20 must-see documentaries to explain the world in 2020
1. Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich (2020)
Director: Lisa Bryant Netflix
It’s a must-watch because… An ongoing scandal of unchecked power and abuse is explored with emotional urgency.
This four-hour inquiry from Netflix, currently lapping its competitors in the non-fiction miniseries department, is surely not the last documentary we’ll see on the late American financier and his horrific history of underage sexual abuse. After all, it’s a story that is still unfolding, with his exgirlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell recently taken into custody. But there’s power in being the first, and Lisa Bryant’s project – which entered production, securely under wraps, while Epstein was still alive – valuably amplifies the voices of victims who were unheard for too long.
2. I Am Not Your Negro (2016)
Director: Raoul Peck Mubi
A must-watch because…The Black Lives Matter movement has put James Baldwin on everyone’s reading list: this doc perfectly complements his writing.
It’s a couple of years since Haitiborn filmmaker Peck won a Bafta, and earned an Oscar nomination, for this fervid, fiery tribute to James Baldwin – but with the black American author’s work surging in popularity amid the BLM protests, it feels due another celebration. This isn’t a drably standard biographical documentary: instead, it engages imaginatively with Baldwin’s political ideas and convictions, emerging as a rousing work of activism in its own right.
3. The Last Dance (2020)
Director: Jason Hehir Netflix
A must-watch because… A sports documentary that builds into a rousing celebration of a black icon.
Even people who aren’t especially into basketball – which, in Britain, is admittedly rather a lot of the population – got hooked on this “10part documentary event” surveying the extraordinary sporting legacy of Michael Jordan. And yes, “event” is Netflix’s own wording: there’s little room for modesty in a series that nominally covers the ups and downs of Jordan’s career, but concentrates most exhilaratingly on the ups: it’s hard not to get caught up in the stakes of his final season with the Chicago Bulls.
4. Spaceship Earth (2020)
Director: Matt Wolf Multiple platforms
A must-watch because… Its depiction of social tensions and restrictions under quarantine feel weirdly of the moment.
One for the “stranger than fiction” file: viewers who followed the news in the early 1990s might recall the hype around Biosphere 2, an elaborate environmental project constructed in Arizona, intended to be a fully self-sufficient ecosystem, all contained under glass. (Biosphere 1, if you’re wondering, is Earth itself.) Eight people volunteered to spend two years in its confines: Matt Wolf’s slick, absorbing documentary charts the fallout of a project that was equal parts worthy eco-hippie research, peculiar cult and Big Brotherprototype.
5. On the Record (2020)
Directors: Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Multiple platforms
A must-watch because…No documentary has so powerfully connected the causes of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter.
The #MeToo movement has yielded a number of documentaries, but a strikingly intersectional perspective makes this searing account of sexual abuse in the hip-hop industry – as articulated by the women who tell of being sexually abused by Def Jam Records chief Russell Simmons – a landmark. (Simmons has denied all accusations.) Dick and Ziering’s film is candid about the particular difficulties black women have faced in coming forward with their stories. Former executive producer Oprah Winfrey controversially withdrew her backing from the film days before its Sundance premiere, but that hasn’t dimmed its critical and audience acclaim.
6. Welcome to Chechnya (2020)
Director: David France BBC iPlayer
A must-watch because…As farright, anti-LGBTQ politics spread across Europe, here’s a terrifying glimpse of them in action.
His films How to Survive a Plague and The Death and Life of Marsha P Johnson established David France as the foremost docmaker in the field of LGBTQ history. His latest, however, is a gripping present-tense affair, documenting the state-sanctioned purge of gay people in the Chechen Republic. Using groundbreaking face-morphing technology to protect the identities of participating victims, France’s film tracks the efforts of a Russian activist group to extract vulnerable people from the country and shepherd them to safety: it’s an escape thriller with perilously high human stakes.
7. The Unwanted: The Secret Windrush Files (2019)
Director: Tim Kirby BBC iPlayer A must-watch because…“The UK is not innocent” has been a popular rallying cry of recent Black Lives Matter protests: this doc tells us why.
As Britain continues to grapple with the national shame of the Windrush scandal – which recently saw thousands of legally settled, Caribbean-born UK residents threatened with deportation – this BBC documentary, written and presented by David Olusoga, delves into the roots of the institutional racism that caused it, exposing the “hostile environment” associated with Theresa May as a political objective preceding her by several generations. It’s suitably enraging stuff, but its emotional pull is enriched by a wealth of thorough, knotty historical detail.
8. Our Planet (2019)
Produced by Keith Scholey and Alastair Fothergill
A must-watch because…Some climate-change docs can be on the dour side, but this offers a bright, accessible conversation starter on the subject.For many of us, it feels as if David Attenborough has narrated our entire life in some capacity. That voice is a reassuring brand in itself, making us listen more attentively to the specifics of his nature documentaries than we might do otherwise, particularly with such reliably ravishing visuals to contend with. That’s of particular value in his high-gloss Netflix series made last year, given its particular focus on climate change as propagated by humans and experienced by all organisms.
9. 13th (2016)
Director: Ava DuVernay Netflix
A must-watch because…A ferocious study of racial oppression in American prisons made waves in 2016, and is still vital in Trump’s America.
Another Bafta winner that just missed Oscar gold, Ava DuVernay’s first documentary feature after a trio of career-boosting narrative films is ostensibly about racial injustice in the prison system, but emerges as an expansive, furious view of the collective psychology that keeps archaic racial hierarchies in place across America. The title refers to the 13th amendment, which tweaked the abolition of slavery to permit involuntary servitude for convicted criminals: for many in America, DuVernay suggests, prison isslavery. Her argument is radical and persuasive.
10. Seahorse (2019)
Director: Jeanie Finlay Vimeo
A must-watch because… Trans gender rights area sticking point even for many self-described liberals: this tender, straight-talking doc has the power to change perceptions.
“The Dad Who Gave Birth” is the subtitle often tacked onto Jeanie Finlay’s study of transgender pregnancy, striking a blunt, tabloid-y note that doesn’t square with the film’s own delicate, humane approach. But yes, that’s the story in a nutshell, as the film documents trans man and Guardian journalist Freddy McConnell’s struggle to conceive and deliver his own child. Finlay covers the social, emotional and medical complications of this process in candid bu tun sensation al is ed detail.
11. Tiger King (2020)
Directors: Rebecca Chaikin and Eric Goode Netflix
A must-watch because…A wild ride any way you slice it, this is documentary-making for the post-truth era, inviting us to decide how we consume and believe its information.
Yes, this compulsive Netflix miniseries – a viral obsession in the early days of lockdown – is unabashed trash, to the extent that it’s being adapted into a narrative film starring Nicolas Cage. Viewers got hooked on the lurid tale of eccentric gay zookeeper and convicted felon Joe Exotic and his escalating feud with conservationist Carole Baskin; critics expressed increasing scepticism over the film’s pile-up of tall stories and allegations, presented in equal, credulous fashion for the internet to pore over.
12. For Sama (2019)
Directors: Waad al-Kateab and Edward Watts Amazon
A must-watch because…A rare female perspective on the Syrian civil war, the worst humanitarian crisis of our age.
The Syrian conflict has inspired a steady stream of documentaries on its fighters and casualties – most of them can hardly fail to be moving, but it takes a unique point of view to cut through the numbing noise. The mostnominated documentary in Bafta history, this has that: taking the form of a video diary by co-director Al-Kateab as she weathers the conflict in Aleppo over six years, first as a student and eventually as a young mother, it’s an extraordinary ground-level chronicle.
13. Honeyland (2019)
Directors: Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov Multiple platforms
A must-watch because…A poetic allegory for the war between traditional and modern agriculture that doesn’t hit you over the head.
Rightly showered with awards on the festival circuit last year, finally culminating in an Oscar nomination, this is environmental docmaking of a subtle, artful order, marrying ecological concerns with rich, close-up human character study. It follows Hatidze Muratova, an ageing, independent beekeeper living in the remote Macedonian mountains, as she finds her ecosystem threatened by a neighbouring Turkish family with brasher honey-gathering ambitions: warm, funny and exquisitely photographed, it invites us to consider what we give the land we take from.
14. Miss Americana (2020)
Director: Lana Wilson Netflix
A must-watch because…Taylor Swift is among the most ubiquitous celebrities of this era: here’s an insight into what that means, for her and for us.
If you’re not a devotee of all-American pop goddess Taylor Swift, you might wonder what’s to be gained from a documentary covering her life and labours over the course of recording her last two albums. But Lana Wilson’s Sundance-premiered documentary isn’t mere fan service: it’s a fascinating glimpse into the construction and deconstruction of celebrity in the Instagram era, covering Swift’s transition from carefully managed blank slate to politically outspoken liberal. Oh, and the music is pretty good too.
15. Tell Me Who I Am (2019)
Director: Ed Perkins Netflix
A must-watch because…Unusual as a story of male victimhood in the #MeToo reckoning, it prompts uncomfortable questions about trauma, and who gets to control it.
As storytelling, this harrowing British documentary is best viewed with as little advance knowledge as possible. Yet a trigger warning is in order for what emerges, through its tricky structure, as a tale of horrifying childhood abuse, shrouded in conflicting layers of memory and misinformation. At the centre of it are now middle-aged twin brothers Alex and Marcus Lewis, the former afflicted with amnesia following a teenage motorbike accident, the latter having taken charge of his brother’s memories in surprising ways.
16. Hail Satan? (2019)
Director: Penny Lane Multiple platforms
A must-watch because…You won’t see a more pointed inquiry into religious freedom at the moment – or a funnier one.
The question mark in Penny Lane’s puckish, perceptive, sometimes riotous documentary about the Satanic Temple and its followers in the US may seem like a trollish affectation, but there’s a reason for it: by the time it’s finished, what these self-styled satanists stand for isn’t as clear-cut as you might think. Lane seeks the lighter, more humane side of a dark movement, but also a politically canny one: devil worship here emerges principally as a weapon in a culture war against the Christian right.
17. The Great Hack (2019)
Directors: Karim Amer and Jehane Noujaim Netflix
A must-watch because…While we’re still living with the consequences of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, this is the clearest primer on how it all went down.
We’re still awaiting a definitive documentary on the whole national catastrophe of the Brexit referendum, but this engrossing Netflix effort offers essential insight into the adjacent matter of the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal. Centred on whistleblower Brittany Kaiser, academic David Carroll and Observer journalist Carole Cadwalladr, the film overlaps their observations and experiences to unpack the far-reaching influence of
the data research company, from Brexit to the last US presidential election and beyond.
18. Midnight Traveler (2019)
Director: Hassan Fazili Multiple platforms
A must-watch because…It gives human dimension to the cold statistics around the refugee crisis.
We’ve seen a lot of documentaries in recent years about the European refugee crisis, but few as personally invested as Afghan film-maker Hassan Fazili’s riveting first-hand account of his own family’s gruelling escape from Afghanistan. As they trek overland from one European country to the next in search of asylum, facing violence and exploitation along the way, Fazili shoots their epic journey on a series of smartphone cameras: in addition to its emotional power, the film demonstrates the medium’s rapidly expanding technical possibilities.
19. The Edge of Democracy (2019)
Director: Petra Costa Netflix
A must-watch because… A hardhitting cautionary tale of the far-right takeover in Brazil – with international resonance.
A global wave of sympathy didn’t exactly greet the recent news that farright Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro had tested positive for coronavirus; Petra Costa’s chilling, beautifully constructed account of his rise to power won’t warm your heart any. In one respect, it’s a dense, impassioned explanation of a political swing that’s been difficult to follow merely from headlines, but there’s universal resonance here too: the fractious public mood evoked here will be recognisable to residents of Trump’s America or Boris Johnson’s Britain.
20. Knock Down the House (2019)
Director: Rachel Lears Netflix
A must-watch because… If you’re despairing about the state of the United States, this portrait of a new political generation is a jolt of hopeful energy.
As we head into a US presidential election putting white male septuagenarians against each other, Rachel Lears’s sparky, motivating documentary is a helpful reminder that there is a younger, more diverse future for American politics. Lears tracks the primary campaigns of four female progressive Democrats, but the clear star of the show is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the irresistible young New Yorker who pulled off the biggest upset victory in the 2018 midterms. Her force of personality is well-captured here: one day we’ll watch this as a reminder of where she started.
Which recent documentaries most illuminate and explain the world today? Share your recommendations in the comments below
This article was amended on 26 July 2020 to correct the spelling of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez