78th Peabody Awards Announces Documentary Winners, Including Hulu’s ‘Minding the Gap’

Kartemquin Films also won an Institutional Award for its dedication to documentary filmmaking spanning more than 50 years.

By Libby Hill

Libby Hill

More stories by Libby

‘Succession’ Won Big at the Critics Choice TV Awards, but So Did These Shows

DGA Awards for TV Settle the ‘Succession’ Direction Question

On ‘Yellowjackets,’ Actresses Abound — How Will That Impact the Emmys?

April 16, 2019 2:00 pm

The 78th Peabody Awards Board of Jurors announced the eight documentary winners included in the Peabody 30 on April 16, including Hulu’s Academy Award-nominated skateboarding film “Minding the Gap.”

Other documentaries among the honorees include profiles of labor leader and civil rights activist Dolores Huerta, African-American playwright and writer Lorraine Hansberry, the Middle East’s first female Sharia law judge, Kholoud Faqih, and the lives of three surviving “comfort women” of World War II. Other topics addressed by the documentaries include the challenges of raising children with mental illness, the failures of Facebook in an increasingly fraught political landscape, and the cultural legacy of jazz musicians around the world.

In addition to the documentaries, the board named Kartemquin Films winner of an Institutional Award for its commitment to documentary film-making for more than 50 years. A Chicago-based non-profit organization, Kartemquin describes itself as a “collaborative community that empowers documentary makers who create stories that foster a more engaged and just society.” Previous films in the group’s filmography include previous Peabody winners “Hoop Dreams” (1994) and “Mapping Stem Cell Research: Terra Incognita” (2008), as well as the Roger Ebert biography “Life Itself” (2014), sports documentary “The Trials of Muhammad Ali” (2013), and newly minted Peabody-winner “Minding the Gap.”