To finish out Season 3, we're revisiting some telling moments from three of our most popular shows of the season: Laura McGann, "The Deepest Breath" Anna Hints, "Smoke Sauna Sisterhood" Fisher Stevens, "Beckham" The Presenting Sponsor of "Top Docs" is Netflix.Av michaellouismerrill

“Check Your Ego at the Door”. Those words were scrawled on a piece of paper and taped to the door of A&M Studios on the night of January 28, 1985. The story behind that command is the subject of director Bao Nguyen’s (“Be Water”) thoroughly captivating new Netflix documentary “The Greatest Night in Pop” about the once-in-a-lifetime event that drew …

So much for campfire singalongs and Capture the Flag. Directors Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss once again plunge into the world of summer camp for young politicians-in-training with “Girls State”, a riveting and exhilarating follow up to their Emmy Award-winning 2020 documentary “Boys State.” The comparisons may be inevitable, but “Girls State” forg…

Many of the issues that plagued the young people of America decades ago–binge drinking, drunken driving, teenage pregnancy, smoking, to name a few–have greatly declined in significance. But in their place we have witnessed a seemingly ever-deepening mental health crisis amongst our youth, one partly rooted, as our guests tell us, in a rise of anxie…

How much do you really know about Reality Winner, the veteran and NSA contractor who shared a document regarding Russian interference in the 2016 election with “The Intercept”, and then subsequently served several years in Federal prison as a consequence? Sonia Kennebeck’s (Enemies of the State, National Bird) “Reality Winner” melds a host of timel…

Joining us for the third year in a row, Variety’s Senior Awards Editor Clayton Davis breaks down this year’s Oscar races for Best Documentary Feature and Best Documentary Short and offers his predictions for who will be victorious at the 96th Academy Awards on March 10th. With the feature doc category taking on a very international flavor this year…

We’ve saved the last of our live, in-person interviews at Sundance 2024 for the winners of the Sundance U.S. Documentary Competition Audience Award and overall Festival Favorite, the incredibly moving, tear-jerking, and, hopefully, policy-shifting documentary “Daughters”. Directors Angela Patton and Natalie Rae join Ken to discuss their world premi…

When Ranjit and his family turn to the Indian legal system to seek justice for his daughter who had been raped by three local young men, they face not only daunting odds from the system but deep resistance from their village. Nisha Pahuja’s Academy Award-nominated film “To Kill a Tiger” traces the profound tension Ranjit experiences: on the one sid…

Continuing our coverage of Academy Award-nominated shorts, Mike speaks with Sean Wang about his loving tribute to his grandmothers. As he describes the film: “Nǎi Nai is my grandma. Wài Pó is my grandma. Together they are a grandma super team that dances, stretches, and farts their sorrows away.” Despite its seeming insularity, and its general mood…

Continuing our coverage of Academy Award-nominated shorts, Mike speaks with Kris Bowers (previously nominated for “A Concerto is a Conversation”) and Ben Proudfoot (an Academy-Award winner for “The Queen of Basketball”) , directors of “The Last Repair Shop”. The film sketches the stories–both representative of the Los Angeles workforce, as well as …

The island of Kinmen is a small island with a potentially big problem. Situated just off the coast of China, but part of Taiwan, Kinmen would likely be the first line of defense should the Chinese government decide to invade Taiwan. Emmy-nominated director S. Leo Chiang, who was born in Taiwan, worked in China and also lived for years in the U.S., …

The fact that Arlo Washington, featured as the main protagonist in John Hoffman and Christine Turner’s inspiring documentary “The Barber of Little Rock”, is, indeed, a barber is almost beside the point. From owning one and then multiple barber shops, to founding the Washington Barber College and starting People Trust Credit Union, the first minorit…

A children’s book about Rosa Parks. A graphic adaptation of “The Diary of Anne Frank”. A Pulitzer Prize-winning book by a Nobel Laureate. These are but a few of the books that have been restricted, challenged, and banned in dozens of states across the U.S. In the new documentary “The ABCs of Book Banning” (directed by Sheila Nevins, produced and co…

Toward the end of this year’s Sundance Grand Jury Prize-winning documentary “Porcelain War”, one of the directors and main subjects of the film, Slava Leontyev, says, “Ukraine is like porcelain. Easy to break but impossible to destroy.” Slava, along with his wife, Anya, create beautifully crafted “porcelain beasts” that used to be their main profes…

Siouxsie and the Banshees. Ice-T. Nine Inch Nails. All were on the slated for the first Lollapalooza lineup in 1991. But as Michael John Warren, director of the new 3-part Paramount+ series “Lolla: The Story of Lollapalooza,” tells us in our live interview at Sundance, his account of the history of the festival–first intended as a goodbye tour for …

In the second of our live, in-person interviews at Sundance 2024, award-winning directors Brett Story (“The Prison Landscape in Twelve Landscapes”) and Stephen Maing (“Crime + Punishment”), along with Amazon Labor Union (ALU) president Chris Smalls, the film’s main protagonist, join Ken to discuss the world premiere of “Union”. In this riveting, ve…

Kicking off our on-the-ground coverage of Sundance 2024, Julian Brave Noisecat and Emily Kassie join Mike to discuss their new film, “Sugarcane”. In this film, they explore the legacy of the St. Joseph Mission, one of many segregated residential schools promulgated by the Canadian government and run by the Catholic Church. The stories they tell are…

Mixing the traditional documentary form with elements of Brechtian theatre, director Kaouther Ben Hania’s (“The Man Who Sold His Skin, “Beauty and the Dogs”) Cannes-winning “Four Daughters” creates a highly intense and emotional experience — for both the audience and the principal characters. Joining Ken on the pod, Kaouther discusses the challenge…

In his vivid, pulsating new documentary, Oscar-winning director Roger Ross Williams (“Music by Prudence”; “Life, Animated”) puts his own creative stamp on Dr. Ibram X. Kendi’s best-selling book “Stamped from the Beginning” about the history of racist ideas in America. Joining Ken on the pod, Roger describes how the racial reckoning of 2020 inspired…

The Sundance Film Festival marks its 40th edition on January 18 - 28. To help get us ready for the big event, Basil Tsiokos, Sundance Senior Programmer, Nonfiction, makes his third visit to “Top Docs” to preview this year’s sure-to-be-killer documentary lineup. As the first Sundance under new Festival Director Eugene Hernandez, what are the new wri…

Not just a movie about sound, but an interactive feast for the senses, “32 Sounds” is the latest in filmmaker Sam Green’s (“The Weather Underground”, “A Thousand Thoughts”) unique “live” documentaries. Inspired by the great 1993 film “Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould”, the film delivers a heightened sensorial experience through an incredibl…

Surrounded by a Bohemian cast of characters, she was conceived and grew up in an avant-garde theater in Paris; she aspired to be a painter. What could be more romantic than that? In “Apolonia, Apolonia”, director Lea Glob’s epic and fascinating portrait of Apolonia Sokol, romantic ideals intermingle with the hard realities of what it takes for a ta…

The only movie to win an Academy Award for Best Picture with an X rating, “Midnight Cowboy” is one of those movies that once you see it, you never forget it. It broke taboos and made American movies relevant again; it both reflected the changing times and was revolutionary. And it had Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman in the indelible roles of Joe Buck…

This holiday season, discover another side to “The Painter of Light”! In our final installment of "Live from Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival", Miranda Yousef joins Mike to discuss her feature documentary, “Art for Everybody”. From an early age, Thomas Kinkade struggled with the impact of his impoverished youth, torn between emulating van Gogh…

Welcome to the Anne-ual Top Docs Holiday Special featuring the one-and-only Anne Thompson, Editor-at-Large at IndieWire! Anne joins Mike and Ken to tackle this year’s Best Feature Documentary Oscar Shortlist, released on December 21st. One day following the release of the list, Anne is already fired up and ready to go. How competitive is this year’…

It’s Emmy time. Yes, finally, after a long delay, the Emmys are almost here. “The Hollywood Reporter”’s Executive Editor of Awards Scott Feinberg joins Mike and Ken to break down the 2023 Emmy nominees in all the major documentary categories, including Outstanding Documentary Program; Outstanding Series; Exceptional Merit in Documentary Filmmaking;…

Director Lisa Cortés’ (“The Remix: Hip Hop X Fashion”, “Invisible Beauty”) electrifying and groundbreaking documentary about Richard Penniman (aka “Little Richard”) proves the point that the stories passed down about the origins of rock and roll have been whitewashed. The so-called “Architect of rock and roll”, Little Richard was ripped off, copied…

One is a beloved bandleader and soon-to-be Grammy nominee; the other, a “New York Times” bestselling author. But, as Matthew Heineman’s (“Retrograde”, “The First Wave”, “Cartel Land”) intimate and heartfelt new documentary “American Symphony” makes clear, life is not always so glittering for high-profile couple Jon Batiste and Suleika Jaouad. Batis…

Building on the smoke sauna tradition of Southern Estonia (included by UNESCO on its “Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity”), filmmaker Anna Hints brings together a group of Estonian women to share the smoke sauna experience and to share some of their most personal stories. The result is Anna’s masterfully constructed…

Both were born in 1945 in Germany during the last year of WWII. Both became giants of the modern German art movement: Anselm Kiefer as a painter and sculptor; Wim Wenders as a filmmaker whose landmark films include “Wings of Desire”, “Paris, Texas” and “The American Friend”. The two had met in 1991 and discussed the possibility of doing a film toge…

In 1990, at the age of 26, in the wake of a heart attack which, in the words of one expert, “liquified” the core of her brain, Terri Schiavo entered a “persistent vegetative state”. As “Between Life and Death: Terri Schiavo’s Story” shows, over the next 15 years her husband Michael and her immediate family would fight over her fate: in the press, i…

Like a black hole, North Korea is a place where light cannot escape. Fed nothing but government propaganda, North Koreans can only access the outside world by slipping across the border to China, the first stop on a harrowing journey that, if successful, eventually leads to South Korea. Against this bleak backdrop, filmmaker Madeleine Gavin’s gripp…

The second season of Netflix’s “High on the Hog” is almost here, and Executive Producers Karis Jagger and Fabienne Toback joined Mike to discuss their celebrated series. The subtitle of the series is “How African-American Cuisine Transformed America” and much like the strong first season, the show explores the impact of Black Cuisine on American cu…

As the first of our series of conversations from the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival, Mike spoke with Li Lu about her new 3-part series, “A Town Called Victoria”. The film explores the aftermath of a mosque burning in this small Texas town. Lu provides a nuanced portrait of the town itself, one torn between support for and fear of the victims…

There’s nothing “sly” about Sylvester Stallone. His iconic screen characters, most notably, Rocky Balboa (“Rocky” and four others) and John Rambo (“Rambo: First Blood” + four others), are about as direct as they come — and, seemingly, so, too, is their creator. But, Emmy award-winning director Thom Zimny (“Bruce Springsteen: Wings for Wheels: The M…

In “The Pigeon Tunnel”, Errol Morris has crafted a career-culminating work. Morris skillfully deploys and redeploys: the revelatory recreations that he has been known for since “The Thin Blue Line”; an interview with a slippery subject that surpasses that even of “The Fog of War” subject Robert McNamara; and the intellectual curiosity on display in…

Two young, idealistic, talented design students from Stanford set out to create a replacement for smoking tobacco, a vaporizing device that will save millions of lives. Instead, they end up building the perfect addiction machine, and, with their wildly effective marketing campaign, they hook a plethora of non-smokers, including teenagers. RJ Cutler…

Inspired by the adventures stories of his youth as well as a “radical” interpretation of Jesus’ “Great Commision” , 26-year-old American John Chau set off to the distant North Sentinel Island to tell the people there–supposedly completely isolated and putatively unfriendly to visitors–of his Savior. Directors Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss (Boys Sta…

From the opening moments when David Beckham strolls through a country field wearing a beekeeper’s outfit, you know you’ll be witnessing another side to one of the world’s most famous people. In “Beckham”, a 4-part series on Netflix, director Fisher Stevens (producer of “The Cove” and “Tiger King”, and an actor on stage and screen for 40 years, most…

Mike is joined by Ken who, when he’s not Co-Creator and Co-Host of “Tod Docs”, serves as the Executive Director of the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival. Mike and Ken discuss some of the highlights of this year’s lineup including the Gala Films, a number of other features that include standouts from Sundance, a World Premier, and some of the Os…

There’s nothing invisible about the beauty, strength and savvy of pathbreaking model and fashion industry icon Bethann Hardison, whose story is at the heart of the eye-opening and captivating new documentary “Invisible Beauty”. Hardison, who directs the film with Frédéric Tcheng (“Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel”, “Dior and I”, “Halston”), be…

The Toronto International Film Festival (September 7 – 17, 2023) is one of the world’s top showcases for documentary film. No doubt, numerous films from this year’s lineup will be among the most acclaimed and talked about of the Fall awards season and beyond. DOC NYC co-founder Thom Powers, who has been TIFF’s Documentary Programmer since 2006, joi…

Closing out our Emmy coverage, today we feature Ken Burns (“Brooklyn Bridge”, “The Civil War”, “Jazz”) and Lynn Novick (“Frank Lloyd Wright”, “Baseball”, “Hemingway”) discussing their thrice-Emmy nominated “The U.S. and the Holocaust”. As Ken tells us, this PBS series addresses the “Holocaust, one of the low points of humanity and what Americans kn…

The legacy of slavery and the contributions of Black American are intrinsic to nearly every aspect of what makes America America. It’s a simple enough thesis, but the makers of the documentary series of "The 1619 Project"–based on the original essays published in The New York Times–bring it to life with stories from history, of course, but also tho…

As Director Davis Guggenheim explains, Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie is “the story of a short kid from Canada who drops out of high school to become a movie star, and he does. Then a few years later, he wakes up with this crazy diagnosis, in a Florida hotel room, and the movie's about what does he do with that?” Davis sat down with Ken & Mike to di…

It’s not easy being an elephant these days. Devastating droughts (exacerbated by climate change), encroaching development, and relentless poachers force elephants across Asia and Africa to go on the run, literally, in the pursuit of food, water and, a place to call home. Executive Producer Lucinda Axelsson (“Elephant Diaries”, “Elephants of Samburu…

On the pod today, legendary director Allen Hughes (“Menace II Society”, “Dead Presidents”, “The Defiant Ones”) joins Mike to talk about his Emmy-nominated “Dear Mama”. The series traces the legacy of Afeni Shakur, Tupac’s mother and once a member of the Black Panthers, on her son’s life and music. Hughes’ series demonstrates how the many modes that…

She could turn the world on with her smile. But, for the “real” Mary Tyler Moore — one of the biggest television stars of the 1970s — what lay beneath that smile? In his engrossing and incisive documentary “Being Mary Tyler Moore”, filmmaker James Adolphus (“Soul of a Nation”, “You Ain’t Got These”) presents a three-dimensional portrait of MTM, pla…

Director Lana Wilson says that in “Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields” she’s showing how Shields found her way from “object of beauty to becoming a human being.” It’s a dramatic thesis, but one that Wilson brings to life in this Emmy-nominated documentary series. After the original “Pretty Baby”, “The Blue Lagoon”, and the Jordache Jeans commercials, Broo…

It’s one thing to be a socially conscious pop musician; it’s an entirely different matter when that musician attempts to parlay his popularity in the music world into the political arena. For Afrobeat star Bobi Wine — whose personal and political journey is the centerpiece of the remarkable new documentary “Bobi Wine: The People’s President” — the …