It is no surprise that Nuisance Bear won the Grand Jury Prize for Documentary at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, because it does what all good movies should, and even fewer documentaries achieve: it is not really about what it’s about. The ability to succeed on a double level is …
This documentary is about the power of community in healing from grief, through the method of Gaelic psalm singing. The dialogue is almost entirely in Scots-Gaelic – the indigenous language of Scotland and a cousin to Irish Gaelic, the indigenous language of Ireland – and centers the journey of one …
There is a small rural enclave in southern Philippines called Sitio Masalay, whose fields were turned into a horrific site of carnage one fateful day in November 2009, summarily taking 58 innocent lives. In the aftermath, only 57 bodies were found, and one remains missing. Director Carl Joseph Papa presciently …
Throughout the more than a hundred and twenty-five years of filmmaking, the film history organized itself into canons and critical retrospectives that analyzed cinema through various prisms. Similar to all of the arts, this canon is white-centered and Anglo-European, excluding the works of people of color, women, and those located …
James Benning is one of the most prominent experimental directors in history. Labeled as a researcher of the American landscapes, his work features a formally rigorous study of the United States and its structures. His interest in the composition of the country is evident in his most well-known films: The …
It’s very normal for documentaries to begin and end with copious lists of the various production companies who have contributed to or enabled its making. As director Valerie Veatch pointed out in her Sundance Film Festival Q&A, Ghost in the Machine has none of these. She had to fund the …
Even if he wasn’t dying from colon cancer, André Ricciardi would make a fascinating subject for a documentary. Tony Benna’s André Is an Idiot shows this clearly by giving us a look not just at his disease, but at the totality of his life, making this film a joyful celebration …
In 2023, the Brazilian documentary veteran, Eliza Capai, released her Incompatível com a Vida (Incompatible with Life). Despite being a mix of talking head with diary documentary, it is an utterly personal telling of her experience with the traumatic loss of her baby in her womb. The director tells her …
It’s not so much that Jaripeo is therapy – a reductive way to think about documentary, especially when the director is documenting their own experiences – but Jaripeo is maybe the first time some of its participants have ever been asked to think about the things they do. This is, …
The legendary filmmaker Robert Flaherty made history with his documentary Nanook of the North, a pioneering film, considered the first non-fiction work. Despite the controversies and claims of its stagings, it establishes the medium’s interest in the study of the human organization and the different cultures. A century later, we …
It’s only January but Scottish documentary Everybody to Kenmure Street is a very serious contender for best documentary of the year. It’s rare to feel a documentary so firmly plant the seed of possibility in the mind of its audience. But there are three things audiences need to know in …
In 2022, the Academy-nominated documentary Filmmaker Sam Green (The Weather Underground) impressed the audiences with a sonic experiment in his 32 Sounds. Mixed as an experiment to watch at the theater and scenes where the sound echoes differently in each soundbar, it illustrates how, underneath the technical experimentation, Green’s films …
The young Canadian director Ben Proudfoot is one of the most prominent names in the documentary short film community. Through his Breakwater Studios, Proudfoot releases two shorts each year, which premiere in major festival venues such as the Tribeca Film Festival or Telluride Film Festival. In 2021, he won his …
Even if it sounds ironic, nepotism might be a burden. It is one of the topics of grief shown in Stiller & Meara: Nothing is Lost. Arguably one of the most popular names in mainstream comedy in the last three decades, Ben Stiller comes from a royal family in comedy. …
In the early 1950s, the legendary French magazine Cahiers du Cinéma popularized a new manner of analyzing cinema. Hence, the politique des auteurs (auteur theory) became their central thesis, in which film criticism analyzed films through the lens of the whole and the filmmaker’s style. Thus, in a subsequent consequence …
Political filmmaking goes beyond documenting political movements and principally records the individuals who make the choices. A classic example of that is Rob Epstein’s The Times of Harvey Milk, a groundbreaking documentary that immortalized Milk’s work and brutal murder. In this sense, these sub-genres of docs crystallize the life of …
In 2020, due to the pandemic and the lack of releases in theaters, a few films got unusual spotlight. One of them was a black-and-white documentary about a pig. Viktor Kossakovsky’s Gunda is one of the films from that year that people remember and discuss. NEON released it in the …
Historically, Brazil has had a complicated relationship between maids and houseowners. The long slavery trade in the country, one of the last to abolish it, spread its evil seeds to the hierarchical association between those who have the power and those who obey. In this sense, the abolition of slavery …
In 2018, the couple Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin made a splash at the Telluride Film Festival with their film, Free Solo. At that time, they were known for their 2015 Meru, another documentary about mountain climbing. However, Solo changed everything for them. It was a massive hit at the …
Šarūnas Bartas is one of the most prominent Lithuanian directors. Over three decades, the filmmaker has produced films such as Few of Us, The House, Peace to Us in Our Dreams, Frost, and In the Dusk. Those films would premiere at the world’s principal film events, such as the Cannes …