Why Best Documentary Has Become an Oscar Haven for Female Directors

Female documentarians have a better chance at Academy recognition than women who make narrative films. Why? The women behind RBG and Free Solo have a few ideas.

By Laura Bradley

February 14, 2019

Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi right and Clair Popkin.

There’s one place in Hollywood where female directors have made strides toward reaching parity with men: the best-feature-documentary category at the Academy Awards.

It took 82 Oscar ceremonies for a woman to win the prize for best director—and so far, only one has managed that feat: The Hurt Locker’s Kathryn Bigelow. In a different Oscars category, however, female directors have fared slightly better. Since 2009, although only one film directed by a woman has won the Academy Award for best documentary feature (Citizenfour, directed by Laura Poitras), 11 of the films that have been nominated in the category were either directed or co-directed by women.

This year was no different: the documentary-feature nominees include two female-led projects. Betsy West and Julie Cohen’s RBG became a surprise box-office sensation over the summer as viewers flocked to learn more about the feisty Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg—both her foundational legal work and her workout routine. Months later, the married filmmaking duo Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin debuted Free Solo—an intimate but bracing portrait of free climber Alex Honnold that doubles as an interrogation of its own genre.

Why has this category made deeper strides than the awards’ narrative categories? Perhaps it’s because the barriers to entry are lower. While an Oscar-winning doc can be made on a shoestring, pulling off the same task for a narrative film is much harder—even as indie houses like A24 become more mainstream presences.

“I have made some documentaries with literally no one giving you any start-up money,” Cohen says. At the same time, West points out, “you don’t make as much money making documentaries. It’s something you do because you can’t help yourself.”

Getting more women behind the camera also means more documentaries about the sorts of topics that men might think are not compelling enough or capable of carrying a feature-length film. In Cohen’s mind, Ginsburg’s life is definitely one of those stories; the success of RBG could hopefully open the door for more.

Cohen and West’s project, from Magnolia Pictures and CNN Films, goes deep on Ginsburg’s history as a women’s-rights pioneer in the 1970s, her love story with the late Martin “Marty” Ginsburg, and, yes, her planking. The film includes interviews with Ginsburg, her childhood friends and family, and former colleagues, and offers a primer of her biggest cases as well as a cultural study of how she became an object of such ardent—and well-merchandised—Internet fascination.

It was a challenge to balance all these elements—but the reaction the two have seen from viewers is its own reward.

Clara Spera (at table, right) talks with her grandmother Ruth Bader Ginsburg during the production of RBG.

Courtesy of Storyville/CNN Films.

“We were telling a pretty important story about how constitutional law can enhance equality under the systems of our government,” Cohen says. “That’s a really important, meaningful story, but it’s not going to get throngs of people coming into a theater.”

“I would say the most common reaction of people coming out of it, in addition to ’She’s so inspiring,’ was ’I had no idea; I didn’t know the whole story,’ ” West adds. “We were happy that was the response.”

Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi has her own theory about why women might gravitate toward nonfiction films: “Documentaries require an enormous amount of grit and empathy—and that is something women are incredibly strong at,” she says.

Free Solo, from National Geographic Documentary Films, is certainly a work that called for more than a little grit. Vasarhelyi and her husband and co-director, Jimmy Chin, had already made a climbing documentary—2015’s Meru—but when Vasarhelyi discovered that the daredevil athlete Alex Honnold scales cliffs without a rope because he finds that less scary than asking someone to climb with him, her eyes welled with tears.

“Alex always had the potential of being quite a profound character portrait, [and] at the same time a story that could inspire courage in others,” Vasarhelyi says. It didn’t hurt that Chin, who also appears on-camera in the doc, has known Honnold for a decade. So the two made a second climbing movie, which documents both Honnold’s quest to scale Yosemite’s El Capitan without a rope, and the filmmakers’ own conflicted feelings about their role in his story. Are we to blame if he falls?, they wonder in one sobering scene. Is he doing this for our sake? Are we a distraction?

“This is a pretty fickle business. . . . Next year, it could be ’Women are over.’ ”

It’s a complicated bit of meta-filmmaking—and further proof that female documentarians need not tell stereotypically female stories to find success on the awards circuit. Despite the acclaim that films like Free Solo have garnered, though, the Oscars still haven’t reached total parity when it comes to documentary nominations, even in the past 10 years; many nominees for documentary filmmaking also boast multiple male directors and one female director. As Cohen says, given the sheer number of female documentary directors there are, it’s somewhat surprising that more women haven’t been awarded.

And that’s not even getting into the number of women who shy away from directing, working as producers instead. “I know a lot of those,” Vasarhelyi says. She spoke with one recently—a 30-year-old female producer who asked how she found the confidence to helm films herself. “I was struck and said, ’Wait, the way you produce, you’re essentially directing; what are you talking about?’ ”

For all the progress made, Vasarhelyi says, the word “director” still conjures a male archetype. Perhaps that’s why occasional bystanders outside the industry have mistaken her for a producer on the films she’s co-directed with her husband.

Which is another wrinkle in this story: although the Academy Awards have separate best-picture and best-director categories for narrative films, its documentary categories are simply divided by type: feature and short subject. Still, it’s encouraging to see female directors recognized for their work—though Cohen remains cautious in her optimism. “Who knows?” she says. “This year, it seems like ’Oh, women documentary filmmakers—they’re in.’ [But] this is a pretty fickle business. . . . Next year, it could be ’Women are over.’ ”

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story misstated the number of female directors and co-directors whose films have been nominated for and won the Academy Award for best documentary feature since 2009. In that span of time, there have been 11 nominated films with female directors; one has won.