The year’s best nonfiction filmmaking on the big screen and TV shows were awarded at the New York Academy of Medicine in East Harlem on Thursday, January 8 — at the 19th annual Cinema Eye Honors.

The 2026 Cinema Eye Honors, comprised of a voting body of more than 800 documentary film experts, gave top honors to Ryan White’s Apple documentary “Come See Me in the Good Light,” which follows poets Andrea Gibson and Megan Falley as they face Gibson’s cancer journey. It won Outstanding Nonfiction Feature, Original Music Score, and Unforgettables Honors (the equivalent of career or life achievement) for Gibson and Falley.

That film is on the Oscar shortlist for Best Documentary Feature. Two other high-profile candidates, “The Perfect Neighbor” and “Seeds,” took two honors each. Geeta Gandbhir’s Netflix-acquired documentary “The Perfect Neighbor” — which uses the true-crime format as a bait-and-switch to lure audiences into a more probing examination of injustices in our police system — won Outstanding Direction for Gandbhir and Outstanding Editing for Viridiana Lieberman. “Seeds,” a documentary about Black farmers in the South that premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, took the prizes for Debut Feature and Cinematography for Brittany Shyne.

There was a tie for Outstanding Production, with two Oscar contenders, “The Alabama Solution” and “Apocalypse in the Tropics,” both honored. Other Oscar contenders abound on the list, from documentary short film shortlister “All the Empty Rooms” to “Cutting through Rocks,” about an Iranian woman elected to council in her rural village. But not “The Tale of Silyan,” which won the audience award from Cinema Eye Honors but was left off the Oscar shortlist.

See the full list of winners across film and TV from Cinema Eye Honors below.

Feature
“Come See Me in the Good Light”
Ryan White, Jessica Hargrave, Tig Notaro, Stef Willen, Brandon Somerhalder, Berenice
Chávez, Blake Neely, Dave Richards, Brent Kiser, Andrea Gibson and Megan Falley

Direction
Geeta Gandbhir
“The Perfect Neighbor”

Editing
Viridiana Lieberman
“The Perfect Neighbor”

Production
(tie)
Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman
“The Alabama Solution”
and
Petra Costa and Alessandra Orofino
“Apocalypse in the Tropics”

Cinematography
Brittany Shyne
“Seeds”

Original Music Score
Blake Neely
“Come See Me in the Good Light”

Sound Design
James LeBrecht, Greg Francis and Nina Hartstone
“Deaf President Now!”

Visual Design
Sara Gunnarsdóttir, Josh Shaffner and Kevin Eskew
“It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley”

Debut
“Seeds”
Directed By Brittany Shyne

Audience Choice Prize
“The Tale of Silyan”
Directed By Tamara Kotevska

Nonfiction Short
“All the Empty Rooms”
Directed by Joshua Seftel

Spotlight Award
“To the West, in Zapata”
Directed By David Bim

Heterodox Award
“The Voice of Hind Rajab”
Directed By Kaouther Ben Hania

Unforgettables Honorees
Noam Shuster-Eliassi
“Coexistence, My Ass!”

Andrea Gibson and Megan Falley
“Come See Me in the Good Light”

Seymour Hersh
“Cover-Up”

Sara Shahverdi
“Cutting Through Rocks”

Pavel Talankin
“Mr. Nobody Against Putin”

Jacinda Ardern
“Prime Minister”

Fatma Hassona
“Put Your Soul On Your Hand and Walk”

Broadcast Film
“Pee-wee as Himself”
Directed by Matt Wolf
HBO | Max

Nonfiction Series
“Social Studies”
Directed by Lauren Greenfield
FX on Hulu

Anthology Series
“Conan O’Brien Must Go”
Executive Producers Conan O’Brien and Jeff Ross
HBO | Max

Broadcast Editing
“Social Studies”
Edited by Alyse Ardell Spiegel, Helen Kearns, Catherine Bull and Charles Little II
FX on Hulu

Broadcast Cinematography
“Omnivore”
Director of Photography Tom Elliott, Sy Turnbull and Jurgen Lisse
Apple TV+