Nature plays a key role in documentaries this season, but so do Putin powerplays

Although many of the documentaries up for Academy Awards consideration this year were made in the thick of the pandemic, the challenges did little to inhibit a particularly robust array of nonfiction submissions. ‘Fire of Love’ Passion erupts, all too literally, in “Fire of Love.” The documentary about celebrated French volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft recounts the love affair of an intrepid couple who for 25 years together risked their lives capturing the rapturous beauty and terror of live volcanoes in every remote corner of the world. Also, they were hilarious.” Salik Rehman is one of three men who care for injured birds in the documentary “All That Breathes” ‘All That Breathes’ In the dangerously smog-choked Indian metropolis of New Delhi, brothers Nadeem Shehzad and Mohammad Saud, and their cohort Salik Rehman, take on the nearly superhuman task of rescuing black kites: scavenging raptors whose carnivorous appetite makes them into something like airborne garbage disposals. “I felt like these were three Don Quixotes,” said filmmaker Shaunak Sen, who chronicles their rescue efforts in “All That Breathes,” which won a grand jury prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. I had to somehow find a poetic, lyrical quality.” Russian dissident Alexei Navalny in the documentary “Navalny.” ‘Navalny’ With his leading-man charisma and media savvy, Russian resistance leader Alexei Navalny might as easily be an action hero as Vladimir Putin’s biggest political threat.