Next year’s Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature will go to “Apollo 11,” “The Cave,” “Diego Maradona,” “For Sama,” “Knock Down the House” or one of 10 other nonfiction films, if the track record for Doc NYC’s annual Short List proves to be as accurate as it has been in past years.

Those five films were included on the documentary festival’s 2019 list, along with “American Factory,” “The Apollo,” “Ask Dr. Ruth,” “The Biggest Little Farm,” “The Edge of Democracy,” “The Elephant Queen,” “The Great Hack,” “Honeyland,” “The Kingmaker” and “One Child Nation.”

All of the films will screen at this year’s festival, which runs in New York City from Nov. 6 through Nov. 15, and will be eligible for juried awards in four categories for the first time.

Doc NYC has been compiling its Short List, which identifies the documentaries that its programming team considers to be the year’s strongest awards contenders,...