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Aside from the occasional “Bowling for Columbine,” documentaries often don’t get media attention.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, along with the UCLA Film and Television Archive, is combatting this with its annual series on outstanding contemporary documentaries. Chosen from the pool of applicants from the previous years’ Academy Awards, two films of a similar theme are given a free screening each Tuesday at the James Bridges Theater.

The first part of the series continues until Dec. 17. War is the focus of this week’s films with “Sisters in Resistance” and “Unfinished Symphony,” screening tonight at 7:30 p.m.

“Sisters in Resistance” tells the story of four young women actively involved in the French resistance against the Nazi occupation. After passing messages, hiding refugees, code-breaking, and distributing underground newspapers, they are captured by the Gestapo and sent to a labor concentration camp for women.

“I was so taken by the whole story,” said director Maia Wechsler. “These women weren’t Catholics or Jews, they were Christian, they could have stayed home and done absolutely nothing … like so many other people did.”

Told almost entirely through group and individual interviews, the film chronicles their journey to the camp and the extreme hardships that formed lifelong friendship between the women.

“In documentary film you get to see the faces,” Wechsler said. “You get to experience what the subject experiences and hear in his or her words what happened.”

Previously a journalist by trade, Wechsler entered the field of documentary film making in 1993, and “Sisters in Resistance” was the first film she directed.

Bestor Cram, producer and co-director of “Unfinished Symphony” also uses an emotionally anchored film style.

“I was always interested in using films to change hearts and minds … bring a world unknown to people to be understood in its most empathetic and horrific ways,” Cram said.

Vietnam veterans are the focus of “Unfinished Symphony,” specifically in a 1971 protest march tracing Paul Revere’s ride in reverse. Told in three sections, the film combines archival footage of the Vietnam War with recent interviews and rarely seen footage of the march itself.

The march went smoothly until Lexington, where town officials refused to let the veterans sleep on the Battle Green (site of the first battle in the Revolutionary War). In a historic act of civil disobedience, over 400 veterans and townspeople were arrested, the largest arrest in the history of Massachusetts.

“The film is a way not only to recall something that happened 30 years back, but also present the role of dissent in democracy, which may be more urgent in the political times we live in then ever before,” Cram said.

When the project originally came to Cram he rejected it since he had already made several films about Vietnam, but after reconsidering the impact of the incident and the 1971 march footage shot, he changed his mind.

“It was interesting both in its raw nature and the way it was disturbingly authentic because it captured the nation, the issues and the times all at once,” Cram said.

These films both work towards capturing the visceral and political power the documentary form allows, and the series hopes to capitalize on that.

Information on other upcoming films can be found at www.oscars.org, including show times and synopses.