Heads up, this episode contains a racial slur and mentions of sexual assault.

History and music, economics and journalism, freedom and family are all prominent in this year's impressive crop of

Oscar nominees for outstanding documentary feature. This year's nominees draw on animation, archival footage,

unforgettable interviews and delabled visuals. They tackle issues including mass incarceration, the plight of refugees and what parts of the past we celebrate most.

And most of the films are streaming now. I'm Aisha Harris and I'm Linda Holmes and today we're bringing you a guide to this year's Oscar-nominated documentary feature films.

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It's just me and Aisha today we're going to run through these five nominees all of which I will say I think are just excellent. There's not a clunker or a boring entry in this bunch which has not honestly always been the case.

But I will completely celebrate whichever of these manages to win because I think they're all great. Let's dive right in with the first one.

Flee is a very interesting entry in that it's also nominated for international feature. It's from Denmark and animated feature.

It uses animation as a way to protect the identity of its central figure who goes by the name Amin. He was a refugee from Afghanistan who came to Denmark and was separated from his family and he's about to get married.

So he's preparing to talk more about his past with his husband because he's mostly kept his past very private.

This one is directed by Jonas Poherr, Russ Musin. It's streaming on Hulu. I was so impressed by just the unusual approach in terms of the animation.

The way that the storytelling covers so much ground. What did you think of this one?

I loved this and I tried to know as little about it as possible going into it. You mentioned animation and one of my favorite sequences is really on the film when Amin is recounting his childhood and flashing back to the 80s.

At some point, take on me by aha is playing in the background and suddenly the animation goes from what most of the film looks like to imitating that iconic music video of take on me.

I just think it's such a whirlwind because this is a moment, a rare moment in the film where he gets to be sort of free and sort of carefree.

I love the way it plays with all those different kinds of visuals because it makes the film feel very, very alive.

I was just really struck by how great this was. At the end of it, there is sort of a happy ending or at least a comforting heartwarming ending that you don't necessarily expect going into it.

The other thing I really like about this one is that typically if you were to have a guy in a documentary telling you the story of his childhood, you would pretty much have two choices. One is to just be showing him as he tells the story of his childhood, just watching him in the present telling the story.

The other is some kind of reenactment kind of situation. And everybody I think has had the experience of reenactments. It certainly they can be effective in certain films, but they can also be very cheesy looking and very distracting.

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