Underground (1974)

The growth in popularity of non-fiction film in the past several decades has included some important political documents and examples of advocacy journalism such as Fog of War, The Inconvenient Truth, Fahrenheit 451, and Taxi to the Dark Side. This year Laura Poitras won an Oscar for her Citizen Four, which profiles Edward Snowden. When accepting her Oscar, Poitras stated that “when the most important decisions being made, affecting all of us, are made in secret, we lose our ability to check the powers that control.” These movies serve to check that power.

Peter Davis received an Oscar in 1974 for Hearts and Minds, his powerful film about the controversies surrounding the Vietnam War. Two years later Barbara Koppel won an Oscar for Harlan County, USA, which exposed the exploitation of coal miners by their unions. That same year