Director Lance Oppenheim's debut feature, Primetime, examines the hidden camera show To Catch a Predator, which ran from 2004 to 2007 on NBC. The film is loosely based on events leading up to the 2007 suicide of Louis William Bill Conradt, after a sting in Murphy, Texas. Robert Pattinson plays host Chris Hansen. Oppenheim says the show mixed truth and fiction in unusual ways. Conradt's sister later filed a wrongful death lawsuit, which was settled in 2008. Scanlan, a cybersecurity expert, says the show raised awareness but was motivated by entertainment.
Screenwest has renamed its First Nations fund the First Nations Practitioner Equity Fund. The fund supports professional skills development and travel costs for Western Australian First Nations screen practitioners who are ineligible for other Screenwest programs. National travel contributions have risen from $1,500 to $2,000, and regional applicants can receive up to $500 towards non-direct flight costs. Documentary project funding now reaches $25,000, and scripted projects can receive up to $35,000. Because the fund had minimal uptake in recent years, its money is being redirected to a new First Nations Special Initiatives Fund.
A new documentary called In Contrast has premiered in Sydney and Adelaide, highlighting the gap in kidney transplant rates for First Nations people. Federal government data shows Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander adults are twice as likely as non-Indigenous adults to have chronic kidney disease, yet 16 per cent of First Nations people receiving kidney replacement therapy had a functioning transplant in 2022, compared with 48 per cent of non-Indigenous Australians. Adelaide public health researcher Kelli Karrikarringka Owen, who has Alport syndrome, said her family's offers to donate organs were refused a decade ago.
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New York's Metropolitan Opera is marking 20 years of its Live in HD productions with a season screening in Australian cinemas from later this month. The first production, Mozart's Cosi Fan Tutte, opens on October 31. Verdi's Macbeth follows from November 14. A documentary hosted by soprano Renee Fleming, featuring highlights from more than 185 onscreen performances, is now showing in cinemas. The 2026-27 season runs through to July.
WIRED's podcast Uncanny Valley goes behind the scenes of an interview with Nathan Fielder about his documentary You Can See Everything, which follows him inside Elizabeth Holmes's home before her prison term. Global editorial director Katie Drummond describes signing a nondisclosure agreement before learning the film's subject and says Fielder, who dislikes being interviewed, turned some questions back on her. The hosts also discuss pledges by Anthropic to commit 5 percent of its shares to a public benefit fund and by Elon Musk to give a SpaceX share to every American child, noting that neither announcement offered concrete detail.
The 2026 Environmental Film Festival will screen green films from around the world from Sunday, October 25 to Sunday, November 8. Organisers say the program covers community protests, grief and conservation, and animated stories about the natural world. Screenings include Valve Turners?, about five activists who try to halt oil flows across four US states, followed by a panel talk. Several short Australian films are also included. The volunteer-run festival also holds a Melbourne Cup Day litter cleanup in Footscray and a closing celebration.
A free online screening of Shaun Micallef's ABC documentary Going For Broke is set for Wednesday 4 November, from 7pm to 8:30pm. The event marks Gambling Harm Awareness Week, held from 24 to 31 October. It explores the effects of gambling harm on individuals, families and communities. A panel discussion with prevention experts, lived experience advocates and researchers will follow, with a question and answer session. The event is delivered with Maroondah, Manningham and Kingston councils.
Hugging Face chief executive Clem Delangue says the Netflix documentary AI Gone Rogue is inaccurate. He appears in the film, which covers an attack on his company by AI agents that came from an OpenAI test model. Delangue said the film was too focused on making AI seem human and frightening. He said it left out the lack of security safeguards, how closed AI models blocked his team's defensive work, and how the company defended itself using an open model. He described the film as a fun sci-fi movie rather than good journalism.
A new documentary, Blank Slate City, follows Canberra's do-it-yourself music scene and the unusual outdoor places where bands perform. Directed by Georgia Arndell and Daan Steffens, the film covers DIY Summer, a run of six shows across 2023 and 2024 staged at landmarks including Black Mountain Tower and the Whitlam Echo Chamber. The film also traces the city's earlier DIY music history and raises questions about where young musicians will play as the city grows.
A new six-episode documentary podcast about Port Kembla, NSW's third largest port, is being launched at The Servo on Sunday, November 1. Radio journalist Jennifer Macey created the series as part of her PhD geography research at the University of Wollongong. Episodes cover water, coal, steel, grain and cars, moving from Indigenous Dreaming stories to the present day. Macey recorded on location, including interviews with migrants and workers. The podcast will be free to listen to on Spotify and other platforms.
Nathan Fielder's film You Can See Everything premiered in early September as a surprise addition to the Telluride Film Festival. Co-directed with Lance Oppenheim, it follows Fielder's time with Elizabeth Holmes and her partner Billy Evans before Holmes went to prison. In an interview with WIRED, Fielder said the project was kept secret to protect the subjects and to avoid shaping the story early. He said he never fully knew what the couple wanted to tell, and that he wanted audiences to draw their own conclusions.
Billy Evans, husband of former Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, runs Haemanthus, a company that has released no products. Its stated goal is to bring blood, urine and saliva testing to homes using a countertop machine. Unlike Theranos, the company's approach reportedly uses light, through a Raman spectroscopy system that received a patent in January 2025. Evans has said the company is in stealth mode. Reported funding ranges from $3.5 million to as much as $20 million.
Readers are invited to vote for their favourite Australian Story episode marking the programme's 30th anniversary. Since 1996, the ABC documentary series has given 1,133 people, both public figures and ordinary Australians, the chance to tell their own stories. A shortlist of episodes is available to vote on through a form on the page, with voting closing on 2 November. The top 30 winners will be revealed on 19 November on the Australian Story Facebook page.
Melbourne's Environmental Film Festival runs from Sunday 25 October to Sunday 8 November, screening more than 20 films from around the world. Presented by Environmental Films Australia, the program includes documentaries, shorts, talks and events across Melbourne, including in Footscray. Its 2026 theme, Who Cares?, includes a community litterpick on Melbourne Cup day, 3 November. The festival closes with a get-together on Saturday 7 November, and a special Enviro Film Club session follows on 8 November. Full listings and bookings are available online.
A decade of night-time fieldwork and efforts to restore threatened species has been turned into a short documentary now shown internationally. Australian Wildlife Conservancy photographer and videographer Brad Leue filmed native animals at Mt Gibson Wildlife Sanctuary, roughly 360 kilometres north-east of Perth, and assembled footage from ten years into a 21-minute film called Back to the Bush. The work follows a predator-free fence project that has aimed to return ten species from the brink of extinction. Leue described the challenges of filming small nocturnal animals with camera traps and stake-outs.
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Comedian Shaun Micallef will attend a free community screening of his documentary Going for Broke at the Sun Theatre in Yarraville on Thursday 29 October. The evening includes selected clips, a panel discussion and a question and answer session. Hosted by Maribyrnong and Hobsons Bay councils and IPC Health, the event runs from 6pm to 8pm and explores gambling harm through lived experience, research and community voices. A qualified counsellor will be on site, and bookings are essential.
Investigative journalist Mariana van Zeller's documentary Super Scam Me explores how romance scams blur the line between love and fraud. The programme premieres on National Geographic and streams on Disney+ and Hulu. To expose a fake Jon Bon Jovi account, van Zeller worked with an ethical hacker who used a fake bitcoin receipt. She also posed as a target, hooking a scammer who claimed to be a military general, and tracked him down using flyers. The Federal Trade Commission says romance scams cost Americans nearly $1.5 billion each year.
The documentary Tell Me will screen in Melbourne on Monday, 19 October, as part of the 31st Greek Film Festival. Directed by Nikos Megrelis and written with Renée Revah, the film follows Revah, a photographer, as she traces a Greek Jewish family's history from Thessaloniki to Auschwitz and Birkenau. Her relatives were deported during World War II and never returned. The film centres on an imagined conversation with her grandfather, the only survivor of his family. Former German minister Claudia Roth said the film links remembrance with the defence of democratic values and human dignity.
Mary Zournazi's documentary Acropolis Cats & Other Wondrous Animals returns to Melbourne this weekend as part of the 31st Greek Film Festival. The film won Best Australian Documentary Film at the Melbourne Documentary Film Festival. It follows people in Greece who care for abandoned cats, often despite their own hardship. The film screens at Palace Cinemas Balwyn on Saturday 17 October at 2.15pm, before travelling to Sydney, Newcastle and Brisbane. Zournazi will attend screenings for audience Q&A sessions.
A documentary profiling broadcaster Amy Goodman, founder of Democracy Now!, is screening at the Adelaide Film Festival. It will be released in Australian cinemas nationally from October 22. Directed by Tia Lessin and Carl Deal, the film follows Goodman's reporting over three decades. Goodman says the media industry is increasingly dominated by corporate interests, and that independent reporting matters more than ever. The directors say they finance and produce their own films to avoid corporate editorial influence.
