Oscar winner All the Empty Rooms, Closure, Free Leonard Peltier, Welcome to Chechnya, Queendom, The Dating Game, Sara Bareilles: Good Grief – James Costa has played an important role bringing those films and many more to the screen as a producer or executive producer.
Each year, he also takes on an important mission for Deadline: selecting the films that screen as part of our fall For the Love of Docs virtual series, which allows awards-worthy films to screen free to the public and guild members, and free to the filmmakers. It’s our gesture of support for the documentary community, presented in partnership with National Geographic Documentary Films.
On the latest episode of Deadline’s Doc Talk podcast, Costa joins us to discuss how he chooses the For the Love of Docs lineup – a slate this year that includes Seized, directed by Sharon Liese; Everybody to Kenmure Street, from director Felipe Bustos Sierra; Ask E. Jean, directed by Ivy Meeropol; J.J. Gerber’s The Life We Leave; and To Hold a Mountain, directed by Biljana Tutorov and Peter Glomazić (winner of the Grand Jury Prize for World Cinema Documentary at Sundance).
We also talk Oscar season with Costa. It’s an unusual year with few obvious frontrunners at this stage, and with many “late-breaking” documentaries (meaning films that premiered late in the year, at Venice, Telluride and Toronto) emerging as strong contenders. This stands in contrast to 2025 when all the eventual Best Documentary Feature nominees premiered at Sundance at the start of the year.
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One of the late-in-the-year films that has immediately risen to the top of Oscar conversations is NAZA, directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor (two of the four directors of Academy Award winner No Other Land). NAZA, featuring whistleblowers critical of Israel’s mass killing of civilians in its war in Gaza, has been denounced by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – he’s pushing legislation that could potentially strip Abraham and Szor of their Israeli citizenship. The threats against the filmmakers have drawn a rebuke from the International Documentary Association, for which Costa used to serve as co-president of the board. We get Costa’s thoughts on the campaign against the directors and on the IDA’s defense of the Abraham and Szor.
That’s on the new episode of Doc Talk hosted by Oscar winner John Ridley (12 Years a Slave, Shirley) and Matt Carey, Deadline’s senior documentary editor. The pod is a production of Deadline and Ridley’s Nō Studios.
Listen to the episode above or on major podcast platforms including Spotify, iHeart and Apple.
