Non-fiction filmmaking remains at the pulse of movie culture. This is still the space for the most progressive ideas, the most complex social issues, and a bastion of truth when you do not trust what is being sold to you.
The Pop Out: Ken & Friends
A celebratory victory lap for Kendrick Lamar but also so, so much more. It’s about The Culture. Nothing less than an armistice as Crips and Bloods alike take the stage and produce one unified message: it’s not the West Coast embattled with itself — this is the West Coast vs. the World. This symbolic message resounds from the stage as Lamar twists the knife, playing his signature takedown of Drake, “Not Like Us,” again and again. And by the third time, the song has become something else. It’s much more than a rap battle. This is an inflection point in rap, the definitive party anthem that tells us, the party is over, and this documentary is the record of the climax. Just as much as this moment on stage is the end of something, it’s the birth of something new, a new era of sharpened teeth and razor wire tongues that purs with the power and aggressive force of a Black Grand National. The party is over. Welcome to the new era.
Daughters
What can documentaries show us about people? They can be vehicles for the greatest kind of empathy. That’s how it is in Daughters, an exceptionally moving account of some incarcerated men and the daughters they’ve left behind. See, there is a father-daughter dance and the men have this one moment, to remember and hope for a life that has been left behind. Seeing the young girls radiate strength and show up unconditionally for their fathers is so deeply affecting. Daughters, as a girl dad myself, is the most disarming and moving piece of filmmaking this year.
Fish War
Fish War is about the stewardship of fishing resources in the state of Washington. It revolves around a court case from fifty years ago, in which treaty-reserved rights were upheld for local tribes to enjoy co-management of fishing resources. It took a lot of local activism to protect what was already written into law, which the documentary traces back over, in a historic dispute that led to violence between police and local tribes and resulted in retained rights for the tribes, but also a standing reminder that local fishing rights are always on the table. The share of half of these essential local resources with area tribes is still taking half of a resource from the land that is rightfully theirs. The documentary strikes a chord and effectively tells its activist message, it’s well-considered and works as a local history of fishing rights which rightfully centers the communities most impacted by these rulings.
Sugarcane
A devastating history of Catholic-run missionary schools and their grave impacts on Indigenous Canadians. Deftly, darkly haunting examination of some unspeakable crimes against humanity, hard to watch and process, just as it appears to have been a hard truth to make a movie about. Sometimes the gravity of a real situation pushes up against our will to document truth, and we might wonder, how much real terror do we want to capture?
Sticky
If you want transgressive truths, you sometimes need to look beyond what is mass produced. Maria Hoffman has made a stunning short video — about 17 minutes long, watch it above! — about how we engage with news online. Switching between a chat, a Nine Inch Nails song, and other documentary and news sources, Hoffman has arrived at her own formal and complete document of engagement, one that is startling, common, and true.
Will & Harper
A sweet shared road trip between longtime friends Will Ferrell and Harper Steele. Will & Harper is a kind movie that comes from a good place about practical acceptance of our friends. It’s a sweet journey without too much of a destination. Like all good roadtrips, being on the journey is the point of the journey. The friends we find along the way are the people who love us unconditionally. Accept nothing less. This is a sweet-hearted movie but it’s also just capturing basic decency among friends. That basic decency feels radical is perhaps the problem and the point.
Doc of Chucky
The Comprehensive and Official sister doc to last year’s also very good Living with Chucky. Thommy Hutson lets the entire story be told. For five hours, we’re swimming in detailed accounts of how the franchise came to be and the processes by which it was made. In the same vein as Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy (2010) and Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History of Friday the 13th (2013). Let’s be honest: you already know if you’re spending five hours watching this. Just know it’s worth it, if you were the kind of person who would.
Piece by Piece
Let’s be clear: this isn’t the same as Todd Haynes making Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1986) out of Barbies. The form is not meant to say anything deep about the subject at all. Instead, the resonance is surface level: LEGO are a fun representation of this bouncy hyper-pop and a suitable faux-originality that also directly aligns with the music of Pharrell Williams. And still, it’s good fun. It was a documentary I could take my 8 year old to. She loves many of these songs. When form and function match, they do not need to cumulatively say anything, the directness is the point. Morgan Neville remains an excellent documentarian of people, following his terrific Won’t You Be My Neighbor (2018) and Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain (2021). What’s more, Neville makes documentaries people want to watch in theaters.
The Remarkable Life of Ibelin
Recounting the many online adventures of a young man with muscular dystrophy, who lived his life inside the Massively Multiplayer Online game World of Warcaft (2004). The friends Ibelin met inside the game gets in touch with his family and shares how they experienced him, not as someone with an incurable disorder, but as an active and known participant of a wonderful and friendly community. It’s moving and creates an interesting portrait of the time spent inside these virtual spaces and how parasocial relationships may still shape our lives.
Half-Life 2: 20th Anniversary
Videogame documentarian Danny O’Dwyer centers the beloved Bellevue based game company Valve in this incisive and revealing look the studio’s development process. Half-Life 2 (2004) remains of the most influential turning-points in the evolution of the gaming medium. Everything changed overnight. Valve’s straight-to-the-consumer model and hardware and systems focused nature for precision allowed them to make a game unlike anyone else was making. The reason why is beyond simple good design: they were coding down to the metal and often beyond what modern computers were thought capable of. This release was a move toward PC gaming as an accessible space with an agreeable context of use but also the evolution of how games were designed, tested, and relayed to the consumer.