So many outstanding documentaries were released in the past year that many will be overlooked. Here are 10 great ones that aren’t on the Oscars short list.

Do Not Resist

From small towns to big cities, police forces in America are being militarized. That’s the frightening premise of Craig Atkinson’s disturbing documentary. Equipped with military vehicles, weapons, and equipment, SWAT teams are ready for war and too often respond to civil disorder, misdemeanors, and peaceful demonstrations in that manner, as is seen in Atkinson’s on-the-ground footage of the protests following the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.

Theo Who Lived

In 2012, Theo Padnos slipped across the border from Turkey into the killing fields of Syria to gather material for a story. He was promptly kidnapped by Al Qaeda and spent the next 22 months in captivity, subjected to constant torture and brutal conditions. He escaped, and tells his story to director David Schisgall at places near where the events took place. These verbal “re-creations’’ are shocking, but also sometimes funny. Astonishingly, Padnos expresses a genuine sympathy with his captors. As remarkable as the fact that Theo lived is that he came through his experience with his sense of humor and humanity intact.

Nuts!

Americans are masters of the con. One forgotten practitioner was John Romulus Brinkley, who, back in 1918, offered goat testicle transplants as a cure for impotence. He made millions of dollars, and went on to such unlikely accomplishments as building the country’s biggest radio station and almost being elected governor of Kansas. Using archival footage and clever animation, Penny Lane relates Brinkley’s story so ingeniously that you side with the guy and start to wonder – did his treatment really work?

Sonita

Oppressed people, such as the title heroine of Rokhsareh Ghaem Maghami’s exhilarating documentary, find a release in rap. In Sonita’s native Afghanistan, girls her age are sold as brides to much older men, and in Iran where she is a refugee women are not permitted to sing. Somehow Sonita creates rap music so stirring that she becomes a YouTube sensation. Will she escape from the bonds of the two cultures and achieve success? Maghami’s film examines the ethics of documentary filmmaking while telling Sonita’s moving and suspenseful story.

The Other Side

Roberto Minervini’s documentary about meth addicts and militiamen in the Louisiana bayou immerses the viewer in a world both alien and familiar. A young man wakes up naked and strolls down a road in a drug-induced haze. Heavily armed, drunken men shoot up a car containing a dummy wearing an Obama mask. These people are frightening and sad but also comprehensible and sympathetic. The film is a tour of the “deplorables,’’ a forgotten demographic whose rage, need, and fear were shockingly manifested in the 2016 presidential election.

Tickled

David Farrier and Dylan Reeve’s documentary started as a lark. As cohost of the show “Newsworthy’’ on New Zealand’s TV3, Farrier made what he describes as a “two-minute wacky news story’’ about a video on “Competitive Endurance Tickling’’ that he saw on YouTube. Immediately he received mysterious threats. He and his co-director looked deeper into the subject and uncovered a world of weirdness, abuse of power, and paranoia worthy of a novel by Thomas Pynchon.

Author: The JT Leroy Story

Fifteen-year-old JT LeRoy became a literary celebrity after the publication of his lurid memoir “The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things.’’ Unfortunately, LeRoy did not exist, but was the fictional creation of 40-year-old punk rocker and housewife Laura Albert. In a way, LeRoy was the “author’’ and the fiction both. Jeff Feuerzeig’s documentary lets Albert tell her story, and explain a complex deception which reveals truths about identity, gender, fame, and the meaning of authorship.

Eat That Question: Frank Zappa in His Own Words

Ever since he hit the rock scene in the 1960s, anyone who was hip knew about Frank Zappa. “I’m famous,’’ he says in one of the interviews spanning decades in Thorsten Schütte’s collage-like documentary. “But most people don’t know what I do.’’ You’ll get a better idea after watching this film. A wit, a surreal genius, and a composer worthy of his influences Edgar Varése, Igor Stravinsky, and Anton Webern, the late rocker (he died of cancer in 1993 at 53) far surpasses his own modest self-definition as just an entertainer and musician.

Recollection

Palestinian filmmaker Kamal Aljafar takes footage from American and Israeli feature films shot in his native city of Jaffa — titles span the 1960s through the 1990s, including the 1986 Chuck Norris film “The Delta Force’’ — and removes the people from the images, leaving empty cityscapes with only an occasional glimpse of a human figure. The result is haunting and provocative, a dream-like study of his old neighborhood with the alien presence removed.

No Home Movie

Death looms over the late Belgian auteur Chantal Akerman’s last film, “No Home Movie.’’ In it, she converses with her mother via Skype and in person at her mother’s genteel home in Brussels about everyday things and about the joys and tragedies of the past (her mother was a survivor of Auschwitz). Simple as it is, the documentary reveals a lifetime of love and strife contained in Akerman’s geometric composition of confining frames within frames. Her mother died shortly after the film finished shooting in 2014. Akerman committed suicide last year at 65.

Peter Keough can be reached at petervkeough@gmail.com.