We talk with Orwa Nyrabia, IDFA's artistic director, and visit with filmmakers premiering new work at the world's biggest documentary festival. Plus, filmmakers Carla Gutiérrez and Irene Taylor share their Amsterdam experience.

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Doc Talk co-hosts John Ridley and Matt Carey react to the announcement of the shortlists in the documentary categories for the 97th Academy Awards. What were the snubs and major surprises? We unpack the 15 features and 15 shorts remaining in contention for the Oscar. 

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We report live from the 40th IDA Documentary Awards in Los Angeles, interviewing winners as they come off stage, including Shiori Ito (Black Box Diaries), the Queendom team, Career Achievement Award winner Dawn Porter, and Curated Series winner Lois Vossen. And we speak with the IDA's executive director, Dominic Asmall Willsdon, about the state of the documentary field.

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No Other Land, set in the occupied West Bank, has emerged as a frontrunner for the Oscars, winning awards around the world including a slew in the past week alone. We speak with Yuval Abraham and Basel Adra, half of the Israeli Palestinian collective of filmmakers behind the documentary. Their film, which has attracted praise and controversy, depicts life for Palestinian villagers who face threats of expulsion from their land by the Israel Defense Forces.

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Japanese journalist Shiori Itō investigates her own sexual assault in the Oscar-contending documentary Black Box Diaries. She joins Doc Talk to discuss how her case changed rape laws in Japan and how she made the transition from objective journalist to first-person storyteller.

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Filmmaker Jeff Zimbalist joins us to discuss his Oscar-contending Netflix documentary Skywalkers: A Love Story. This is the story of a young Russian couple who have made a career of illegally climbing to the top of extraordinary tall structures, including the 118-story Merdeka in Malaysia, and then photographing themselves doing balletic poses in the sky. Doc Talk co-host John Ridley calls it the scariest documentary he's ever seen. 

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Renowned documentary filmmaker R.J. Cutler discusses his two Oscar-contending documentaries – Elton John: Never Too Late, and Martha, the latter film about businesswoman, entrepreneur and lifestyle doyenne Martha Stewart. Cutler responds to Stewart’s, at times, harsh criticism of his film. She's campaigning for Netflix to create a "second version" of the documentary that's more to her liking.

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We welcome Johan Grimonprez, director of the award-winning documentary Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat. The Belgian filmmaker explains how he synched complex geopolitical history from the late 1950s and early '60s to the music of jazz giants like Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie. His dizzying achievement exposes the plot by the U.S., the UN secretary general, and Belgium to assassinate charismatic Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba, all while the band played on.

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For our second episode recorded live at SFFILM's Doc Stories festival, we speak with director Kevin Macdonald about his documentary One to One: John & Yoko, examining a remarkable year-plus in the lives of the famous couple after they moved to New York. And we climb into the time machine to explore 1970s bizarro radicalism with director Robinson Devor and producer Jason Reid of Suburban Fury, a documentary about would-be presidential assassin Sara Jane Moore.

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Doc Talk heads to San Francisco for the 10th anniversary of SFFILM's Doc Stories festival. We speak with SFFILM Executive Director Anne Lai and Director of Programming Jessie Fairbanks, as well as the filmmakers behind a stunning film in the program, Arepas en Bici. 

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