SXSW 2025 Documentary Preview: The Biggest Doc Premieres from Austin

A film festival without documentaries is like a day without sunshine. Thankfully, South by Southwest has always brought the goods when it comes to non-fiction filmmaking. The 2025 SXSW Film & TV Festival is filled with compelling documentary features receiving their World, North American, or U.S. premieres. From the pastoral and thought-provoking Arrest the Midwife […]

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A film festival without documentaries is like a day without sunshine. Thankfully, South by Southwest has always brought the goods when it comes to non-fiction filmmaking.

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The 2025 SXSW Film & TV Festival is filled with compelling documentary features receiving their World, North American, or U.S. premieres. From the pastoral and thought-provoking Arrest the Midwife to the chilling Age of Disclosure to a Marc Maron project that asks Are We Good? – here are the docs to watch this year in Austin.

Arrest the Midwife

What does it fully mean to have the freedom of choice when it comes to childbirth? That understanding is going to be examined in Arrest the Midwife, a new documentary from director/producer Elaine Epstein. The same filmmaker who gave the world the Sundance and Emmy-nominated doc State of Denial, Epstein’s Arrest the Midwife picks up where the media fallout left off after three homebirth midwives serving Amish and Mennonite communities were arrested in upstate New York. Their detainment ignited a media firestorm and a wave of legislation, as well as a debate about just what freedom of choice, and maternal health, really means.

The Python Hunt

You might not know this, but Florida can be a really WEIRD place. Case in point: this new doc about a group of amateur bounty hunters who compete in a 10-night, government-sanctioned contest to see who can remove (read: kill) the most Burmese pythons, invasive snakes that threaten the Everglades ecosystem. Filmmaker Xander Robin, the director behind the very weird 2016 horror fantasy Are We Not Cats, sheds light on this most Floridian of conservation efforts.

Remaining Native

Thanks to recent works such as Reservation Dogs and Sugarcane, pop culture is finally gaining awareness of Indian boarding schools, a particularly shameful chapter in American history. Emmy-nominated Haudenosaunee director Paige Bethmann, who recently made the list of DOC NYC’s 40 under 40 documentary filmmakers to watch, continues that conversation with Remaining Native.

Bethmann’s film focuses on 17-year-old Ku Stevens, whose running feats continue the work of his grandfather, who escaped from a boarding school decades earlier. As he works to make a collegiate running team and distinguish himself in his sport, Stevens refuses to let the country forget what happened to his family. Remaining Native chronicles everything from Stevens’ achievements to investigations of artifacts stolen from Native peoples.

The Spies Among Us

The Spies Among Us offers one of the more timely entries at SXSW. Directors Jamie Coughlin Silverman and Gabriel Silverman follow a former victim of the Stasi, East Germany’s secret police, as he confronts his one-time tormenters. The Spies Among Us cuts through rhetoric about dictatorship to remind viewers of the fundamental cost. Fearless but empathetic, The Spies Among Us should be essential viewing for anyone worried about the world today.

The Age of Disclosure

The Age of Disclosure offers an irresistible premise. Director Dan Farah speaks to 34 members of the American government, including high-ranking officials in the military and intelligence community, about the existence of aliens. The film purports to reveal an 80-year effort by U.S. leaders to hide findings about non-human intelligent life, even battling against other nations to protect their information.

While that concept alone makes The Age of Disclosure a can’t miss, and materials for the film play up the ‘90s paranoia of the concept with an aesthetic that recalls The X-Files, Farah has more than sensationalism in mind. The Age of Disclosure also promises to explore the impact of government secrets on the populations they’re supposed to represent.

Are We Good?

Marc Maron might be the most influential comedian of our generation, and yet most people can’t name one of his bits. That’s because Maron, whose stand-up and acting career goes back to 1987, rose to prominence with his podcast WTF?. Part comedy insider chat show, part therapy session, WTF? revealed Maron as a shockingly vulnerable and insightful interviewer, someone who unlocked the central appeal of standup comedy.

For Are We Good?, director Steven Feinartz traces Maron’s life and career. The film touches on everything from his childhood and early career to the public explosion of his very personal podcast to the loss of his partner, indie filmmaker and SXSW legend Lynn Shelton. Are We Good? promises to be classic Maron: raw, moving, and hilarious.

Dear Tomorrow

Since 2009, Danish filmmaker Kaspar Astrup Schröder has explored odd corners of the world, as in his parkour documentary My Playground (2009) or 2018’s Fantasy Fantasy, about two girls with autism. For Dear Tomorrow, Schröder returns to one of his favorite locations to tell the story of lonely Japanese men.

Dear Tomorrow focuses on a mental health hotline that helps men in crisis, showing not only the difficult circumstances under which these professionals work but also the incredible size of the loneliness epidemic. Bleak as that sounds, Schröder always finds a human, empathetic core for his stories. Dear Tomorrow continues in that vein, honoring their dignity and never allowing the men to become mere statistics on a government chart.

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