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Academy Award for Documentary Feature

The Academy Award for Documentary Feature is one of the most prestigious awards for documentary films.

Winners

Films are listed by the year they received the award; the year of production follows the title in parentheses. There is sometimes a gap of more than a year between a film's production and its award, which is often the result of the film's unavailability in translation.

For 1942 there was one Documentary category and four winners

• 1942
  • Battle of Midway
  • Kokoda Front Line
  • Moscow Strikes Back
  • Prelude To War

From 1943 there were two separate documentary categories

• 1943 Desert Victory
• 1944 The Fighting Lady
• 1945 The True Glory
• 1946 none given
• 1947 Design for Death
• 1948 The Secret Land
• 1949 Daybreak in Udi
• 1950 1951 Kon-Tiki
• 1952 The Sea Around Us
• 1953 The Living Desert
• 1954 The Vanishing Prairie
• 1955 Helen Keller in Her Story
• 1956 The Silent World
• 1957 Albert Schweitzer
• 1958 White Wilderness
• 1959 Serengeti Shall Not Die
• 1960 The Horse with the Flying Tail
• 1961 Sky Above and Mud Beneath
• 1962 1963 1964 Jacques-Yves Cousteau's World Without Sun
• 1965 The Eleanor Roosevelt Story
• 1966 The War Game
• 1967 The Anderson Platoon
• 1968 Young Americans was announced as the winner of the Documentary Feature Oscar. On May 7, 1969, the film was declared ineligible after it was revealed that the film had played in October of 1967, therefore ineligible for a 1968 Award. The first runner-up, Journey into Self was awarded the statuette on May 8, 1969.]
• 1969 Arthur Rubinstein - The Love of Life
• 1970 Woodstock
• 1971 The Hellstrom Chronicle
• 1972 Marjoe
• 1973 The Great American Cowboy
• 1974 Hearts and Minds
• 1975 The Man Who Skied Down Everest
• 1976 Harlan County, U.S.A.
• 1977 Who Are the Debolts? And Where Did They Get Nineteen Kids?
• 1978 Scared Straight!
• 1979 Best Boy
• 1980 1981 Genocide
• 1982 Just Another Missing Kid
• 1983 He Makes Me Feel Like Dancin'
• 1984 The Times of Harvey Milk
• 1985 Broken Rainbow
• 1986 (tie):
  • Down and Out in America
• 1987 1988 Hôtel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie
• 1989 1990 American Dream
• 1991 In the Shadow of the Stars
• 1992 The Panama Deception
• 1993 1994 1995 Anne Frank Remembered
• 1996 When We Were Kings
• 1997 The Long Way Home
• 1998 The Last Days
• 1999 One Day in September
• 2000 2001 Murder on a Saturday Morning
• 2002 Bowling for Columbine
  • Daughter From Danang
  • Le Peuple migrateur
  • Prisoner of Paradise
  • Spellbound
• 2003 The Fog of War
  • Balseros
  • Capturing the Friedmans
  • My Architect
  • The Weather Underground