From Joshua Oppenheimer's perpetrator re-enactments to a young mother filming the siege of Aleppo: ten European documentaries that have redrawn what non-fiction film can do.
Over the past fifteen years European documentary has stopped behaving like the poor relation of feature cinema. It is where the most consequential formal experiments are happening, and where the most urgent political material now arrives. Between them, the European Film Awards' documentary category, the Berlinale's documentary strand, IDFA in Amsterdam, CPH:DOX in Copenhagen and the Cannes L'Œil d'or have built an infrastructure that funds, screens and rewards work which, twenty years ago, would have struggled to get made at all.
A few movements of the period shape the selection below. Joshua Oppenheimer's The Act of Killing started the perpetrator re-enactment school, which gave documentary a way of sitting with its subjects instead of indicting them from above. From inside Ukraine and Syria came a wave of war-witness work, shot by the people being bombed and smuggled out at considerable personal cost. Jonas Poher Rasmussen pioneered animation as testimony with Flee, using rotoscope to protect an asylum seeker's identity while keeping his voice. In Norway, Benjamin Ree perfected the patient observational portrait, letting a relationship unfold over years until its meaning becomes clear. Then there are the archival reckonings, of which Andres Veiel's Riefenstahl, made almost entirely from one woman's seven-hundred-box personal estate, is the current high point.
In every one of these films, how to shoot the material and what the material is turn out to be the same question. These are the ten to start with.
1. The Act of Killing
Dir. Joshua Oppenheimer · Denmark / Norway / UK · BAFTA & European Film Award winner
Joshua Oppenheimer's The Act of Killing (2012) changed what documentary thought it could do. Shot over seven years in North Sumatra as a Danish-Norwegian-British-Indonesian co-production, with Werner Herzog and Errol Morris as executive producers, it goes back to the Indonesian killings of 1965-66, in which army-affiliated paramilitaries murdered approximately one million suspected communists. Oppenheimer persuaded Anwar Congo and a small group of his fellow former death-squad members to re-enact their work for the camera in the genres they had soaked up in the cinemas of the period: gangster, musical, western. More than forty members of the Indonesian crew chose to stay anonymous in the final credits.
It won the European Film Award and the BAFTA for Best Documentary, was nominated for the Academy Award, and was named one of the year's best by Sight & Sound, The Guardian, The Village Voice and the National Board of Review. Oppenheimer's companion film, The Look of Silence, followed in 2014. More than a decade on, The Act of Killing is standard viewing on journalism, anthropology and documentary courses, and a generation of filmmakers has adopted, argued over and adapted its method, most recently and most openly Igor Bezinović in Fiume o Morte!, further down this list.
2. Flee
Dir. Jonas Poher Rasmussen · Denmark · Triple Oscar nominee
Jonas Poher Rasmussen's Flee (Flugt, 2021) was the first film in Academy history to be nominated for Best Animated Feature, Best Documentary Feature and Best International Feature in the same year. Rasmussen, a Danish filmmaker, had been friends with his subject for over fifteen years: an Afghan academic now living in Copenhagen, protected throughout by the pseudonym Amin Nawabi. Here he finally records the story of Amin's flight from Kabul as a teenager in the early 1990s, which Amin had kept from most of the people in his Danish life, his fiancé among them, for more than twenty years.
The film moves between present-day interviews in Copenhagen, rotoscoped into hand-drawn 2D animation, and animated reconstructions of the long migration through Russia and the Baltics. Protecting Amin's identity is a practical necessity, since parts of his original asylum claim could expose him to retroactive immigration sanctions, and the animation exists in large part to meet that need. It won the European Film Award for Best Documentary, the Sundance Grand Jury Prize, the Annecy Cristal and a Robert, and its use of animation is one of the most discussed choices in the documentary filmmaking of its decade.
3. No Other Land
Dir. Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham & Rachel Szor · Palestine / Norway · Oscar winner
No Other Land won the 2025 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, the first Palestinian-Israeli documentary to take the category, as well as the Berlinale Panorama Audience Award, the Berlinale Documentary Award and the European Film Award for Best Documentary. The four-person directing collective, two Palestinians from the West Bank and two Israelis, assembled it from approximately five years of footage gathered between 2019 and 2023.
The Palestinian activist Basel Adra and the Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham join forces to film the slow destruction of Masafer Yatta, a cluster of West Bank villages in the South Hebron Hills. The Israeli military has classified the area as a closed firing zone since the 1980s, which has allowed the gradual demolition of its homes, schools and water infrastructure over the years. Most of the film is Adra's own first-person footage of the demolitions as they happened, set beside Abraham's investigative reporting. The collective's joint acceptance speech at the 2025 ceremony was one of the most discussed moments of the year, and the directors' physical safety, and the fate of the communities they filmed, have stayed in the news since the Oscar.
4. 20 Days in Mariupol
Dir. Mstyslav Chernov · Ukraine · Ukraine's first ever Oscar
Mstyslav Chernov's 20 Days in Mariupol (2023) won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2024, Ukraine's first ever Oscar. It also won the BAFTA, the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service journalism (shared with Chernov's Associated Press colleagues) and a Sundance audience award. Chernov dedicated the win to the people of Mariupol, and said in his acceptance speech that he wished the film had never had to be made.
When Russia's full-scale invasion began in February 2022, Chernov, the photojournalist Evgeniy Maloletka and the producer Vasilisa Stepanenko were the last international press team inside the besieged port city. The film is built almost entirely from their AP footage of the three-week siege: children dying after a strike on a maternity hospital, mass graves dug in courtyards, the destruction of the Drama Theatre, residents queueing for water as shells land around them. Chernov's Ukrainian voice-over breaks with the conventions of objective journalism and turns the film into a survivor's testimony. To get it out at all, he and his team had to smuggle hard drives past Russian checkpoints, and every frame carries the weight of evidence saved against the odds.
5. Fiume o Morte!
Dir. Igor Bezinović · Croatia / Italy / Slovenia · European Film Award for Best Documentary
Igor Bezinović's Fiume o Morte! (2025) won the European Film Award for Best Documentary and was shortlisted for EFA Best Film. After The Blockade (2012) and A Brief Excursion (2017), it confirms Bezinović as one of the most distinctive documentary filmmakers working in Croatia. The title quotes Gabriele D'Annunzio's 1919 occupation of Fiume, when the right-wing poet seized the Adriatic city after World War I in an episode that prefigured the Italian Fascist movement.
Working through a local community network in Rijeka, as Fiume is now called, Bezinović assembles a portrait in many voices of how the occupation has been remembered, mythologised, suppressed and rediscovered over the century since. Dozens of residents (historians, schoolchildren, anti-fascist activists, descendants of the occupiers) stage their own versions of the history. The tone is playful but serious, with re-enactments, classroom seminars, archive footage and walks through the present-day city alternating chapter by chapter, and its methodological nerve has drawn favourable comparisons with Oppenheimer's The Act of Killing. Its subject, how a city remembers its own fascist prehistory, has only grown more relevant.
6. The Painter and the Thief
Dir. Benjamin Ree · Norway · Sundance Special Jury Award
Benjamin Ree's The Painter and the Thief (2020) premiered at Sundance, where it won the World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award for Creative Storytelling. Neon acquired it for global distribution and it became one of the highest-profile documentary releases of the pandemic years, also taking the Audience Award at the BFI London Film Festival and the Golden Firebird at Hong Kong International. It topped several end-of-year documentary lists, including those of the BBC, The Washington Post and The Boston Globe.
The film follows the long relationship between Barbora Kysilkova, a Czech hyperrealist painter who moved to Berlin and then Oslo in the early 2010s, and Karl Bertil-Nordland, the man who stole two of her largest canvases from the Galleri Nobel in Oslo in April 2015. Ree, only twenty-nine when the film premiered, shot it as well as directing it, and the score is by the Norwegian composer Uno Helmersson. His decision to give painter and thief roughly equal screen time and inner life, without ranking one as victim and the other as perpetrator, has been written about in Sight & Sound, the academic journal Studies in Documentary Film and Roger Ebert's online archive. Four years later Ree took the same patient, embedded method into Ibelin.
7. The Remarkable Life of Ibelin
Dir. Benjamin Ree · Norway · Sundance Audience & Directing Award
Benjamin Ree's The Remarkable Life of Ibelin (2024) won both the Audience Award and the Directing Award in the World Cinema Documentary competition at Sundance, only the second Norwegian-language documentary ever to take both prizes at a single edition. Later in 2024 it won the Peabody Award, and it was named Best Film at Norway's Amanda Awards. Netflix bought it straight after Sundance and released it worldwide in October 2024.
Its subject is Mats Steen, a young Norwegian man with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, and the parallel life he lived online as Ibelin Redmoore in the World of Warcraft community, recorded across roughly fifteen thousand hours of in-game material. Much of Ree's achievement is archival. The film works from the real-time records of Mats's keystrokes, voice chat and character logs, animated with Blizzard Entertainment's archive material in cooperation with the studio's licensing arm. Mats's parents Robert and Trude Steen, his sister Mia and the European World of Warcraft guild Starlight all took part at length. It has come up often in academic discussion of online communities and disability advocacy, and it prompted wide mainstream coverage of a larger question: whether relationships formed online, across geographic and physical distance, can be as meaningful as any other.
8. Riefenstahl
Dir. Andres Veiel · Germany · EFA Best Documentary shortlist
Andres Veiel's Riefenstahl premiered at Venice in 2024 and travelled widely on the festival circuit through 2025, reaching the European Film Awards' Best Documentary shortlist and earning a Lola nomination in the same category. Co-produced by ZDF and Arte, it rests on a remarkable archival find. Leni Riefenstahl's personal estate was opened to researchers after the death of her companion Horst Kettner in 2016 and acquired by Sandra Maischberger's Berlin production company, which brought in Veiel, the documentarist behind Black Box BRD and Beuys, to shape it into a film.
The estate runs to approximately seven hundred boxes of letters, calendars, photographs, audio tapes, home video and film negatives spanning a century. Veiel and his editor Stephan Krumbiegel build the film almost entirely from this material, with no on-camera interviews and no conventional narration. It is one of the most ethically careful documentary portraits of a Nazi-era figure since Claude Lanzmann's late work, a comparison Sight & Sound, Cahiers du Cinéma and The Guardian all made. It also won the Petra Kelly: Act Now! Award at the German Film Awards, an extra prize for documentary work in the public interest.
9. For Sama
Dir. Waad al-Kateab & Edward Watts · UK / Syria · Cannes L'Œil d'or
Waad al-Kateab and Edward Watts's For Sama (2019) won the L'Œil d'or for Best Documentary at Cannes, and the BAFTA for Best Documentary the following year. It was also nominated for the Academy Award and won the European Film Award for Best Documentary. Al-Kateab, a young woman who had been filming the Syrian uprising in Aleppo since 2011, assembled it from more than five hundred hours of her own footage, shot over the five years she lived through the siege of Eastern Aleppo.
The film takes the form of a letter to her infant daughter Sama, born during the siege, explaining the city that al-Kateab and her husband Hamza, a doctor, chose to stay in while it was bombed through 2012-2016. It moves between the small hospital where Hamza worked, one of the last functioning medical facilities in the city, and the family's domestic life, including the wedding the couple held during the siege. Al-Kateab kept the camera running through hospital trauma, family intimacy and bombardment alike, and the ethical and emotional weight of that footage has been much written about. It is one of the defining works of war-witness documentary of the 2010s, and critics often pair it with 20 Days in Mariupol as the form's two recent reference points.
10. Collective
Dir. Alexander Nanau · Romania · Double Oscar nominee
Alexander Nanau's Collective (Colectiv, 2019) was nominated for two Academy Awards in 2021, Best Documentary Feature and Best International Feature, and was the first Romanian film ever nominated in the latter category. It also won the European Film Award for Best Documentary and the LUX Audience Award. It follows journalists at the Romanian sports newspaper Gazeta Sporturilor as they investigate corruption in the country's healthcare system after the Colectiv nightclub fire in Bucharest in October 2015. Sixty-four people died: twenty-seven on the night, and thirty-seven later from infections caught in Romanian hospitals.
The newspaper's investigation, led by the sports editor Cătălin Tolontan with reporters Mirela Neag and Răzvan Lutac, exposed a long-running scheme by the Hexi Pharma company to dilute hospital disinfectants below clinically effective strength. Nanau and his small crew followed the reporting as it happened, and that unusual access is the foundation of the film's craft. A second thread follows Vlad Voiculescu, the technocrat appointed Health Minister in the political fallout, as he tries to reform the system from inside while the journalists keep reporting from outside. Collective is the nearest thing recent European documentary has produced to an All the President's Men for the 21st century.
A Form Coming Into Its Own
Taken together, these ten films show how often the formal choice is also the political one. Oppenheimer uses re-enactment because indictment would have shut his subjects up. Rasmussen uses animation because recognition would cost his subject something real. The No Other Land collective share authorship because no one of them could have shot what the four did together. Chernov narrates in Ukrainian, in the first person, because the English-language objectivity of the AP wire would have falsified the experience. Veiel refuses interviews because letting Riefenstahl speak through her own archive is the only honest way to handle a woman who spent a century curating herself.
The infrastructure behind those choices (the European Film Awards documentary category, the Berlinale documentary strand, IDFA, CPH:DOX, the Cannes L'Œil d'or, and streaming partnerships with MUBI, Neon, Netflix and ARTE) has matured to the point where ambitious non-fiction has somewhere to go. Over the past fifteen years it has produced as much consequential cinema as any other strand of European film.
For more in this vein, see our round-up of the 10 Must-Watch European War Films, where 20 Days in Mariupol and For Sama would also feel at home. If Riefenstahl caught your attention, our 10 Must-Watch German Films of 2025 places it among the year's most important German releases. For a broader picture of the year that gave us No Other Land, see our 10 Must-Watch European Films of 2024.
For a national cinema where documentary and fiction blur especially productively, see our 10 Must-Watch Romanian Films for Collective.
Two of the four filmmakers behind No Other Land, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, returned in 2026 with NAZA, the only documentary in competition at Venice and the winner of its Special Jury Prize. See our Venice 2026 Winners List.
