The Last Repair Shop (2024)

In a Los Angeles warehouse, a dwindling handful of craftspeople keep more than 80,000 student instruments playable, so that children in the city's public schools can have them fixed for free. Ben Proudfoot and Kris Bowers let four of the repairers tell their own life stories, and each portrait turns out to be about far more than violins and tubas; by the end the workshop feels like a quiet argument for what public schools can give a child. It won the Oscar for Best Documentary Short Film in 2024, and the Los Angeles Times, which released it in its Short Docs series, streams it free in full on its YouTube channel.