documentary
Back in 2013, a prestigious ballet director from the Bolshoi Theater named Sergei Filin was attacked outside his house, and acid was thrown into his face. He suffered third degree burns all over his face and down his neck and was left blind in one eye. After an investigation, it was discovered that a dancer of the Bolshoi paid the perpetrator; the motive was in reference to the casting of Swan Lake in which Filin was responsible.
The world is a terrifying place. Its machinations are convoluted constructions managed by a mixture of public servants or private business people whom we would like to assume have the public’s best interests at heart, but whose true motives are more dubious and difficult to discern. Oftentimes financial imperatives outweigh common sense, and the result is disaster on a massive scale.
Long maligned no matter the medium, the short film is often seen merely as a launching pad for bigger and better things. However, for documentarians, the short is almost the primary form, as it takes a lot of time, funding and quality footage to come up with a feature-length documentary worthy of release. Thus, for documentary, the short is the rule rather than the exception, and the field is stacked with quality, potent films, more or less unhampered by typical commercial expectations.
It’s not often that you can say that someone is one of your favourite directors, but for a long time you didn’t even know their name or recognise that all the films you liked were theirs. Jeanie Finlay is a special case though, the documentarian who pushes you hard to look at the subject and never at themselves. Through her good working relationship with the BBC I and many of you in the UK have been watching her films without ever actually joining the dots and seeing that Finlay was the filmmaker behind them all.
On November 23rd 2012, 17 year old Jordan Davis was shot dead inside a friends car at a gas station. He was shot by Michael Dunn, a 43 year old white male, because of an altercation which began when Dunn asked Jordan and his friends to turn down their music. The situation escalated and a few minutes later Jordan Davis was dead.
“I heard once somebody describing Zionism as a person escaping a burning building jumping out of the window and falling on somebody else’s head.” – Orly Noy, Israeli peace activist Colliding Dreams is a historical documentary exploring the history and ideas of Zionism, a nationalist movement of the Jewish community. The documentary examines Zionism in relation to the Jewish-Israeli occupation, a highly politically and religiously charged conflict between the Zionists and the Palestinians that continues until this day.
Between fronting various rock bands, starring in ’80s B-Movies and baring it all for dinner guests in the Aloha state, Jon Mikl Thor has been existing on the fringes of American pop culture going on 5 decades now. The subject of the new documentary I Am Thor, my review of which you can read here, he is poised to come roaring back onto the heavy metal scene and beyond. Jon was gracious enough to take the time to speak with me about the documentary, his career, and all that lays ahead.
Documentary filmmaking is an interesting thing: while an actor in a fiction film can (though certainly doesn’t necessarily) excise their own personal ego and inhabit a role entirely separate from themselves, the documentary subject does not have this luxury. In fact, for the subject of a documentary to be successful it takes precisely the opposite skill; to be fully present in oneself, perpetuating the most “you” version of you possible.
Rachel Lyon’s wide-eyed documentary Hate Crimes in the Heartland revisits the largely ignored history of racial violence in Tulsa, Oklahoma. In the wake of a racially motivated shooting spree on Good Friday in 2012, Lyon interviews survivors, leaders, historians, and residents to discuss the city’s racially divided legacy and the effects of the “Tulsa Race Riot,” a misnomer for the day long, Ku Klux Klan-led decimation of Black Wall Street’s infrastructure. Interviewees discuss the contemporary effects of the small-scale genocidal effort in 1921 and media coverage of the Good Friday shootings in 2012.
In the very North of England, settled into the cinematic hillside of the North Pennines, there lives a family of sheep farmers. Amongst the snow, the wind, and the dying local farm industry, this small family battles every day to rear the perfect sheep and to pursue the life they have always dreamed of. Meet the Hutchinsons – the stars of quirky documentary Addicted to Sheep.
As the Western world is finally starting to make significant strides towards sexual orientation equality, it is easy to forget that in most of the rest of the world homosexuals are less than accepted in their respective societies. LGBT people in such countries face discrimination, social exile and physical beatings as punishment for their existence, and as such have largely been forced to stay closeted. But Love is one of those things that is hard to keep hidden, and as one wise man once said about Life, Love too often “finds a way”.
The Look of Silence, the harrowing companion piece to The Act of Killing, was released earlier this year to universal acclaim. With the film about to be released on streaming platforms in the US, with a ton of awards nominations heading its way (including a place in the shortlist for Best Documentary at the Oscars this year), Film Inquiry spoke to director Joshua Oppenheimer about the past decade in his life making these films, as well as the new form of documentary storytelling he has pioneered. Alistair Ryder for Film Inquiry:
In What Our Fathers Did: A Nazi Legacy two sons are brought together by a shared legacy, the legacy mentioned in the title. Both are the sons of high-ranking Nazi officers.
Cady McClain is an award-winning daytime TV actress, but she has another side: as a director. She has completed two short award-winning films, Flip Fantasia and World of Albert Fuh, and the comedy web series Suzy F*cking Homemaker, and is currently in production on a new documentary about women directors called Seeing Is Believing:
Hanna Polak is a documentarian whose films have been screened the world over. It only took her two directorial efforts for her to be recognized by the Academy, as her memorable film Children of Leningradsky was nominated for Best Documentary Short in 2005. After spending some time as a director for hire, Polak is returning to the international documentary scene with an absolutely remarkable film over 14 years in the making, Something Better To Come (you can read my review here).