"When our memories fly through all the hundreds of moments, scenes, faces, struggles from all the scores of documentaries we’ve seen this year, the one that haunts us the most, the one we each first think of, is the scene in “For Sama” in which a small medical team in a rough hospital under attack in Aleppo, Syria, deliver an unresponsive baby into this harsh, mean world. What happens next on camera, and behind the lens through the poise of director Waad al-Kateab, shook us to our core."

"When our memories fly through all the hundreds of moments, scenes, faces, struggles from all the scores of documentaries we’ve seen this year, the one that haunts us the most, the one we each first think of, is the scene in “For Sama” in which a small medical team in a rough hospital under attack in Aleppo, Syria, deliver an unresponsive baby into this harsh, mean world. What happens next on camera, and behind the lens through the poise of director Waad al-Kateab, shook us to our core."

"That movie is spectacular in so many ways. It has everything a documentary should have: unexpected twists, characters that are flawed and complex and crazy. And the story is told in a way that it feels like a compelling — almost fictional — narrative but its obviously as real as it gets. But there are times when you’re watching it and you just go, “Oh my God, did this really happen? Is this real?” I love documentaries and there are a lot of great ones. I’m a big Werner Herzog fan as well, and Errol Morris."

"When I got into documentaries in the mid-eighties, I discovered how you could not just observe but also sculpt reality. This is when I fell in love with the Czech New Wave. So Forman, Passer, Nemec. My favorite film from that era is probably Loves of a Blonde, which looks at the world without an agenda, rhetoric, or plot mechanics, but with lots of empathy and irony. It shows that if you have a good sense of casting and know where to put the camera and when not to cut, the most ordinary things can be lifted into something poetic and timeless."

"A documentary that doesn’t feel like a documentary. It feels like a movie, a movie that I get lost in every time I see it. What’s amazing is if you had scripted it the way it happened people wouldn’t buy it and wouldn’t believe it. But the fact it happened that way in real life, it was mesmerizing and those two boys they were real and you rooted for them and you felt for them and you went through every emotion with them. It was so beautifully done and changed the game in terms of documentaries in making them more commercial and giving them a bigger platform than they had prior."