening inside their schools now.”

Both the Kremlin and school administrators have remained mum on the project ahead of the Oscars, likely content to pretend it doesn’t exist. For the foreseeable future, Talankin will be unable to return home. At the Baftas, co-director David Borenstein thanked him, “for showing me that no matter how dark things get, whether it’s in Russia or on the streets of Minneapolis, we always face a moral choice”. Borenstein added: “No matter who we are, there is always power in our actions. To quote JRR Tolkien: ‘Courage is found in unlikely places.’ We need more Mr Nobodies.”

Come See Me in the Good Light

Come See Me in the Good Light may not deal specifically with oppressive regimes, but it is no less intense – a searing, frank, deceptively funny portrait of falling in love with life while coming to terms with death. Directed by Ryan White, this Apple TV doc follows the final years of Andrea Gibson, a spoken word dynamite and poet laureate of Colorado, as they face terminal ovarian cancer with their devoted partner and fellow poet, Megan Falley.

The film ends in a liminal space: Gibson very much alive, vibrant and brimming with love. They lived to see its Sundance premiere, alongside Falley, producer Tig Notaro and others. They died surrounded by loved ones in July 2025, a date unmentioned in the film.

Since then, Falley has carried on Gibson’s legacy through their Substack, Things That Don’t Suck, and a relentless press tour that has served, in her writing, as a “seance”, “resurrection” and opportunity to grieve in public community. As Gibson once wrote: “to die is to be reincarnated in those we love while they are still alive”.

“Sometimes I feel like Andrea’s earth-side delegate,” Falley wrote in a post published on 9 March, en route to the Oscars. “I stand before new audiences carrying forward the lessons they most wanted to leave the world with. In this way, Andrea is still doing what they always did – bringing people closer to the truth of their own lives. I’m simply the voice they speak through now.

“Andrea once wrote, ‘I know mortality isn’t small talk, but I wish it was,’” she added. “After screenings I sometimes feel like telling them, Baby. You got your wish.”

Cutting Through Rocks

Perhaps the least viewed of the five nominated documentaries this year, owing to limited distribution, Cutting Through Rocks is nonetheless a stunning portrait of courage: that of Sara Shahverdi, an iconoclastic female farmer and trailblazing village council member in rural north-west Iran, as well as the young girls daring to follow in her image.

Protected only by her confidence and conviction that women should have control over their own destiny, Shahverdi cuts a fiercely unconventional nature in an extremely patriarchal world: she rides a motorcycle, wears pants, participates in construction projects, encourages girl to stay in school, advocates for teenage divorcees and works to get wives equal ownership of their husbands’ property. Such actions, filmed by Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni over eight years, come with great risk; Shahverdi faces a legal crisis in the film, which according to the film-makers has resolved safely.

Since the film premiered – it won the Grand Jury prize at Sundance – Shahverdi’s four-year village council term ended. But she “continues to be a fierce advocate for women and girls”, according to a statement from the film-makers, including advocacy for a new school that is under construction in the village. Owing to travel bans that predate the Trump administration’s war in Iran, Shahverdi cannot attend the Oscars or any US screening, but she was “thrilled to learn … that her story is reaching audiences worldwide”.