Won in 2007. With this extraordinary film director Alex Gibney makes a convincing and well researched case against the acts of torture, abuse and humiliation committed by the U.S. military against political prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay.

2005 Winner. About the life and death of the Emperor Penguin in Antartica.

2003 Winner. Probes the reasons behind the U.S. commitment to the Vietnam War--and finds a depressingly inconsistent policy.

Winner 2001. Documents a murder trial in which a 15-year-old African-American is wrongfully accused of a 2000 murder in Jacksonville, Florida.

1999 Winner. The 1972 Olympics were interrupted by Palestinian terrorists taking Israeli athletes hostage. Besides footage taken at the time, we see interviews with the surviving terrorist, Jamal Al Gashey, and various officials detailing how the police, lacking an anti-terrorist squad & turning down help from the Israelis, botched matters.

1997 Winner. Tells the story of the struggle European Jews faced in trying to reach Palestine, which they hoped would become the new Jewish homeland.

1995 Winner. Using previously unreleased archival material in addition to contemporary interviews, this academy award-winning documentary tells the story of the Frank family and presents the first fully-rounded portrait of their brash and free-spirited daughter Anne, perhaps the world's most famous victim of the Holocaust.

1993 Winner. portrait of the children of Stanton Elementary School in North Philadelphia, an inner-city neighborhood where 90% of the students live below the poverty line. As seen through the viewpoint of devoted principal Deanna Burney, the film shows Stanton as grossly underfunded, understaffed, and filled with children struggling to overcome their difficulties.

1991 winner. Hilarious and affectionate look at the path to stardom inside the competitive world of opera.

Winner 1989. Recounts the lives and deaths of various victims of AIDS who are commemorated in the AIDS quilt. It is a massive cloth collecting each piece as a memorial for each victim of the disease to both show the death toll and to show the humanity of the victims

Winner 1986. The newly homeless talk about the jobs they've lost, "Justice Ville" in Los Angeles (bulldozed by court order), and squatting in New York's abandoned buildings. A family living in a welfare hotel tells their story.

Winner 1984. Member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors Harvey Milk and San Francisco Mayor George Moscone were assassinated by Supervisor Dan White on November 22, 1978. Portrays Milk's life leading up to his election, his successful efforts to represent San Francisco's gay community, and the city's reaction to the assassinations.

"Just Another Missing Kid" won in 1982. That film does not exist on DVD or VHS. This is a really good movie based on the same story about a Canadian boy who disappears on his way to college and how the authorities refuse to help the desperate family. Only after a private detective solves the mystery do the authorities come clamoring for the credit of solving the case.

Winner 1980. Chronicles with affection and intelligence the great violinist's 1979 visit to China.

Winner 1978. This film shows the Scared Straight program that has hardened convicts from maximum security prisons tell their stories about the truth about prison life in order to convince kids that no crime is worth the risk of being incarcerated.

Winner 1976. The coal miners' strike against the Brookside Mine of Eastover Mining Company in Harlan County, Kentucky in 1973. Eastovers refusal to sign a contract (when the miners joined the United Mine Workers of America) led to the strike, which lasted more than a year and included violent battles between gun-toting company thugs/scabs and the picketing miners and their supportive women-folk.

Winner 1974. Using a wealth of sources-from interviews to newsreels to documentary footage of the conflict at home and abroad-Davis constructs a powerfully affecting portrait of the disastrous effects of the Vietnam war.

Marjoe won in 1972. MARJOE is the ferocious and extraordinary chronicle of a firebrand evangelical preacher who wholeheartedly and humorously exposes himself as a fraud.

Won in 1970. An intimate look at the Woodstock Music & Art Festival held in Bethel, NY in 1969, from preparation through cleanup, with historic access to insiders, blistering concert footage, and portraits of the concertgoers.