10 great documentaries about modern news media

The hard-bitten, Hemingway-esque reporter that dabbles in war reporting as if it were a foreign adventure is long out of fashion as an archetype. Sensibilities have changed, it’s said; so have models of news gathering and dissemination. Citizens intent on a different reality for their suffering cities can take up digital means to record injustices and share them widely, as Palestinian photojournalist Fatima Hassouna did for her besieged Gaza in Sepideh Farsi’s powerful new video-call assemblage Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk – a project that has already, tragically, outlasted Hassouna’s life. Journalism might have democratised, but authoritarian power is surging, and independent voices are as imperilled as ever. Surveillance and strong-arm populism are back with a vengeance.

Women who defend free expression – but who are criminalised under repressive state oversight and a social media weaponised for propaganda – figure prominently in recent documentaries on today’s media landscape, from MeToo activist Sophia Xueqin Huang in Total Trust (2023) to anti-disinformation warrior Maria Ressa in A Thousand Cuts (2020) and the censorship-defying team at Russian independent channel TV Rain in My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air In Moscow (2024). 

There are also, next to frontline cameramen in today’s great war documentaries like 2,000 Meters to Andriivka (2025), those fighting from chairs not trenches with a different skillset, such as Eliot Higgins in Bellingcat: Truth in a Post-Truth World (2018).

As Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk arrives in cinemas, here are 10 films that reflect on the battle for control over news narratives today, and who is at its heart.

Director: Laura Poitras

In 2014, American documentarian Laura Poitras received an encrypted email from a stranger, who signed off as ‘Citizen Four’ and offered her inside information about the illegal wiretapping practices of US government intelligence. She travelled, accompanied by journalists Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill, to meet the whistleblower, revealed to be former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, in a Hong Kong hotel room. 

The encounter, filmed across days of interviews, as a furious media and political storm over the spying scandal brewed outside, is the basis of Citizenfour. The acclaimed and hugely consequential doc plays out with all the seat-edge tension of a suspense thriller, and also takes in Snowden’s attempts to evade extradition, with Poitras and Greenwald meeting him again in Moscow. It offers an eye-opening, real-time view on the risks and complexities of sharing truths in a digital era in which everyday technology makes surveillance easier than ever.

Director: Robert Greene

News anchor Christine Chubbuck shot herself on live American television in 1974, prefacing this horror with a sardonic comment on the channel’s lurid coverage of grisly events – a shocking act that foreshadowed an online era of live-streamed violence. 

Director Robert Greene turns to multi-layered docufiction to reframe assumptions about the much-mythologised tragedy (rumoured rightly or wrongly to have inspired Sidney Lumet’s 1976 classic Network) and the 29-year-old woman at its heart. He follows New York actress Kate Lyn Sheil as she researches Chubbuck’s life for the assignment of portraying her on film. Kate talks with Sarasota locals who knew the broadcaster, as she struggles to get a sense of her as a person. This is an ethically thorny and complex, endless prism of a film, prompting reflection on performance, institutionalised misogyny, authenticity, irresolvable mystery and the manipulation of reality, which crucially holds our collective voyeurism up to critical scrutiny.

Director: Matthew Heineman

Syrian journalist and activist group Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently was launched in 2014 to get online posts, videos and images out to the wider world of the atrocities committed by president Bashar al-Assad and by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Their output served to counter the misinformation that started being pumped out of Raqqa once ISIS had taken control of the city, banning home internet. 

The logistically challenging, high-risk work of the undercover collective, whose members both in and outside Raqqa have been actively hunted down and sometimes killed, is the focus of Matthew Heineman’s nail-biting City of Ghosts. The film is a conduit of sorts, amplifying the voices and reach of brave and resolute resistance fighters, while managing remarkably personal insight into their daily lives and showing how networks of citizens can work together to innovate and inform when traditional media is harshly suppressed. 

Director: Hans Pool

Smartphones and social media ushered in the rise of armchair news reporting. Leicester-based computer enthusiast Eliot Higgins showed just how salient and credible it can be, when in 2014 he founded Bellingcat from home. The open-source journalism website, named after the fable about mice who debate which of them will place a bell around a marauding cat’s neck to warn others, publishes findings from citizens analysing the staggering digital trail of data accessible to the public. 

The downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in Ukraine, the identity of white supremacists attacking protesters in Charlottesville, and Russian involvement in the Salisbury poisoning of the Skripals, are among high-profile Bellingcat investigations outlined in Hans Pool’s Bellingcat: Truth in a Post-Truth World. The riveting and instructive doc lays out the vulnerabilities as well as strengths of this method in a time of underfunded traditional on-the-ground journalism and a deluge of online disinformation. 

Director: Alexander Nanau

In 2015, a fire sparked by pyrotechnics ripped through the Colectiv nightclub in Bucharest during a metal concert, killing 26 on site and hospitalising scores more. The catastrophe didn’t stop there, many of the injured subsequently died from bacterial infections. It was discovered, to great public outrage, that disinfectants had been diluted to the point of uselessness and funds siphoned off in a nationwide healthcare fraud and government cover-up in which a staggering number of people were complicit. 

Director Alexander Nanau, who started shooting early in the scandal, follows journalists at newspaper Gazeta Sporturilor as they uncover the mind-boggling corruption and callous venality that enabled the tragedy. This jaw-dropping, Oscar-shortlisted doc paints a damning and resonant picture of the consequences of a societal breakdown in collective empathy and solidarity, and sounds an urgent alarm over just how essential an independent, critical press is for holding power to account for its crimes.

Director: Ramona S. Diaz

Maria Ressa, journalist and critic of then-president Rodrigo Duterte, declared democracy in the Philippines was dying by a thousand cuts, and vowed that Rappler, the news website she founded, would hold the line against its erosion. Ressa and her team reported early on the weaponisation of Facebook for propaganda, as Duterte, the unabashedly violent and populist ‘social media president’, enlisted a keyboard army to silence dissent over his ‘war on drugs’ and the explosion of extra-judicial killings of the poor. 

As pressure on Ressa escalates from a deluge of hate messages to a conviction for cyber-libel, we watch as pro-Duterte entertainer and blogger Mocha Uson is officially enlisted into the regime’s communications arm. Filipinos are among the most online of the globe’s citizens, and this insightful and urgent documentary by Ramona S. Diaz charts changes to their information landscape that are now finding echoes around the world as authoritarianism surges.   

Director: Jialing Zhang

During the Covid-19 pandemic, China’s authorities claimed dubiously that 98 per cent of its people trusted the government. Documentary Total Trust reveals a China that is dystopian in the ever-watching ways that Orwell envisaged, using expanded surveillance to control citizens who are so accustomed to having their privacy violated that they tend to self-censor every move. It suggests this fear of shame and punishment is grounded in reality. The Sharp Eyes programme metes out merit and demerit points for behaviour, and encourages scrutiny between neighbours. 

Some voices of resistance go against the grain. We follow three, including journalist Sophia Xueqin Huang. Her coverage of the #MeToo movement got her into hot water, and she was eventually charged with subverting state power. Jialing Zhang, who is on police record and is reluctant to return after making Sundance-winner One Child Nation (2019), directed the film remotely, collaborating with anonymous activists on the ground.

Director: Julia Loktev

In 2021, Russian-American filmmaker Julia Loktev travelled to Moscow to make a documentary about her friend Anna Nemzer and other independent journalists who were under pressure from Putin’s regime and a law that labelled them ‘foreign agents’ on a fast-growing blacklist. She did not foresee that Russia would launch its full-scale invasion of Ukraine just months in, and an escalating crackdown on critical media would push nearly all of the featured women at outlets like TV Rain (declared an “undesirable organisation” by the government) to shut up shop and flee the country. 

This is a masterclass in documentary filmmaking, and its five-and-a-half hours (the first of two installments) fly by. It enfolds the viewer in the fear that seeps into every aspect of life for professionals dedicated to creating a different kind of Russia, and their cognitive dissonance as existence appears to go on comfortably for those who quietly acquiesce.   

Director: Mstyslav Chernov

The distance between familiar locations can warp under the surreal conditions of war. There are only a few thousand meters to the village that Ukraine’s 3rd Assault Brigade are determined to retake, but the fighters can only inch their way across the ravaged ground and enemy trenches, as artillery fire and drones threaten. Battle footage from helmet cameras brings us close, in a queasily immersive experience. 

Multi-format journalist Mstyslav Chernov, whose documentary 20 Days in Mariupol (2023) on the same war won an Academy Award, and his colleague Alex Babenko embed with the unit for this 2023 last-ditch counteroffensive. This nerve-shredding film reckons with the Russian invasion’s toll, and a level of destruction that means there may be no brick left to raise the blue and yellow flag over. This is not a glorification of adrenaline, but a haunting reflection on reluctant necessity and resilience, via the immediacy of modern technology. 

Director: Sepideh Farsi

Woven together from a year of video calls between the director, Iranian exile Sepideh Farsi, and Fatima Hassouna, a young Palestinian photojournalist in besieged Gaza, Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk is an intimate, devastating window on to life and death during Israel’s ongoing invasion. In spite of constant bombardment and rising hunger, Fatima is determined to record the surrounding destruction. The connection is unreliable and calls between the two women frequently cut out, adding to the limitations of broken English. These barriers to communication are entirely the point, as we feel the distance of a population cut off from the world and restricted from sharing its truths. 

Shining through is the magnetic presence of Hassouna – her defiant optimism making the news hit even harder, when we learn that she was killed along with nine members of her family the day after the film was selected for Cannes.

Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk is in cinemas from 22 August 2025.