Top Docs: Award-Winning Documentary Filmmakers

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

@topdocspod on X and Instagram

 

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

@topdocspod on X and Instagram

 

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.