Top 5 Shane Boris documentaries to watch before AIDC 2025
Some of our favourite films produced by AIDC 2025 guest Speaker and Advisory Committee member Shane Boris
By Jessa Shields
We’re thrilled to welcome producer Shane Boris to AIDC as an Advisory Committee member and as one of our first announced guest speakers for the 2025 conference.
An accomplished producer and creative visionary, Boris was the first producer since Walt Disney to be nominated in the Academy Awards for two films produced in the same year when he was up for both Navalny and Fire of Love in 2022 (Navalny took home the prize).
He was also previously nominated for an Academy Award for The Edge of Democracy in 2020, and has earned a slew of other awards and accolades including a BAFTA and a Peabody award. Boris is up for a Cinema Eye Honors Award in 2025 for production on Hollywoodgate.
Here are five incredible films from Boris’s career that you need to add to your watchlist before AIDC 2025.
1. Navalny
Dir. Daniel Roher | 2022
This Academy Award-winning documentary is an absolutely jaw-dropping political thriller centred on Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny and the investigation into his poisoning, which occurred in 2020. Absorbing and tense, the film follows Navalny and his inner circle shortly after he emerges from a coma in hospital, up until his arrest at border patrol as he tries to reenter Russia from Germany. Since Navalny’s tragic death in prison earlier this year, the film has now become a moving tribute to the courage, humour and perseverance of a man who refused to back down to unspeakable corruption.
Available on DocPlay
2. Fire of Love
Dir. Sara Dosa | 2022
Also nominated for an Academy Award in 2023 alongside Navalny, Fire of Love is a love story forged in the molten heart of a volcano. It draws from hundreds of hours of 16mm archive footage taken by two intrepid French volcanologists (and married couple) named Katia and Maurice Krafft, who were passionate about filming volcano eruptions up close. With poetic narration by Miranda July and a dreamy score by Air’s Nicolas Godin, Fire of Love is a dazzling spectacle of nature’s power, and a moving exploration of what it means to love and live a meaningful life.
Available on Disney+
3. Stray
Dir. Elizabeth Lo | 2020
Following three of Istanbul’s over 100,000 stray dogs – Zeytin, Nazar and Kartal – Stray positions its camera at the dogs’ eye-level, immersing the viewer in the movements of the pack. Alongside the dogs, the film explores the city, stopping every now and then to catch snippets of human conversations across politics and class. The canine gaze also provides a window into the lives of a group of Syrian refugees living on the streets of Istanbul, offering a layered commentary on humanity and our capacity for compassion towards other species as well as our own.
Available on DocPlay
4. The Seer & the Unseen
Dir. Sara Dosa | 2019
Another collaboration between Boris and Fire of Love director Sara Dosa, The Seer & the Unseen follows Ragga, an Icelandic grandmother, environmental activist and celebrated “seer”. Ragga has the ability to communicate with a parallel realm of elves – the spirit-like caretakers of nature that over half of Iceland’s population believes in. Advocating on behalf of the elves, Ragga and her fellow activists protest the construction of a needless road that would destroy the elves’ homes. This magic realist fable explores the invisible forces – be they elves or capitalism – that shape our visible worlds and natural landscapes.
Available on YouTube
5. The Edge of Democracy
Dir. Petra Costa | 2019
Inserting the personal into the political, The Edge of Democracy documents the rise and fall of a leftist government in Brazil under the presidencies of Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff. In an act of radical sincerity, director Petra Costa tells her family’s own story, using it as a mirror of Brazil’s political polarisation nationally. The Edge of Democracy won a Peabody award and was nominated for an Academy Award in 2020. An urgent and powerful warning about the fragility of democracy and the increasing polarisation felt all over the world, its message is just as pertinent now as when it was released five years ago.
Available on Netflix
Shane Boris will join our other first-announced speaking guests Shiori Ito, Gabriel Shipton and Elizabeth Klinck as Spotlight Session speakers at AIDC 2025.
The full program and speaker line-up for AIDC 2025 will be announced 30 January 2025.
AIDC 2025: FUTURE TELLING will take place 2-5 March 2025 at ACMI in Melbourne / Naarm.
You can view our pass options and register HERE.
Main Image: Navalny, courtesy Madman Entertainment