The SCAD Savannah Film Festival and The Hollywood Reporter have announced the 10 standout 2026 documentaries that will be represented by their directors on the 13th annual edition of Docs to Watch, the fest’s panel that has become an important stop on the road to the Oscars for nonfiction films.

This year’s selections: Poh Si Teng’s American Doctor (Watermelon), Ron Howard’s Avedon (Netflix), Alysa Nahmias’s Cookie Queens (Roadside), Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi’s Everest: The Other Side (Nat Geo), Amir Bar-Lev’s The Last First: Winter K2 (Apple), Julia Loktev’s My Undesirable Friends: Part II – Exile (MUBI), William Greaves and David Greaves’s Once Upon a Time in Harlem (Neon), Itab Azzam & Jack MacInnes’s One in a Million (Frontline), Rory Kennedy’s The Trial of Alec Baldwin (Abramorama) and Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s You Can See Everything (A24).

Over the past 12 years, 27 films that were represented on the panel went on to receive an Oscar nomination for best documentary feature, and eight ultimately won that award: 2015’s Amy, 2016’s O.J.: Made in America, 2017’s Icarus, 2018’s Free Solo, 2019’s American Factory, 2021’s Summer of Soul, 2022’s Navalny and 2023’s 20 Days in Mariupol.

The 2026 panel will take place over 90 minutes at the Lucas Theatre on the afternoon of Wednesday, Oct. 28, and will be moderated by yours truly.

“This year’s Docs to Watch selections reflect a range of films that take us somewhere we didn’t expect to go, whether that’s into a hidden chapter of history, the life of an extraordinary individual, or a story unfolding in front of us right now,” Christina Routhier, the senior executive director of SCAD Theaters and Festivals, said in a statement. “We’re excited to partner with Scott Feinberg and The Hollywood Reporter to bring these filmmakers and their films to Savannah and give our students and audiences the chance to experience the work, meet the artists behind it, and be part of the conversation.”

Here are some brief loglines about each of 2026’s Docs to Watch:

• American Doctor, a film independently financed and directed by a Malaysian-born American journalist, follows three American physicians — one Jewish, one Palestinian and one Zoroastrian — as they volunteer at a hospital in Gaza amid the ongoing war

• Avedon, from Oscar-winning director Ron Howard, explores the life, work and legacy of the American portrait photographer Richard Avedon, drawing upon unprecedented access to his personal archives and including never-before-seen stills and behind-the-lens footage

• Cookie Queens, the year’s highest-grossing non-celebrity doc, is a heartwarming chronicle of four young girls’ efforts, in the face of varying forms of adversity, to meet their sales goals during Girl Scouts cookie-selling season

• Everest: The Other Side, from the Oscar-winning directors of Free Solo, is another film about extreme outdoor athletes, in this case a man and a woman who fall in love and share a dream of climbing and then skiing down the north face of Mt. Everest

• The Last First: Winter K2 follows a team of mountaineers as they strive to achieve something never previously accomplished, namely, climbing K2, the second-highest mountain in the world after Mt. Everest, in winter

• My Undesirable Friends: Part II – Exile is the six-hour second installment, following a five-hour first, in an epic portrait of independent Russian journalists whose coverage amid Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian crackdown forces them to flee their homeland

• Once Upon a Time in Harlem is a miraculous achievement, featuring remarkable footage of a gathering of Harlem Renaissance luminaries that was shot by one filmmaker in 1972 but not turned into a film until that filmmaker’s son completed it more than a half-century later

• One in a Million, the winner of the Sundance Film Festival’s audience award, chronicles a tumultuous decade in the life of a young Syrian girl who, along with her family, flees her war-torn country and seeks refuge in Europe

• The Trial of Alec Baldwin is the result of exclusive access to the titular star following a 2021 accidental shooting during the making of the film Rust, and includes powerful footage from the set, from Baldwin’s police interrogation and from the legal proceedings that followed

• You Can See Everything, a film unlike any other, follows The Rehearsal’s Nathan Fielder as he is welcomed into the home of Theranos’ Elizabeth Holmes over the 34 days before begins serving a prison sentence, and tries to figure out what she’s really about

The 29th SCAD Savannah Film Festival will take place Oct. 24-31. Presented by the Savannah College of Art and Design, it is the largest university-run film festival in the world. Each year, some 75,000 people attend the eight-day event, which attracts some of the biggest names in Hollywood and world cinema, and which features exclusive screenings, panel discussions and workshops. Tickets for this year’s fest are now on sale.

SPOILER ALERT: This post spoils the entirety of Prime Video‘s The Love Hypothesis movie.

Editor’s Note: Trigger Warning – The following contains mention of sexual harassment. Help is available at the National Sexual Assault Hotline: 1-800-656-4673.

A cathartic scene towards the end of The Love Hypothesis, adapted from the best-selling book by Ali Hazelwood and now streaming on Prime Video, reaffirms the already solid bond between Olive Smith (Lili Reinhart) and her best friend Anh (Rachel Marsh), the foundational relationship at the heart of the love story.

After all, it’s for Anh that Olive starts the “harebrained,” to quote Hazelwood, scheme of fake dating one of Stanford University’s most notorious professors, Adam Carlsen, also known as Dr. Evil for his exacting manner with graduate students. Unfortunately, Adam’s supposedly “close” friend and colleague, Harvard’s Dr. Tom Benton (Arty Froushan) gets between Olive and Adam momentarily when he sexually harasses Olive, but he can’t come between her and Anh.

“It really speaks to their friendship and how they view one another that Olive goes to her to her best friend. Of course she goes to her best friend. She’s assaulted and looking for comfort and to finally admit the truth – something that’s been weighing on her – that she does feel guilty about for lying to her friend, even though it is for her friend’s benefit,” Lili Reinhart told Deadline.

Tom weasles his way between Adam and Olive professionally as well when he offers Olive a spot on his lab bench for her pancreatic cancer research the following year, but he injects the offer with the threat that she would need to sleep with him to earn the spot, trapping her in a hotel room under the guise of bringing her a coffee. In the hotel lobby, he corners Dr. Carlsen as and hints that Adam might hold Olive back all the way in California when she leaves to continue her research in Boston.

“Of course, she’s going to go to her safe space when something like that happens, and she doesn’t have family. Her family is Anh,” Reinhart continued. “So she goes to Anh and finally reveals the truth and tells her what happens with Tom Benton in in the hotel room. It’s a climactic moment between the two, and for the plot, obviously, but also just for Olive having kept all of this inside. I think it finally just has to come out, and it’s cathartic to see her have that release with her best friend.”

Costar Bateman wouldn’t use the word “excited” for the scene in which he embodies a Darth Vader march to go confront Tom about the issue and put the perpetrator in his place.

“When an abuse of power takes place, there’s no such thing as a winner. But in terms of addressing something that’s taken place like that, it felt, I guess, good to be able to do it because these things operate in the shadows. When people behave like this and abuse their power like that, the only way it can continue is if it is allowed to continue, if it’s concealed and hidden from people,” Bateman told Deadline. “So to do what Adam does, which is to kick the door down literally and expose that, it’s incredibly brave. It could risk a lot of things, but it’s the only way that behavior like that is stopped. So I guess it felt good in the moment for the character to be able to do that, but honestly, that sort of section of the film is such a delicate one that. There was no great moment for it.”

The confrontation, captured on social media, makes way for the final step in the equation of a romantic comedy or drama that contains a third act breakup or dissolving of a fake relationship – the admission of feelings between the couple in question. After Olive catches the video, she runs to the building where Adam has just interrupted Tom’s lecture, ready to have a conversation about where they stand.

“It’s a huge scene. It’s where they admit they love each other. That scene was challenging for many different reasons. It was so important for us to make that scene right. So many things had to land to make that scene a success. There was a lot of discussion about the things that they say to each other because it is going off the cuff from the book,” Reinhart said. “The language that they use has to be within their world. They are using science still when they’re talking about love because they’re hiding behind it. It’s funny, they’re trying to be honest with each other, they’re still hiding behind these words that are so flowery and sciencey, and these phrases that they’re throwing out there because they’re being vulnerable with each other, and that’s scary.”

RELATED: 11 Major Differences In ‘The Love Hypothesis’ Movie Vs. Ali Hazelwood’s Novel

In true scientist fashion, Olive first proposes that she received ‘false positive’ results, or made a Type 1 Error, from their fake dating “experiment,” meaning she fell for Adam and assumed he reciprocated her feelings. He then introduces the concept of a false negative or Type Two error, meaning he projected that he didn’t love Olive when he did. They then draw the conclusion that he ultimately “contaminated the experiment,” by pretending there was no affect when there was (his feelings for her), so she proposed they start over with their project.

“I think we got it there. We landed the plane, and I think it’s a beautiful scene. But even just playing with the ‘I love yous.’ That scene was being massaged up until the day we shot it, and even on the day, we were still playing with different versions of it,” Reinhart said. “It was a very talked about and highly discussed scene because we wanted it to be perfect.”

Bateman also pointed out that the classic get together for real moment stood out with specific aspects that make it unique in the broader canon of romantic comedy and drama films.

“Because we have the benefit where we are now in 2026, we have so many romantic comedies that are part of our consciousness. We all know the momentum, where they’re going. It’s hard not to fall into cliché. So that was very important for us to make it feel very real to [Adam and Olive],” he said. “I think the science helped that because it was unique to this story, so it made it feel fresh. I still remember shooting that scene, and it surprised me that it was there.”

“I can still remember [Lili] calling ‘Adam,’ and I turn, and the scene, it surprised me that it was there, which was great. I think it sort of felt very authentic in that way, and I love playing it. It was really fun, and even reading it, I sort of go, ‘Whoa!’” Bateman continued. “In the romantic comedies, that sort of chasing them down at the airport moment, there’s a build up to it. Whereas this, it happened because it’s all to do with the Tom Benton stuff, and then she sees the phone [recording] of it. It happens so quickly; it almost sneaks in the back door, and suddenly you go, ‘Oh my God, I’m at that moment in the movie, and I didn’t really see it coming.’”

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