A24's non-fiction slate

A24 has been building a documentary slate over the last five years that is arguably the most interesting non-fiction programme in American cinema, and the industry has been slow to notice. The company's documentaries — including recent titles on subjects ranging from music biography to sports culture to visual art — share a set of production values and editorial ambitions that mark them out from the streamer documentary boom that has dominated the last decade.

The most consistent feature of the slate is authorial voice. A24's documentaries are almost always director-driven in a way that most streamer documentary commissioning is not. Where Netflix and Amazon's non-fiction slates lean heavily on subject-driven docuseries — the interesting person or the interesting story is the pitch, and the director is essentially a hired hand — A24's slate leans on directorial reputation. The film is being commissioned because a specific director is going to make it, and the subject is chosen partly to serve the director's practice.

The second consistent feature is theatrical intent. A24 releases most of its documentaries theatrically first, with a real marketing spend and a genuine cinema-first strategy. That is unusual in an era when most documentaries go straight to streaming or receive a token theatrical window for awards eligibility. The theatrical-first strategy costs money, and it produces documentaries that are composed for cinema rather than for on-demand consumption. The difference is visible on the screen.

The third feature is form. A24 documentaries are more likely than the industry average to be formally inventive — hybrid documentaries, essay films, non-standard structures — and less likely to default to the interview-and-archive template that dominates the streamer documentary slate. That formal ambition is not always successful, and some of the individual films are more interesting as attempts than as achievements. But the ambition is consistent, and the industry benefits from having at least one significant American distributor that treats documentary form as a live artistic question.

The critique of the A24 documentary slate is a fair one about scale. The company releases a smaller number of documentaries than any of the streamers, and its cultural footprint in non-fiction is smaller than its footprint in feature drama. Both observations are true. But the slate is the most consistently interesting documentary commissioning in American film currently, and it is a proof point that theatrical-first non-fiction is still viable if the commissioning is disciplined. That proof point deserves more industry attention than it has received.