In a year filled with groundbreaking storytelling, feminist documentaries released this year inspired, educated and sparked vital conversations. Here are some of the best feminist documentaries streaming in 2024.
Feminist Documentary Films
Daughters
Directed by Natalie Rae and Angela Patton
More than two decades ago, Angela Patton founded Girls for a Change, a nonprofit to support Black girls. Among other innovative initiatives, her organization created the “Date With Dad” program, designed so girls could connect with their incarcerated fathers, and for the men to be reminded that there’s life after prison. Codirected by Patton and Natalie Rae, Daughters, which won an audience award at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, highlights the program, including its special daddy-daughter dance that, in Patton’s words, is a way for the girls “to invite their fathers into their lives on their terms” and spend time in the same space together—a rare opportunity, especially now when many U.S. prisons and jails no longer allow in-person visits.
Daughters employ an intimate approach in their portrayal of incarcerated fathers, as well as the children, mothers, and other caregivers on the outside. Some of the girls have a hard time understanding what happened to their fathers or barely remember them; others are angry, unsure if they can or want to forgive their dads for leaving them behind. The film maintains a tight focus on the lives and thoughts of the girls and their parents, telling a story of human connection rather than lingering on the events that led to the incarceration. But it doesn’t back down from the sadness and complexity of each family’s circumstances. Ultimately, Daughters is full of sympathy and hope, just like the program it features: According to the film, 95 percent of the men who’ve taken part in “Date With Dad” have not returned to jail in the 12 years of its tenure.
Power of the Dream
Directed by Dawn Porter
Dawn Porter’s uplifting documentary uses a mix of news footage, interviews and social commentary to foreground the social justice efforts of the WNBA for nearly a decade. Featuring interviews with sports commentators Jemele Hill and Holly Rowe, as well as star players Sue Bird, Layshia Clarendon, Angel McCoughtry, Nneka Ogwumike and Elizabeth Williams, among others, the film reminds us that athletes also have a stake in U.S. politics, particularly in a league made up predominantly of Black and LGBTQ+ women.
In 2016, players from the Minnesota Lynx were some of the first to take up the Black Lives Matter movement in professional sports, even before NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick made headlines by taking a knee. The league dedicated its 2020 pandemic “bubble” season to Breonna Taylor, the “Say Her Name” campaign and Black Lives Matter. The Atlanta Dream was instrumental in pushing back against Kelly Loeffler, their anti-BLM co-owner, by supporting her opponent, Reverend Raphael Warnock, in his race for office, ultimately helping him secure the Senate seat for Georgia and flipping Congress blue in 2021.
Perfectly timed for the upcoming election season, Power of the Dream illustrates how women can stand in solidarity, creating communities that have tremendous power to shape America’s political and social landscape.
Four Daughters
Written by Kaouther Ben Harris
Apple TV+, YouTube, Amazon Prime Video, Fandango at Home
In 2016, two sisters were arrested in Libya after a U.S. airstrike against their ISIS compound killed more than 40 people. Tunisian nationals Ghofrane and Rahma had been radicalized into the Islamic terrorist group just a few years prior and ran away from home to marry ISIS members at 15 and 16, respectively. This is the story that was reported in the news, with their mother, Olfa, speaking out publicly about her children’s recruitment and the fears she harbored about the welfare of her two younger daughters, Tayssir and Eya, then 11 and 13.
Four Daughters—director Kaouther Ben Hania’s exploration of family, love, memory, and loss—takes viewers back to the days before Ghofrane and Rahma left home, in an intimate examination of the murky complexities of intergenerational trauma. Employing a mesmerizing approach that mingles fact and fiction, Ben Hania asks the real-life Tayssir, Eya and Olfa to reflect on and reenact certain memories from their past alongside actors hired to play the lost elder daughters and, in scenes that might be too upsetting for the real Olfa to perform herself, their mother.
Captured through beautiful and arresting camerawork, this experimental approach illustrates how the family members work through their grief together and in surprising concert with the actors. Offering unflinching and sometimes troubling insights into a very private world, the film asks a series of questions about bodily autonomy, power, religion, and the promise and limits of the motherly and sisterly love that are sure to stick with viewers.
Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project
Directed by Michele Stephenson and Joe Brewster
Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, YouTube TV, YouTube, Max, Roku Channel, Sling
A grand jury prize-winning documentary at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival, Going to Mars takes its title from poet Nikki Giovanni’s musings about space travel serving as a metaphor for slavery: the deep blue of a seemingly never-ending ocean and the darkness of space; the haunting experience of heading out into an unforgiving unknown with no way to turn back. But there’s peace and power mixed in with Giovanni’s allegory, and hopefulness for the future that’s reflected evocatively in this documentary on her life and work.
Merging the usual archival footage, interviews and recordings of Giovanni’s home life and professional appearances with contemplative dreamlike sequences that offer illustrations of her ideas, achievements and poetic introspection, Going to Mars exposes how the juxtaposition of everyday life, politics, activism and art can shape and sustain a profoundly creative life.
Razing Liberty Square
Directed by Katia Esson
An effective and ethical documentarian gains the trust of her subjects, developing a rapport that gives them space to show and reflect upon the intimacies of their lives. The strength of this relationship, and its possibilities, shines through in Katja Esson’s new film. Shot over five years in Miami’s public housing development, Liberty Square, and the surrounding predominantly Black neighborhood, Liberty City, the film highlights the effects of “climate gentrification” and the subtle but no less insidious racism disguised as capitalist progress that’s so often at odds with residents’ best interests and their desire for community, security, and belonging.
Threatened by the devastating effects of climate change, developers in Miami are always looking for land that’s less at risk from rising sea levels. Liberty Square, originally planned to keep Black, low-income public housing away from the more desirable parts of the city nearer to Miami’s beaches, also happens to be on higher ground. What begins as a plan to redevelop the area into mixed-income housing, including promises not to displace the original residents, devolves over the years into a complex negotiation for space that echoes similar battles all across the U.S. Razing Liberty Square focuses on four individuals affected by the redevelopment: a worried single mother of seven who wants what’s best for her children; an earnest community liaison for the developers who grew up in the area; the hardworking principal of Liberty Square’s alternative school fighting for resources for her students; and a climate justice activist trying to educate and advocate in the community. Through their eyes, and the testimony of dozens of other residents, Esson’s film offers an incisive reflection on the price of gentrification and the impacts of climate change on communities of color.
Frida
Directed by Carla Gutierrez
Apple TV+, Amazon Prime Video, Fandango at Home
Frida Kahlo may be one of the most well-known and frequently depicted women artists in popular media. And yet Carla Gutiérrez’s lyrical, evocative documentary proves there’s still more to discover about the enigmatic Kahlo. Imbued with feeling as well as detail, the film navigates Kahlo’s life in her own words, enlivening her letters, diary entries, and other writings via performed voice-over, and showcasing her illustrations and paintings through stills and animations that heighten the drama of the artist’s already rich and challenging body of work.
“Love is the foundation of all life,” Kahlo tells a former lover in one letter, and this declaration serves as a motif throughout the film. Even in moments of tremendous pain from the lifelong complications she faced after a catastrophic bus accident in her youth, Kahlo had a vision and an aesthetic genius that remained sharply luminous. French surrealist André Breton wrote, “The art of Frida Kahlo is a ribbon around a bomb,” and such is also the work of the film: giving viewers a gripping portrait of the tumultuous emotions, complicated passions, and creative brilliance behind one of the preeminent artists of the 20th century.
Hannah Gadsby’s Gender Agenda
Directed by Julian Smith
After their ingenious 2018 comedy special Nanette took the internet by storm—followed by the powerful and powerfully funny Douglas (2020) and Something Special (2023)—award-winning Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby is back with a new venture. This time, they’re using their international platform to showcase other comics whose material pushes the boundaries of gender, sexuality, and body politics. The new Netflix special Hannah Gadsby’s Gender Agenda puts seven genderqueer comedians front and center in a rare and inspiring opportunity to be themselves and make us laugh.
The featured comedians—Jes Tom, Alok, Asha Ward, Chloe Petts, DeAnne Smith, Krishna Istha and Dahlia Belle—hail from the U.K., the U.S. and Canada. From Tom’s clever freneticism and Ward’s deadpan delivery to Belle’s expressive repartee and Alok’s calculated performativity, Gender Agenda represents a truly diverse group of comics with divergent experiences, tones, and styles.
And while Smith affirms that these days “anything less than calling for global revolution feels a bit self-indulgent,” they and the rest of their cohort vividly attest to the power, necessity, and possibility of laughter too, if not change the world, at least move the needle of representation inorably forward until we can all find our place.
It’s Only Life After All
Directed by Alexandria
Hulu, YouTube, Youtube TV, Amazon Prime Video, Max, Netflix, Apple TV+, Fandango at Home, Roku, Sling, Discovery+, Philo, Investigation Discovery
Alexandria Bombach’s heartfelt Indigo Girls documentary will either bring you right back to your college dorm room or, if you didn’t come of age in the late 1980s and ’90s, will make you wish that you had. With a kind of carefree intimacy, the film showcases the lives and partnership of singer-songwriters Amy Ray and Emily Saliers through an impressive array of archival footage, interviews with fans and, of course, conversations with the women themselves. At the height of their popularity, the Indigo Girls were two of the only out lesbians in folk music, and their 50ish years of mutually supportive friendship (contrary to years of speculation, they have never been a couple) through both boon years and difficult transitions shines through their music and the way they speak about each other and their art. Considering the depth and longevity of the duo’s appeal—illustrated so clearly by the prominence of their hit “Closer to Fine” in last summer’s blockbuster Barbie movie—a documentary like this is a welcome dose of nostalgia for our contemporary moment.
Sue Bird: In the Clutch
Directed by Sarah Dowland
Netflix, Apple TV+, Amazon Prime Video, Fandango at Home
Even if you’re not a fan of basketball, it’s hard not to get excited by the determination, openness and energy on display from the beginning to the end of Sarah Dowland’s documentary. Bird has been a basketball phenom since high school, during her time on the University of Connecticut’s NCAA championship-winning team, on teams in Europe and at the Olympics, and throughout her long career with the WNBA as part of the Seattle Storm. Over her career, Bird’s teams have won two NCAA championships, five EuroLeague titles, four WNBA championships, four World Championship gold medals, and five Olympic gold medals (and that’s just a sampling of her many achievements).
In addition to highlighting Bird’s wealth of victories, and some devastating losses—including a torn ACL in college that almost prematurely ended a brilliant career—the film reflects on some of the challenges women face in professional sports, from objectifying marketing campaigns to stunningly low pay. In 2016, Bird met U.S. women’s soccer player Megan Rapinoe, and the two-star athletes have been engaged since 2020. Although it took dating Rapinoe for Bird to come out publicly (she’s been out to family and friends for 20 years), she’s been a long-time activist and advocate, supporting the LGBTQ+ community, leading Black Lives Matter protests, and promoting girls and women in sports. A basketball legend, Bird was the oldest active WNBA player at the time of her retirement last year—and it’s very clear from her bright enthusiasm throughout the film that she has no intention of slowing down now.
Nyad
Written by Julia Cox and Diana Nyad, directed by Elizabeth Chair Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin
There’s a running joke in Nyad, a new Netflix biopic about long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad, that Diana (Annette Bening) cannot resist telling the same story at every opportunity despite frequent attempts by best friend Bonnie (Jodie Foster) to dissuade her. It’s about how, as a child, she learned about the naiads of Greek mythology from her stepfather, which drove her to break multiple world records, becoming a water nymph in human form. Years later, she’s still clinging to that mythos and what she sees as a thwarted destiny: At age 28, she attempted to swim the seemingly impossible 110-mile crossing from Havana to Key West and failed.
When the film begins, Diana’s turning 60, she’s bored and she’s suddenly ready to try again. Based on Find a Way, Diana Nyad’s 2015 autobiography, Nyad doesn’t shy away from the difficulties Diana faces, nor her relentless— sometimes to the point of becoming myopic—pursuit of her goal. But the film also celebrates her remarkable triumph and the Odyssean obstacles she overcomes, from life-threatening jellyfish stings and potential shark attacks to unreliable currents and the tremendous strain swimming for more than 50 hours has on the body, resulting in hallucinations and drastic weight loss.
The film is full of impressive women, including both the real and fictionalized Nyad, as well as Bening and Foster, who play their roles with a superbly gritty dedication to realism that constitutes a rare opportunity for tresses in their 60s. More than just an inspiring sports film and a chronicle of human resilience and tenacity, it’s a clarion call to those who think a woman’s age has any bearing on her ability or worth.
A Town Called Victoria
Directed by Li Lu
On Jan. 27, 2017, President Donald Trump announced his anti-Muslim travel ban. Hours later, a mosque in Victoria, Texas, was burned to the ground. In the weeks that followed, the story of the Victoria Islamic Center went viral and support poured in. In a matter of days, a GoFundMe page set up on the mosque’s behalf raised more than $1 million for rebuilding. Local religious leaders offered aid as part of a larger interfaith community, and the town seemed to rally around its small but robust Muslim community. And yet, as this three-part docuseries explores with nuance and care, Victoria is a city like so many in America: a complicated jumble of institutional racism and xenophobia despite many well-meaning individuals who are struggling every day to make their hometown better for all of their neighbors.
Exemplifying the power of documentary to tell multiple stories simultaneously, A Town Called Victoria addresseses in frank and unflinching terms a series of events, from the mosque’s reconstruction to the arrest and criminal trial of the alleged arsonist, through many different eyes. In interviews with dozens of community members, news footage and animated reenactments of the trial paint a sometimes heartening, often troubling, picture of small-town America in all its complexity.
The Lady Bird Diaries
Written and directed by Jennifer Cram
When President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963 and Lyndon B. Johnson ascended to the presidency, his wife, Claudia Alta Taylor “Lady Bird” Johnson, decided to keep an audio diary of her time in the White House. These tapes, made public after her death, serve as the backbone of this gripping documentary. For six years, Lady Bird chronicled the personal, the harrowing and the mundane, reflecting in cogent and telling ways on the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, and the toll she felt the presidency was taking on her husband’s mental and physical health.
Dawn Porter’s film offers a compelling new perspective on an era rife with complexities, a time when progressive successes like the Voting Rights Act and Fair Housing Act were bracketed by the tragedies of war, the strain of civil protests, and the assassinations of JFK and Martin Luther King Jr. Through a mix of archival footage, home videos, recorded phone calls and news footage, all contextualized in Lady Bird’s own words and voice, The Lady Bird Diaries is an intimate portrait of a tumultuous time in U.S. history.
Women in the Front Seat
Directed by Indi Sainy
In this charming documentary, South Asian American filmmaker Indy Saini uses her deep attachment to riding motorcycles as an inroad to an invigorating portrait of the diverse and dynamic community of women bikers. Women in the Front Seat gives space to each woman’s reflections, exploring how and why they choose to take up what some see as a dangerous hobby or even lifestyle antithetical to how society tells women to behave. For some, biking is a meditation or escape, an exploitation of their own vulnerability and mortality; for others, it’s a form of resistance to cultural norms or the edicts of parents and former partners who told them no. All the women connect riding to a fundamental part of their identity. Disrupting masculine stereotypes and demonstrating the truly varied lives of these women—whose day jobs range from nurse to police officer to ceramic artist—Women in the Front Seat highlights the empowering communion between woman and machine amid the always vital promise of community.
Feminist Non-Fiction Television and Limited Series
Simone Biles Rising
Directed by Katie Walsh
A four-part limited series, Simone Biles Rising is a timely and absorbing look at the factors impacting gymnast Simone Biles’ shocking partial withdrawal from the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and her hard-won return to the 2024 Paris Games. With a thoughtful approach that focuses on Biles’ support system, including her teammates, coaches, parents, siblings and new husband, the documentary series lets the phenomenal gymnast shape her own story.
Led by interviews with Biles herself, the series takes us through her stunning victories as well as her challenges— including the abuse she and many fellow gymnasts suffered at the hands of longtime team physician Larry Nassar and the tremendous pressure she experiences as the media and fan-dubbed “Greatest of All Time.” The show champions Biles’ dedication to her own mental health as a turning point in a sport that used to pride itself on pushing its athletes, especially young girls, to their limits and beyond. The beloved Biles shines in Simone Biles Rising, which does what sports documentaries do best: make us believe in the resilience and power of the human spirit.
Twice Colonized
Directed by Lin Alluna
Apple TV+, Youtube, Amazon Prime Video, Fadango at Home, Google Play Movies
Inuit activist Aaju Peter was born in Greenland but sent to school in Denmark from ages 11 to 18, living with host families in a situation she compares, looking back, to the residential school system in other nations designed to remove Indigenous children from their communities and “whitenize” them. Not at home in Denmark but having lost much of her connection to her native land, Peter no longer felt she had a community to return to until she moved to the Canadian Arctic and met other Indigenous people who, like her, had been “twice colonized”—doubly impacted by European colonialism and Canadian policies that restrict Indigenous life and traditions.
Twice Colonized artfully follows Peter as she grapples with the suicide of her youngest son and struggles to escape an abusive relationship, all while investigating her own generational trauma and amplifying the voices of other Indigenous people in Europe as she and they lobby for positions of power in the Danish Parliament, European Union and United Nations. Lin Alluna’s atmospheric, nonlinear documentary is both lovely and devastating, a profoundly personal look at the consequences of disregarding the rights and agency of Indigenous people globally—and what people like Peter are doing to undo those harmful legacies.
Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV
Directed by Mary Robertson and Emma Schwartz
Netflix, Apple TV+, Youtube, Amazon Prime Video, Fadango at Home, Google Play Movies
Born out of an investigative piece written for Business Insider in 2022, the docuseries chronicles the underbelly of children’s programming in the 1990s and early 2000s on the sets of several hit Nickelodeon shows. Founded before streaming platforms allowed children and families to tailor their viewing, Nickelodeon marketed itself as a kid-focused cable channel that was less about education and more about sometimes-wild and envelope-pushing entertainment. As a rising star on the network, credited with discovering many famous child actors like Amanda Bynes, Nickelodeon writer and producer Dan Schneider accrued a frightening degree of power over his staff, as well as his young charges and their guardians.
Interviews with former Nickelodeon employees and those in their orbit uncover a dark legacy that includes illegally underpaying women staff writers, who were also subjected to a toxic and abusive workplace; racist privileging of white cast members; sexualized jokes and costumes embedded in comedy gags meant for kids; widespread dysfunction on sets, where cast members and their parents, both desperate not to hurt burgeoning careers, were often persuaded to ignore child labor laws; and child abuse and sexual misconduct that occurred under Schneider’s purview, although he himself was never charged despite disturbingly close relationships with many of his young female stars. Quiet on Set is a direct and unflinching look back at television history, but also a haunting reminder about the dangers of unbridled power.
These picks appeared in the “Now Streaming” section of the print magazine. Join the Ms. community today and you’ll get issues delivered straight to your mailbox.
