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Gold Derby senior editor Joyce Eng recently conducted fascinating, in-depth discussions with the directors and/or producers of eight of the leading contenders for Best Documentary at many major awards in 2021, including the Oscars. Watch her one-on-one chats with each creator plus group roundtable talks about the creative challenges they all faced while making their films.

Discussions include “Rebuilding Paradise” Nat Geo; “Miss Americana” Netflix; “Boys State” Apple TV+; “40 Years a Prisoner” HBO; “All In: The Fight for Democracy” Amazon Prime Video; “On the Record” HBO; “Kingdom of Silence” Showtime; and “A Most Beautiful Thing” 50 Egg Films.

“Speaking truth to power, social justice documentaries are really part of a cutting edge of documentary,” argues filmmaker Kirby Dick about the wave of investigative nonfiction films we’ve seen in recent years, including those from our “Meet the Experts” documentary panelists. Watch our group discussion with those directors above.

SEEWatch our chats with top cinematographers, costume designers, documentary filmmakers and other crafts leaders

Dick and Amy Ziering exposed sexual abuse in the music business in “On the Record.” Rick Rowley investigated the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in “Kingdom of Silence.” Tommy Oliver followed a man’s journey to free his parents from an unjust prison sentence in “40 Years a Prisoner.” And Mary Mazzio explored racial inequality through the eyes of a team of high school rowers in “A Most Beautiful Thing.”

“All of the films here on this panel are great examples of what has been core...

“Honestly, it’s not a rowing film,” explains director Mary Mazzio about her documentary “A Most Beautiful Thing,” which tells the story of the first African-American public high school rowing team in the US, formed in the late 1990s against all odds. “It’s masquerading as a sports film, but it’s a true investigation and really amplification of young men from the West Side of Chicago, their reality, and all of the systemic obstacles that these young people face at such an early age.” Mazzio joined us for our “Meet the Experts” documentary panel. Watch our interview with the filmmaker above.

SEE2021 Oscar Predictions: Best Director

Mazzio came to this film from a rowing background — she competed at the 1992 Olympics — and finding out about this groundbreaking rowing team was what first sparked her interest. She read the self-published memoir of one of those rowers, Arshay Cooper, and reached out to him.

Six top film documentary directors will reveal the secrets behind their projects when they join Gold Derby’s special “Meet the Experts” Q&a event with key 2021 guild and Oscar contenders this month. Each person will participate in two video discussions to be published on Tuesday, December 15, at 5:00 p.m. Pt; 8:00 p.m. Et. We’ll have a one-on-one with our senior editor Daniel Montgomery and a group chat with Daniel and all of the group together.

RSVP today to this specific event by clicking here to book your reservation. Or click here to RSVP for our entire ongoing panel series. We’ll send you a reminder a few minutes before the start of the show.

This “Meet the Experts” panel welcomes the following 2021 guild and Oscar contenders:

“All In: The Fight for Democracy” (Amazon Prime): Liz Garbus

Garbus is a two-time Oscar nominee for “What Happened, Miss Simone?...

The Academy dropped another 33 feature films into the online screening room for members of its Documentary Branch on Oct. 30, giving the Oscars doc race its biggest influx of new films to date. The branch now has 86 films to consider, with two or three more batches of films (and potentially more than 50 additional contenders) likely to be added to the field by early January.

Coming the same week that the Critics Choice Documentary Awards announced its nominees and the International Documentary Association’s Ida Documentary Awards revealed the 30-film shortlist from which it will make its final choices, the Academy move kicked the Oscar doc race into another gear in a year that promises to be highly competitive.

Among the docs that were made available to voters this week were Bryce Dallas Howard’s film about fatherhood, “Dads,” which means she’ll be competing against her father, Ron Howard, who is...

It makes sense that this year’s AFI Fest closed on Thursday night with the premiere of director Errol Morris’ wild and entertaining documentary “My Psychedelic Love Story.” In a year in which reality has smacked all of us in the face, nonfiction filmmaking is in the spotlight more than ever, from a string of docs that deal with issues at stake in the upcoming election to more freewheeling works like Morris’ film, a Wtf concoction from a director who only gets this playful once in a while.

It’s undeniable that the Oscars race for Best Picture is off to a slow start, with fewer films than usual playing the scaled-down fall film festivals and studios reluctant to commit to theatrical openings as the pandemic stretches on. But the race for Best Documentary Feature promises to be a robust one. More than 50 films are now available in the Academy...

October is here and you know what that means: time for the streaming services to put their spookiest foot forward. Amazon is doing its part for its new releases in October 2020 by rolling out some horror originals and library titles.

This is the month that the much-hyped Blumhouse horror anthology series Welcome to the Blumhouse arrives. “Episodes” of that, Black Box and The Lie launch on Oct. 6 and Evil Eye and Nocturne arrive on Oct. 13. Another horror-adjacent release of note is Truth Seekers, a comedy-horror series from Nick Frost and Simon Pegg.

That’s about it for notable originals. Thankfully October 1 brings the usual burst of fascinating library movie titles. A Knights Tale, Spaceballs, and The Departed all debut on the first of the month. Terminator: Dark Fate arrives on Oct. 9. The superb final season of Mr. Robot will be available on Oct. 6. Start playing Pixies “Where is My Mind?...

As we head into the last week of September, let’s look ahead at what’s coming to Amazon Prime in October. It’s the usual mix of great newly-licensed titles arriving at the top of the month and a range of original movies and TV shows dropping throughout the upcoming weeks. But, what with it being spooky season, this time Prime’s October haul is specifically geared towards giving you some scares during Halloween.

For starters, horror fans will not want to miss the launch of Blumhouse’s “Welcome to the Blumhouse” series with four original films going up across October. The first duo, Black Box and The Lie, land on Prime on October 6th. Then, a week later on the 13th, both Evil Eye and Nocturne debut. Anything with Blumhouse behind it is usually worth checking out, so make sure not to miss those.

October 1st delivers a couple of vampire movies,...

A documentary about Harry Belafonte’s “Tonight Show” stint and another executive produced by NFL player Malcolm Jenkins will be among the movies that will debut on Peacock as part of NBCUniversal’s original film slate in September.

The original films “Anthony,” “The Sit-In: Harry Belafonte Hosts The Tonight Show” and “Black Boys” will premiere early next month. Further, the documentary “A Most Beautiful Thing” and Emilio Esteveez’s “The Public” will stream exclusively on the service in September.

“The Sit-In,” which premieres Sept. 10, looks at the events surrounding the week in which Belafonte guest hosted “The Tonight Show” in place of Johnny Carson for a full week in February 1968, the first time a Black man ever got the opportunity. Belafonte’s guests that week included Aretha Franklin, Sidney Poitier, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, and the documentary includes behind-the-scenes footage of how the politics of the day shaped the show.

Peacock has unveiled a slate of original films, all of which will debut on the service in September.

The NBCU streamer, which launched nationally just over a month ago, will premiere a doc on Harry Belafonte’s brief stint hosting “The Tonight Show,” Emilio Estevez’s pic “The Public,” starring Alec Baldwin, and a doc from NFL star Malcolm Jenkins which celebrates the humanity of Black men and boys.

“The Sit-In: Harry Belafonte Hosts the Tonight Show” was supposed to launch at the Tribeca Film Festival, but soon after the festival didn’t take place, Variety caught up with the doc’s producers and director Yoruba Richen to talk about the significance of Belafonte hosting, and how it reflects on the current late night landscape.

“It says a lot about the politics of today and where we are,” Richen said. “And that late night is still dominated by white men.