The Oscar race is heating up. The Academy has narrowed down the films in the running for Documentary Feature to 15, and four of them are directed or co-directed by women, amounting to about 27 percent of the pool.

The short list includes Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady’s “One of Us,” an intimate look into the lives of three individuals who chose to leave or were pushed out of their insular Hasidic community, and Jennifer Brea’s “Unrest,” which sees the filmmaker exploring her own medical mystery. “When I was 28, I was a PhD student at Harvard and engaged to the love of my life. Then I came down with a terrible fever,” Brea recounted to us. “Although doctors told me my symptoms were ‘all in my head,’ I grew progressively more ill, and within months I was unable even to sit in a wheelchair.”

Also featured is “Faces Places,” a road movie co-directed by Agnès Varda that sees her and collaborator JR traveling through rural France and meeting locals, and environmental doc “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power,” co-directed by Bonni Cohen. “Climate change is depressing. There are so many climate crisis films out there that wag their finger at the viewer, scare and depress them with the apocalyptic nature of this problem,” Cohen told us. “Our challenge was to make sure to leave the audience with a bucket of hope, one filled with the solutions that are in place to solve this crisis and make sure the world is livable for our children.”

Thirty-five percent of the 170 titles originally submitted for consideration in this category were helmed or co-helmed by women.

Ava DuVernay’s “13th,” an exploration of the connection between slavery and mass-incarceration in the United States, was the sole woman-directed doc to be nominated this year.

Oscar nominations will be announced January 23, 2018 and the event will take place March 4, 2018.