At festivals, you get the greatest sampling of subjects and interests in documentary films. Take a risk and go see docs at your next well-programmed festival and be rewarded by a smorgasbord of topical interests and highly charged social issue movies that move the needle more often than feature films might do. It’s this range that makes documentaries so thrilling. We can think of the documentary as editing projects, a compilation of life, organized into a film. In this collection of ten documentaries, we get a bit of everything. Profiles of popular artists, authors, athletes, astronauts, and fascists. We get stories about people who play a game with the advertising culture of the dead internet, cinephiles who love horror as much as we do, a chilling story about an unspeakable crime, and the most exceptional genre-fluid piece on the power and pain in Black lives. This year, it’s a grab bag of works operating outside the conventions and stories of the modern cinema. Let’s dig in!

1-800-On-Her-Own

Ani DiFranco is too complex for Dana Flor’s documentary, that wrestles primarily with DiFranco’s difficulty balancing being an artist and having a family. It’s one of many surface-level contradictions about DiFranco, who championed and stood for Queer identity, but now must play the normative role as family matriarch. DiFranco is a gift as a subject. Her politics run deep in her blood. She is impassioned. Everything sits right at the surface with her. In a Zoom call with Justin Vernon of Bon Iver, he rejects the idea of their collaboration, and you see it breaking DiFranco. Even when something hard happens, it doesn’t seem to mean anything at all in the documentary— anything of interest goes formally unexamined. The hagiographic approach of 1-800-On-Her-Own, as the title probably suggests, is so high on DiFranco that Flor holds no interest in digging into anything in particular or making a movie about anything. It is, above all else, a time capsule of an uncomfortable moment in an artist’s life, without much conclusion or any progressive story to be told at all. A deeply confusing venture that leaves everything on the table and does absolutely nothing at all with such an intriguing subject, often flashing back to past events and performances it has little interest in connecting to anything. Call it a mere observation of a very interesting person who begs for a less banal treatment.

Baby Doe

Without so much as checking for vital signs, a mother stuffs her newborn into a trash bag. Many years later, new forensic evidence brings her case in front of a jury and Jessica Earnshaw’s documentary shows why someone would be driven to such psychopathic outcomes. The reason why is, naturally, her faith. She was pregnant out of wedlock and seemingly nobody around her knew (so painfully obvious in photos of her from the time), including her husband. So, her husband seems to be the second problem, that she’s stuck in a relationship where stuffing a newborn into a bag is easier than discussing openly with her partner for many years. Earnshaw’s documentary is surprising, though, because it never flinches or looks away, and is able to find empathy even in what seems to be the most heinous act.

BAR

If watching folks prepare for a test is your idea of a good time, then you’re just like me, and watching people with passion fully immerse themselves in what they love is a worthy venture. BAR is about the Beverage Alcohol Resource’s 5-day program wherein the most dedicated bartenders can reach the prestigious ranks of a select few cocktail artisans. The program prepares its students so that they can serve any cocktail at any bar in the world with grace and confidence. Many drinks are shaken and insert shots of pouring and imbibing are plentiful. Doesn’t have a lot of liftoff for anyone outside the scene, but we can imagine BAR has its select demographic, who will get enough out of it. The test of a specialized documentary is whether someone with no interest can become someone with invested interest. BAR isn’t especially that, but if you’re already in, it’s bespoke and catered to you, like a custom-prepared spirit from a world class bartender.

BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions

BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions is a major work. Kahlil Joseph, who defined the ongoing visual aesthetics of Kendrick Lamar and Beyoncé in Good Kidd, m.A.A.d. City and Lemonade, has now directed a revelatory experimental film. BLKNWS says upfront: “this is not a documentary,” and that’s true, it’s highly experimental docufiction of the highest order. This astounding work is a transcendent meditation on Black power and pain. A journey through the consciousness of Black history, the “story” surrounds West African curator and scholar Funmilayo Akechukwu, whose work on “The Resonance Field,” opens a thought-portal, where we can explore an entire visual history of Black media. Call it docufiction, aesthetic journalism, or an art installation, but the truth is: BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions is everything. Expertly photographed by Bradford Young (Arrival, Selma) and edited by Paul Rogers (Everything Everywhere All at Once), this is a staggering work of pure cinematic genius that renders many of our definitions about film obsolete. The film is, after all, as free as it is Black, and everything about that is so exceptionally gorgeous, that it signals the arrival of a real trailblazing force in movies, in Kahlil Joseph. Do not be surprised when Seattle native Joseph becomes an unstoppable force in art film culture. For what it’s worth, he’s already there, and BLKNWS expands the potential of what movies can be. A legitimate and freeform work of cultural preservation.

Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story

What makes a good writer? Bad writers describe. Good writers evoke. They do not paint a portrait with adjectives. Their cadence comes from the rhythm of words. When prose gets going, it’s because the order of the words is right. That’s how it feels reading Edna O’Brien, the iconic literary force of feminism from Ireland. All the words are in the right place. When you read them in the order they are in, you see a writer who understands assonance and what words feel like in the mouth. Listening to it, especially in the cadence of an Irish lilt, is uniquely beautiful. This documentary stays close to the art and reflects upon a literary life by embodying the literature. It’s full of good choices like that. By understanding the author and their words with some intimacy, it feels we are offered a clear, non-standard portrait of the author, just as they are. Blue Road reaches beyond generic profiling and will either make new fans or make folks even bigger fans of the artist.

Chain Reactions

We’re not in Kansas anymore — in 2022’s Lynch/Oz, Alexandre O. Philippe took us somewhere over the Lynchian rainbow and now he’s bringing us under the cosmic death rays of Tobe Hooper’s hot Texas sun. Both films are collections of personal essays exploring our relationships to transformational cinema. In Chain Reactions, Patton Oswalt, Takashi Miike, Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Stephen King, and Karyn Kusama pontificate on the enduring power of Hooper’s horror masterclass, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. They each grasp onto a different element but in total create a vivid tribute to one of our greatest genre films. As a piece of highly watchable film appreciation, good editing and the right subjects ensure these Chain Reactions are more than basic personal reflections, and help expand our understanding of Massacre, and its place in the canon of horror. It would be lovely if Alexandre O. Philippe kept going, and made his own devotional filmography celebrating the best of pop-cult cinema.

Remaining Native

Remaining Native is about a young man running to prove that he is worthy of his name. His name is Ku Stevens — Kutoven is a Paiute word meaning, “eagle bringing the light from the darkness.” That’s what Ku already is, and when he runs hard enough, he’ll see it in himself. This coming-of-age documentary blends personal aspiration with cultural darkness. Ku isn’t only running toward the power of his ancestral name, but also from the horrors of assimilated indigenous boarding schools. This is why Ku already has earned the name “Kutoven” — alongside Haudenosaunee filmmaker Paige Bethmann — they have already brought light to the darkness of these schools, and their grim designs. The running is almost the secondary topic, but it is symbolically relevant to the social issues at the heart of Remaining Native. Nobody goes to find athletes in those spaces and Ku’s long-distance running, he hopes, will bring him all the way from Nevada to The University of Oregon’s distance running team. If people leave the reservation and they find success, Ku says, they never come back. But he will come back. Because he is the eagle who brings light to darkness.

Riefenstahl

There’s a scene in Riefenstahl where Leni Riefenstahl is being lit for an interview. She becomes tense and demanding. Old in age and worn by time, all she can consider is the staging of the interview. In German director Andres Veiel’s documentary, we are (refreshingly) never asked, could we separate the artist from her art? It’s clear she thought she could and did. And has no real regrets or apprehensions about her work done under the terms of the Nazis, knowing that her staging was done correctly and that her intentions were to make “peaceful” films. She turns herself into another monster of history, as her accounts conflict with themselves and the documentary uses her own words to untangle her series of lies and justifications — and still, she never relented. Could the artist even see and know herself? Was she so far gone an inhumane that she had no empathy at all? Riefenstahl is not going to fill the audience with new information but would also be a mixed starter course on the filmmaker and actress, with not enough grounding to really be for newcomers to her story and works. Whether you should watch them at all, or this documentary, is also not nearly as important a question as it’s always been posed as. She reveals herself to be an aesthetic objectivist without much humanity, which is all we could’ve ever figured she was.

Sally

National Geographic makes safe documentaries. Sally is yet another. There are really not any notable choices, no experiments, or clever techniques. This is a talking head type of documentary about a very well known figure. It does have a point of view: the story is mostly told from the perspective of Sally’s longtime partner Tam O’Shaughnessy, revolving around their love affair and the challenges of being a queer woman making inroads in a male dominated industry. This becomes a case of: we do not want to review the person, but the movie exists only as a rigid portrait of who they were. It is informative: Sally, the first American woman in space, had to overcome a lot of prejudice to get into space. Then there are the recreations of the couple’s romance, which feels weird as hell, in this movie that takes no risks. It just feels like a tasteless thing to replicate about the late subject. And reenactments are generally a bad choice in such a narrow approach. It’s mostly interesting to see a real astronaut hero and remember what we used to celebrate, in contrast to the recent stunt of Blue Origin sending some women celebrities briefly into orbit, just for the embarrassing faux feminism of it all. There’s not enough here to dig in deeper. A new understanding of Sally is not possible here, unless this is an introduction. Then, it is useful history, sure. Like many biographies of astronauts tend to be, this one is matter-of-fact and straight-forward, but does remind us Sally was a special and trailblazing person in aeronautics.

Unclickable

The Internet was, at some point, an interesting virtual frontier. Now it’s half-dead and easier to find faux content than anything real, or worth clicking through. Part of its demise is due to fraudulent advertising determining the outcomes of content. Unclickable asks, is ad fraud destroying democracy? They put together a team of programmers to subvert massive companies and the biggest political campaigns in America. And it works. But the question may be too broad and self-interested — implicitly suggesting Democracy is a function of advertising, which is at best, only partly true. Ad fraud often is seen as a victimless crime, but the documentary does locate victims and identify for them how they are being targeted and what it’s costing them. It’s a short documentary and the edit doesn’t feel final or complete, necessarily, but it’s a touch-point topic for the Dead Internet of today.