Filmmakers Behind Four Oscar Contenders Take the Stage in Hot Springs
Filmmakers behind four Oscar-contending documentaries gathered on stage at the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival in Arkansas earlier this month, and the talk was recorded live for a podcast. The session was the festival's first roundtable of Oscar contenders, held with Deadline, and the audience filled the Arlington Hotel in Hot Springs for the recording.
The festival ran from October 9 to 17, 2026, in the historic spa town. The panel covered American Doctor, directed by Poh Si Teng; To Hold a Mountain, co-directed by Biljana Tutorov; Closure, directed by Michał Marczak; and Once Upon a Time in Harlem. The episode belongs to Deadline's Doc Talk podcast, hosted by Oscar winner John Ridley and Matt Carey, Deadline's senior documentary editor, and produced with Ridley's Nō Studios.
Tutorov spoke about To Hold a Mountain, a Sundance Grand Jury Award winner filmed in Montenegro. She said that she, co-director Petar Glomazić and protagonist Gara Jovanović became "enemies of the state" while making the film. The remark came from the roundtable as reported by Deadline.
Marczak won the Golden Alexander at the Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival in Greece for Closure. He told the panel that making the film helped him work through grief he had put off after his father died when Marczak was 11 years old.
Poh Si Teng described a protagonist who "ghosted" her at a crucial point in production. Documentaries depend on people who agree to be filmed, so a subject going silent can stall a shoot for weeks or longer. She did not say how long the gap lasted.
Once Upon a Time in Harlem has a family at its centre. Producer Liani Greaves made it with her father, David Greaves, using footage shot in 1972 by William Greaves, David's father and Liani's grandfather. Deadline describes it as the only documentary of 2026 to screen at Sundance, Cannes, Telluride, TIFF and the New York Film Festival.
The festival's week also brought awards news. Deadline reported on October 19 that Once Upon a Time in Harlem and a film titled NAZA earned awards at the 35th edition. The same report said the festival gave its Brent Renaud Career Achievement Award to filmmaker Joe Berlinger. Earlier in the month, DOC NYC named To Hold a Mountain and Once Upon a Time in Harlem to its short lists of the year's best documentaries, as Deadline reported on October 14.
For readers who want to hear the conversation, the Doc Talk episode is on podcast platforms. Documentary awards season runs through the winter, and festival stops such as this one are where many of these films gather attention before the nominations are announced. Nothing on the panel settled which films will be nominated, and the roundtable did not try to.
