Documentary filmmakers deserve much more love and attention than they receive. One way to get more attention is to make the list of 15 documentaries short-listed by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Variety has this year's list and cites three Iraq War-themed films as being "center stage": Phil Donahue and Ellen Spiro's Body of War, Charles Ferguson's No End in Sight (which Cinematical's Kim Voynar gave high marks when it played at Sundance) and Richard Robbins' Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience.

Kim is a self-styled "documentary dork" -- her words, not mine -- and wrote a column two months ago about films she thought "have (or ought to have) a shot at Oscar gold." She included No End in Sight, as well as the following docs that all made the short list: Sean Fine and Andrea Nix-Fine's War/Dance, Michael Moore's Sicko, Daniel Karslake's For the Bible Tells Me So, and Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman's Nanking. Kim was pulling for Logan Smalley's Darius Goes West, which sadly did not make the list. Other notable exclusions included David Singleton's In the Shadow of the Moon and Seth Gordon's The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters.

Here are the remaining eight that did make the list. First, the ones we've covered so far: Tony Kaye's Lake of Fire, Richard Berge and Bonni Cohen's The Rape of Europa, Weijun Chen's Please Vote for Me and Peter Raymont's A Promise to the Dead: The Exile Journey of Ariel Dorfman. Next, the ones we haven't seen yet: Steven Okazaki's White Light/Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (which has played on HBO), Alex Gibney's Taxi to the Dark Side (due for release in January), Bill Haney's The Price of Sugar and Tricia Regan's Autism: The Musical.

Now the Academy's Documentary Branch will review the 15 films and narrow the list still further to the final five nominees, which will be announced on January 22.

If foreign-language feature films can serve as windows into the lives and cultures of people we may never meet, and tell us about places we may never travel, how much more so a good documentary? In July I wrote about Campaign, a doc about the Japanese political process as seen through the eyes of an unlikely candidate. Since I haven't seen too many documentaries from or about Japan, that's made my ears perk up every time I hear about another.

Recently I watched White Light, Black Rain, which started showing on HBO after premiering at Sundance earlier this year. Steven Okazaki is a gifted, Academy Award-winning filmmaker, and one of his gifts is an ability to take a subject that might initially sound uninviting -- in this case, survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- and present the material in a straightforward yet artful manner that is very persuasive. I found myself caught up in the stories and very striking images and, before I realized it, the points had been made. The film will continue showing on HBO in August and September; it's also available on DVD.

The Village That Became Water (pictured) was released in Japan this month and Mark Schilling of The Japan Times had high praise for it. Filmmaker Nobuo Onishi spent 15 years documenting the impact of a long-planned dam on the people who would be displaced by the construction. The villagers raised and prepared their own food, "made medicines from local plants," and lived contentedly without any taste of modern civilization. The dam was first proposed in 1957; "after decades of living with the threat of the dam, they have become resigned to it and determined to enjoy their remaining time in the best place they know." The documentary, which Schilling says is permeated by Onishi's "commitment and passion," sounds well worth seeking out; I hope some enterprising festival programmers will give us a chance to see it.