2025 Oscars: Best Documentary Feature Predictions

Nominations voting is from January 8-12, 2025, with official Oscar nominations announced January 17, 2025. Final voting is February 11-18, 2025. And finally, the 97th Oscars telecast will be broadcast on Sunday, March 2 and air live on ABC at 7:00 p.m. ET/ 4:00 p.m. PT. We update our picks through awards season, so keep checking IndieWire for all our 2025 Oscar predictions.

The State of the Race

By this point in the Best Documentary Feature race, there are a significant number of pivotal shortlists and awards nominations to cross-reference to understand which films seem most likely to receive an Oscar nomination.

While the Critics Choice Documentary Awards went almost fully populist, and the IDA Documentary Awards added quite a few titles to their list that did not appear anywhere else, the Doc NYC and Cinema Eye Honors lists seemed to best strike the balance between what films are crowd favorites and what films could appeal to the Documentary Branch’s increasingly discerning, international-leaning tastes.

All that said, National Geographic’s “Sugarcane,” Netflix’s “The Remarkable Life of Ibelin,” and MTV Documentary Films’ “Black Box Diaries” made just about every shortlist that dropped in the past two weeks, once again proving that a premiere at Sundance is often the best launchpad for a Best Documentary Feature campaign. This year’s Berlinale proved to be pivotal to this documentary awards season as well, as both Golden Bear winner “Dahomey,” from new awards player Mubi, and Best Documentary winner “No Other Land,” probably the most notable in a trend of documentary contenders who are self-distributing, made a lot of these lists as well.

As the season goes on, it is becoming more and more likely that Netflix could take up as much as a third of the Best Documentary Feature shortlist come December. In addition to “The Remarkable Life of Ibelin,” the streaming service has “Daughters” and “Will & Harper,” which have also been huge festival favorites, and TIFF 2023 premiere “Mountain Queen: The Summits of Lhakpa Sherpa,” which has been holding strong, being recognized by the Doc NYC and Cinema Eye Honors, for example. It would be a stretch for Netflix to get that fifth spot, but films like “Skywalkers: A Love Story,” “State of Silence,” and “Yintah” all have the critical acclaim to support a surprise entry.

While they have made a little less noise, two films that seem to have impressed the documentary community, therefore also showing up on these shortlists are “Ernest Cole: Lost and Found,” from Magnolia Pictures, and “Queendom,” from Greenwich Entertainment. The former was directed by “I Am Not Your Negro” filmmaker Raoul Peck, and the latter was produced by “How to Survive a Plague” filmmaker David France, so both awards campaign have insight on what it takes to secure that Oscar nomination.

The Best Documentary Feature shortlist usually never fails to surprise. We’ve seen many years where what felt like the most popular documentary of the year got left off, so it is hard to say any contender’s chances are set in stone, but we are now at a place in the Oscar race in which it is pretty clear which films voters need to catch up on if they have not seen them already.

Contenders for the shortlist of 15 are listed in alphabetical order below. No documentary will be deemed a frontrunner until we have seen the film.

Frontrunners:
“A New Kind of Wilderness”
“Black Box Diaries”
“Dahomey”
“Daughters”
“Frida”
“Hollywoodgate”
“The Last of the Sea Women”
“Mountain Queen: The Summits of Lhakpa Sherpa”
“No Other Land”
“Porcelain War”
“The Remarkable Life of Ibelin”
“Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat”
“Sugarcane”
“Union”
“Will & Harper”

Contenders:
“Afternoons of Solitude”
“Bad River”
“The Bibi Files”
“Bread and Roses”
“Eno”
“Ernest Cole: Lost and Found”
“Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger”
“Nocturnes”
“Patrice: The Movie”
“Piece by Piece”
“Queendom”
“Seeking Mavis Beacon”
“Separated”
“Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story”
“Zurawski v Texas”