While covering the devastating effects of the Russian bombing of Ukraine, documentary filmmaker/journalist Brent Renaud was shot and killed by Russian forces on March 22, 2022. He was the first foreign-born journalist killed in the war. Now, Brent’s filmmaking partner and younger brother Craig has made the harrowing documentary “Armed Only With a Camera: The Life and Death of Brent Renaud.”

Craig joins Ken on the pod to discuss Brent’s extraordinary career, the lasting impacts that Brent had on those he encountered while shooting in hot zones and other places of trauma around the world, and how he chose to honor Brent by picking up a camera in the aftermath of personal tragedy. With this remarkable film, Renaud Brothers Films lives on as a powerful reminder of all that can be accomplished when journalists and filmmakers do their incredibly valuable and dangerous work — and all that can be lost in a fleeting moment.

“Armed Only With a Camera: The Life and Death of Brent Renaud” is nominated for an Oscar for Best Documentary Short. It can be streamed on HBO MAX.

The Presenting Sponsor of "Top Docs" is Netflix.

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 ”Three donkeys are in an unnamed desert and they discover an abandoned astronomical observatory.  And the universe.” 

That’s how Alison McAlpine (“Second Sight”, “Ghostmen of Skye”, "Cielo") describes her Oscar-nominated short documentary “Perfectly a Strangeness” to Mike.  In this wordless film, McAlpine uses the “fundamentals of cinema”– sound, movement, light, shadow, reflections – to craft a “conversation” between the muscular, visceral donkeys and the advanced, technological observatory.  The resulting 15 minutes are a rare amalgam of mundanity and profundity, one which will make you see living creatures, man-made objects, and even the night sky anew.

The Presenting Sponsor of "Top Docs" is Netflix.

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A day in the life of a women’s reproductive healthcare center is unlike any other. In this post-Roe world, potential danger lurks in the dark or right out in the open. In the tense and nuanced Oscar-nominated documentary short “The Devil Is Busy” (directed by Christalyn Hampton and Geeta Gandbhir), we follow Tracii, the head of security at an Atlanta women’s health clinic, as she goes through her routine to ensure that no physical harm comes to those seeking care or dispensing it.

Christalyn and producer Rose Arce join Ken on the pod to discuss the intense stress facing Tracii, her colleagues, and the clinic’s patients (referred to as “guests”), many of whom have traveled hundreds of miles for an appointment at one of the few remaining abortion providers in the region. Over the course of the film, we learn more about Tracii, the difficult decisions she has had to face, and the role that religion and a forgiving God play in her life. Countering the shrill voices of the male anti-abortion protestors outside, Tracii’s simple acts of kindness transform an average day into something extraordinary.

“The Devil Is Busy” has been nominated for the Oscar for Best Documentary Short. It can be streamed on HBO MAX.

The Presenting Sponsor of "Top Docs" is Netflix.

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@cwdivadance and @rose_marie_arce on Instagram

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In a special, in-person conversation from the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, director Judd Ehrlich (“Keepers of the Game”) joins Ken in Park City to discuss his new documentary “Jane Elliott Against the World,” which just had its world premiere in the festival’s U.S. Documentary Competition section.

In the opening scene of “Jane Elliott Against the World,” the film’s eponymous protagonist rather provocatively calls herself a “bitch” — actually, an acronym for “Being in Total Control, Honey.” As a teacher in a rural Iowa school in the 1960s, Jane devised a provocative social experiment called “Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes” intended to make her students understand what it feels like to be an oppressed minority based on outward appearance. The effect on her students was immediate and profound, and the experiment reverberated across the country, making Jane famous. Judd describes getting to know Jane and learning from her daughters how, growing up, Jane’s full-time anti-racism activism took its toll on the family. Now 92, Jane shows few signs of slowing down. She may not be in total control, but, to anyone who tries to stand in her way, be forewarned.

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The Presenting Sponsor of "Top Docs" is Netflix.

Cop. Drug agent. Preacher. Marijuana activist. Cop buster.  Can this really be one man?  

In their documentary “Never Get Busted”, David Anthony Ngo and Erin Williams-Weir follow the protean Barry Cooper.  In this special interview recorded live late last year at the Hot Spring Documentary Film Festival (where our own Ken Jacobson serves as Executive Director), David and Erin share the lives, loves and ever-shifting mission of a man who despite constantly changing, continually seems rooted in an authentic calling.  And they explore with him a legal system deeply compromised by misaligned incentives and financial corruption.

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@davidanthonyfilm & @nevergetbustedfilm on Instagram

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The Presenting Sponsor of "Top Docs" is Netflix.

This is it! The final Sundance Film Festival to be held in Utah is just around the corner. The 2026 Sundance Film Festival — the 42nd edition — runs from January 22 – February 1 in Park City and Salt Lake City, Utah (and online from Jan. 29 – Feb 1). Next year, this iconic event moves to Boulder, Colorado. To help get us fired up for the festival, we welcome back Basil Tsiokos, Sundance Senior Programmer, Nonfiction, to “Top Docs” to preview Sundance’s stellar documentary lineup.

From among the 40+ feature documentaries having their world premieres at this year’s festival across multiple sections, Basil spotlights first-time feature filmmakers, as well as those returning with exciting new works. And don’t miss Basil’s take on this year’s Oscar Shortlist and predictions for the final nominees. With 9 of this year’s 15 Oscar-shortlisted feature docs having premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, you can bet that many of 2026’s most talked about documentaries will be making their debuts at Sundance.

For more info about the Sundance Film Festival program, go to festival.sundance.org.

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@1basil1 on X, @sundancefest on X and @sundanceorg on Instagram

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The Presenting Sponsor of "Top Docs" is Netflix.

The premise of Rachel Grady’s and Heidi Ewing’s (“Jesus Camp”, “Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You,” Endangered) new Oscar-shortlisted documentary, “Folktales” is simple enough:  They follow three students at a post-high school program in Norway’s Arctic circle as they learn survival skills and dog sledding.  But by almost literally weaving in Nordic tales of the Fates, demonstrating the healing ties that grow between the students and the dogs, and exploring the profound wisdom proffered by two capable, insightful teachers (Iselin and Thor-Atle), Ewing and Grady provide a deep meditation on coming of age in the time of putatively frictionless lives and ubiquitous cell phones.

Rachel joins Mike on the pod to explain how she found joy in the challenges of shooting in darkened forests in polar winter--how in effect she “went to Folk High School too!”   And she shares the wisdom she garnered from Iselin and Thor-Atle as well:  Throughout our lives, doors open and close.

You can watch “Folktales” on streaming platforms including Amazon.

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@rachelgrady on Instagram

@heidewing on Instagram

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The Presenting Sponsor of "Top Docs" is Netflix.

In his new, Oscar-shortlisted “The Alabama Solution”, which he co-directed with Charlotte Kaufman, Andrew Jarecki ("Capturing the Friedmans", "The Jinx") focusses on inmates of the Alabama Department of Corrections who use contraband phones to organize dissent within the system, even sustained labor strikes, all aimed at improving the dramatically overcrowded, squalid, abusive, and even fatal conditions within the state’s 14 prisons.

To date, Alabama’s “solution” to these problems–and the attention it has drawn from the Federal DOJ– has been to build larger prisons that promise to provide no increase in the system’s number of beds, but do promise with their massive financial overruns to feather the beds of the governor’s friends and supporters.  Jarecki and Kaufman, in league with the prisoners they depict here, hope to change that.

You can watch “The Alabama Solution” on HBO Max.

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@andrew.jarecki on Instagram

@topdocspod on Instagram and twitter/X

The Presenting Sponsor of "Top Docs" is Netflix.

In her Oscar-shortlisted new documentary, “Seeds”, director Brittany Shyne depicts the lives of Black farmers in the South.  In a flexible verité style in which she doesn’t fear breaking the fourth wall, Shyne pays meticulous attention to the workings of farm life, focussing, as she notes to Mike, literally on the hands that do that labor.  But she sets the entire experience with a broader framework of the “maintenance of legacy and [what] that entails” within the “political and social structures” which inform the lives of these farmers.

The resulting film becomes a meditation on relationships:  Between the members of the community, of course, but also between: people and the land; people and machines; people and animals; and between people and their own bodies and mortality.

Hidden Gem:

“Handsworth Songs”

The Presenting Sponsor of "Top Docs" is Netflix.

You might assume that receiving a fellowship to Harvard University represents the culmination of a burgeoning academic career. But, as director Amber Fares (“Speed Sisters”) shows in the amusing opening scenes of her Sundance award-winning documentary “Coexistence, My Ass!,” when Noam Shuster Eliassi, the main participant in her film, receives such an honor, she has actually been invited by Harvard’s Peace and Divinity School to prepare material for her one-woman comedy show about the Palestinian/Israeli conflict.  

Amber joins Ken on the pod to discuss Noam’s winding path from an Israeli cooperative village that is home to both Jews and Arabs to a dream job at the UN to finding her true voice as a comedian and activist. As we see throughout the film, and in a performance of Noam’s completed show that provides the narrative spine for the film, Noam faces hard truths, both on and off the stage. She brings a fresh perspective to an age-old conflict and to the everyday realities of post-Oct 7th Israeli society.

“Coexistence, My Ass!” has been named to this year’s Oscar shortlist in the Documentary Feature Film category.

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@amber_fares on Instagram

@topdocspod on Instagram and X

Hidden Gem:

“We Are Pat”

The Presenting Sponsor of "Top Docs" is Netflix.