Documentaries Cover the Gamut
FROM CLIMATE CHANGE TO DEMOCRACY AND PERSONAL HISTORIES, THESE WORKS SHOW RANGE
ALL IN: THE FIGHT FOR DEMOCRACY
Initially slated for the Telluride Film Festival, Liz Garbus and Lisa Cortes’ film nonetheless made a splash upon release in September. A study of American voter disenfranchisement, the film ended up zeroing in on Stacey Abrams’ controversial loss for Georgia governor, and it only grew timelier when that state ended up a key battleground in the 2020 presidential election just weeks later.
ASSASSINS
Ryan White’s documentary centers on the terrifying and bizarre killing of North Korean ruling family member Kim Jong-nam, who was poisoned by two women at a Malaysian airport. As the Sundance selected film explores, the case was far stranger than the headlines suggested at the time, and the women involved are allowed to tell their own stories.
ATHLETE A
Having recently tackled climate change with “An Inconvenient Sequel,” Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk spotlighted a very different type of nightmare for their fourth feature: the Larry Nassar sexual-abuse scandal that rocked the world of gymnastics. Throughout, the directors keep the focus on the resilient women who came forward to end the abuse, as well as the Indianapolis Star journalists who uncovered just how deep the rot went.
BELUSHI
The glory days of “Saturday Night Live” have been the subject of several documentaries already, and nonfiction film studies of fast-living, young-dying entertainment icons are almost too numerous to count, but R.J. Cutler’s exploration of the late John Belushi seems to have touched a particular nerve, digging through the anarchic comic’s correspondence to get to the man behind the showman.
BE WATER
Although it didn’t capture the zeitgeist quite like the (Oscar-ineligible) Chicago Bulls series “The Last Dance,” Bao Nguyen’s portrait of the martial-arts legend Bruce Lee was yet another achievement for ESPN’S 30 for 30 series, restoring much of the humanity and complications to a multihyphenate who has long been overshadowed by his own iconic image.
BOYS STATE
Winner of Sundance’s U.S. documentary grand prize, Jesse Moss and Amanda Mcbaine’s film zeroes in on an unusual type of summer camp, where teenage boys from across Texas convene to form their own mock government, offering an uncanny microcosm of the same types of dysfunctions and dissembling that bedevil U.S. politics writ large.
CRIP CAMP: A DISABILITY REVOLUTION
Winner of the audience award at Sundance, Nicole Newnham and James Lebrecht’s affecting documentary uncovers a fascinating nexus for one of America’s least-explored civil-rights movements: a summer camp for people with disabilities that eventually spurred a flurry of activism on behalf of accessibility legislation and legal protections for the disabled community.
COLLECTIVE
When it premiered during the fall festival season of 2019, Alexander Nanau’s expose of shocking corruption and disinformation on the part of the Romanian medical establishment following a disastrous nightclub fire left critics and audiences stunned. Also Romania’s foreign-language entry, its themes have surely gained even greater relevance now.
DICK JOHNSON IS DEAD
A most unusual feature from the longtime documentary cinematographer who made her directorial debut with “Cameraperson,” Kirsten Johnson’s film is a loving, at times genuinely funny tribute to her father, whose battle with Alzheimer’s the two tackle by inventing increasingly elaborate ways to stage his own fake death. The film won both best documentary and best director at the Critics Choice Documentary Awards.
THE DISSIDENT
Recent Oscar-winning documentarian Bryan Fogel (“Icarus”) returned to screens with another ripped-from-the-headlines story involving international intrigue, however this one was far darker than his doping-in-cycling expose. “The Dissident” explores the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, as well as speaking with activists who detail further attempts to suppress dissent in the Kingdom.
THE FIGHT
Winners of a special jury award for social impact filmmaking at Sundance, Eli Despres, Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg directed this inspiring and affectionate tribute to the ACLU lawyers who were forced to put up the fight of their lives to combat the Trump administration’s continual encroachment upon the rights of the transgender community and immigrants, just to name a few.
GIVING VOICE
Winner of the festival favorite award at Sundance, James D. Stern and Fernando Villena’s doc tracks a crowd of high school theater students who compete in an August Wilson monologue competition for a spot in a Broadway play, touching on everything from the playwright’s legacy and the Black theater tradition to the sheer joy of performance for these young competitors.
GUNDA
Conceptually, few documentaries this year were simpler than Victor Kossakovsky’s dialogue-free, black-and-white film “Gunda,” which follows a pig around a farm as she feeds her young, visits a scene-stealing chicken, and commiserates with cattle. And yet “Gunda,” which bowed to impressed audiences at Berlin, is hardly as straightforward as it seems, inviting audiences to lean into a sort of radical empathy with its central livestock without resorting to anthropomorphic gimmicks.
I AM GRETA
Filmmaker Nathan Grossman gained access to one of the world’s most famous teenagers for his debut feature, spotlighting Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg as she organizes strikes and demonstrations, tussles with antagonistic leaders including Donald Trump, and navigates sudden international celebrity without taking her eyes off the prize.
JOHN LEWIS: GOOD TROUBLE
Dawn Porter’s portrait of the civil-rights icon and longtime Georgia congressman would have likely been appointment viewing no matter when it came out, but digitally premiering as it did just after his death, it ended up serving as a feature-length, first-person eulogy for a largerthan-life American figure. (It’s also one of two D.c.-centric features Porter has released this year, the other being “The Way I See It,” about Obama White House photographer Pete Souza.)
KINGDOM OF SILENCE
One of two 2020 documentaries about the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, director Rick Rowley’s “Kingdom of Silence” offers both an overview of the journalist’s life and work, as well as a broader perspective on U.s.-saudi relations, making both it and “The Dissident” effectively complementary works.
MLK/FBI
Making generous use of recently declassified documents, Sam Pollard’s film, which premiered at Toronto, offers an expose of the FBI’S attempts to discredit, harass and blackmail the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., presenting a timely reminder that this long-since-deified activist was regarded with widespread hostility and distrust among much of white America in his own lifetime.
MR. SOUL!
A five-time nominee at the recent Critics Choice Documentary Awards (winning the first doc trophy), Melissa Haizlip’s loving portrait of her uncle, the pioneering Black TV host Ellis Haizlip, has been steadily accruing awards from the IDA, AFI Docs and the Pan African Film Festival on its long fest run, finally arriving in release this year.
REBUILDING PARADISE
A Sundance premiere subsequently released via National Geographic, “Rebuilding Paradise” is Ron Howard’s portrait of the small California city, burned nearly to the ground during horrific wildfires in 2018, as its residents try to pick up the pieces and reimagine what their community might look like after such a calamity.
THE PAINTER AND THE THIEF
Winner of a special prize for creative storytelling at Sundance, this Norwegian entry from director Benjamin Ree unravels the fascinating story of an artist named Barbora Kysilkova, whose paintings were stolen from an art gallery, and who then developed an unlikely friendship with one of the thieves.
THE SOCIAL DILEMMA Best known for his climate change documentaries “Chasing Coral” and “Chasing Ice,” here director Jeff Orlowski targeted what many see as another self-induced threat to modern civilization: social media. Interviewing conscience-stricken defectors from major social networking platforms and weaving in dramatizations throughout, Orlowski examines the role of Facebook et al in facilitating deep data mining and political radicalization.
TOTALLY UNDER CONTROL
Docs don’t get much more timely than this. Directed by Alex Gibney, Ophelia Harutyunyan and Suzanne Hillinger, the film traces the Trump administration’s fumbling attempts to control the COVID-19 pandemic, contrasted with those of more successful countries such as South Korea. Released in October, the film earned rave reviews for its activist zeal and up-to-theminute thoroughness.
THE TRUFFLE HUNTERS
In many ways a more lighthearted counterpart to last year’s Oscar winner “Honeyland,” Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw’s film spotlights practitioners of another intensely artisanal European agricultural tradition at risk of disappearing: Italian truffle hunters, who scour the forests of Northern Italy with their talented canine scouts seeking the lucrative fungi.
TIME
Winner of the documentary directing award at Sundance, Garrett Bradley’s elegiac black-and-white film offered an unusually intimate glimpse at the lingering effects of long-term incarceration, weaving together a tapestry of home movies shot by Fox Rich as she raises her family and pursues legal remedies while her husband is locked up for a robbery.
WELCOME TO CHECHNYA A sobering call to action, David France’s film interviews survivors of the horrific purges and persecution undergone by LGBTQ people in the war-torn Russian republic. In order to protect the identities of several of his subjects without losing the empathetic connection of on-camera interviews, France utilized a striking facial replacement visual effects technique. The film won an editing award at Sundance and the audience documentary prize at Berlin.
ALSO IN THE MIX
”76 Days,” “The Go-go’s,” “The Human Factor,” “Feels Good Man,” “Kiss the Ground,” “Miss Americana,” “The Mole Agent,” “My Psychedelic Love Story,” “My Octopus Teacher,” “Notturno,” “Oliver Sacks: His Own Life,” “On the Record,” “A Secret Love,” “Spaceship Earth,” “Stars and Strife,” “A Thousand Cuts,” “The Velvet Underground,” “The Way I See It”