“Quest”
Jonathan Olshefski’s documentary portrait of a black family’s life changes (or lack thereof) throughout the eight years of the Obama administration felt startlingly timely, according to our reviewer, when it premiered, in a Sundance film festival that was happening concurrently with the inauguration of his successor, an orange sack of shit. But “Quest” is more meditative than pointed, ennobled by Olshefski’s rigorous verite style, which loops voiceover over the picture but otherwise does not intrude on the observation of these lives. Dramas do occur, even senseless violence, but it’s the aftereffects that become the focus of this humane and empathetic film: how we get up again after being knocked down. Dad Christopher “Quest” Rainey, mother Christine’a and daughter PJ are no strangers to being knocked down but what emerges most clearly is their decency, a quality that gets talked about a lot by politicians but seldom truly celebrated. The Raineys are the kind of people who will work in a homeless shelter even when their own roof is held together with sheet plastic or do menial jobs to support a recording studio that gives a platform to otherwise disenfranchised local talent. The TV may always be on and constantly signaling scandals and political shifts and controversies, but “Quest” reminds us that those chattering pundits are not America. This is.
“Tarzan’s Testicles”
Without a doubt the best title for a doc — or any film, really — that we’re likely to come across in 2017, for the foreseeable future you may have to do some rooting through festival sidebars to be able to track down Romanian director Alexandru Solomon‘s “Tarzan’s Testicles.” But we strongly urge you to do so: it’s a wild, weird yet contemplative look at the only partially recognized Black Sea nation of Abkhazia, and the Institute in its capital in which apes and monkeys are bred for live scientific experimentation. As horrific as that sounds (and there are some very upsetting scenes) the film’s overall remit is broader, and somehow dreamier, with the attitudes of the employees to their furry, miserable charges relating to the tiny, beleaguered country’s war-torn recent past and religiously divided present. The institute, which was set up in the 1920s by a kind of Soviet Dr. Moreau whose ambition was to create a human/ape hybrid species to serve as subhuman slave labor (no, really), becomes an uncanny microcosm for the conflicts that beset that entire region today, and it explores everything from Abkhazia’s fervent, militaristic nationalism to the jawdropping rejection of Darwinian science in favor of Orthodox dogma, even by some of the younger scientists in the facility.
“Water & Power: A California Heist”
As “just” a National Geographic issues doc, Marina Zenovich‘s “Water and Power” may not reinvent the wheel in terms of presentation, but that the result is as compelling as it is, just shows what an extraordinary story there is to be told here. And with its unavoidable shades of “Chinatown,” Zenovich, who also directed the Roman Polanski docs “Wanted and Desired” and “Odd Man Out” may just be the perfect person to tell it. Uncovering a conspiracy as old as a developed California itself, ‘Water and Power’ starts with human stories of deprivation due to drought — the residents who have to travel into town and pay $5 for a shower, and who have to flush their toilets with recycled dishwater and collected rain. But it soon spins outward from these small stories of hardship into a staggeringly massive picture of high-level corruption and corporate greed. Not only is profit placed before people, in so doing the landscape and environment are in serious peril, with massive over-pumping (groundwater is not regulated the way that land is, so anyone can pump out water that lies beneath his neighbor’s land) leading to subsidence and the kind of irony that can have verdant almond groves surround scrubby residential areas where retired couples literally fear for their lives due to water scarcity.
“The White World According to Daliborek”
Another festival title we’ve picked up on our travels, “The White World According to Daliborek” has an irresistibly catchy hook: as a “documentary play” — that is, some of the scenarios are restaged or otherwise manipulated by director Vit Klusak — it takes as it subject a Czech neo-Nazi whose violent rhetoric and incoherent but vicious belief system contrasts to genuinely humorous effect with his pathetic, provincial life. Dalibor is pushing 40, lives with his equally batshit mother in an economically depressed Czech town, works a menial job in a factory and posts terrible homemade youtube videos in a variety of completely baffling personas. It’s not often that a documentary comes across as an all-out comedy, but ‘Daliborek’ is often hilarious, and for once there is really no guilt in laughing at rather than with. But for all the entertainment value along the way, there is a sobering message about the normalization of this idiotic, fringe point of view and Klusak refuses to let us leave the theater laughing. Instead, in a divisive, ethically ambiguous ending he follows Dalibor and family to Auschwitz for a summary reminder that any casual affection we may have incidentally accrued for this bumbling, tragicomic figure has been singularly misplaced.
“Whose Streets?”
It’s hard for any documentary on historical events to feel definitive, especially if it’s about something that only happened a few years back. There may yet be some great “OJ: Made In America” style epic to be made about the protests in Ferguson after the death of black teenager Michael Brown at the hands of a cop, but in terms of capturing the mood and reality of the time from the ground, it’s hard to imagine anyone doing it better than Sabaah Folayan and Damon Davis do with “Whose Streets?” The filmmakers, who are activists and organizers as well as directors, mix their own work with found footage from social media and elsewhere to visceral, powerful effect, examining less the case that sparked the protests than the protest itself, the way it grew, the disagreements within the movement. Individual figures stand out, but it’s really a movie about the power of the collective, a testament to citizen journalism, and in some ways less a documentary than a piece of historical evidence. It opens next month, and we can’t recommend it enough.
So. Much. Great. Documentary. So. Little. Time. The above is, as we mentioned, just a snapshot selection of where we’ve managed to get to at this stage in the doc year, and there are a few that narrowly missed the cut like Laura Poitras‘ “Risk”; Melanie Laurent‘s enviro-doc “Tomorrow”; touching exploration of a forgotten life “God Knows Where I Am”; wrenching “Cries From Syria”; insightful “Abacus: Small Enough To Jail“; multi-stranded story of newly released ex-cons trying to make it on the outside in “Land of the Free”; and big-game hunting doc “Trophy.” Elsewhere, “All these Sleepless Nights” and “I am Not Your Negro” among others, were on our end-of-2016 list, even though they were 2017 releases, so we didn’t include those here, but obviously heartily recommend them.
But there is also a whole host of films that we just haven’t got to yet, but hear great things about, like the story of the first trans activist “The Death and Life of Marsha P Johnson”; HBO true crime doc “Mommy Dead and Dearest“; Grateful Dead doc “Long Strange Trip“; “Tell Them We Are Rising” which explores black colleges and universities; Colin Hanks‘ film “Eagles of Death Metal: Nos Amis“; “Elian” about the custody battle over a Cuban boy; “Intent to Destroy” Joe Berlinger‘s Armenian Genocide doc; Barbara Kopple‘s “This is Everything: Gigi Gorgeous“; “Served Like A Girl” about female war vets suffering PTSD; “The Blood is At The Doorstep” about a police shooting; Sundance doc “The Force” about Oakland PD; the buzzed titles, also from Sundance “Step” and Netflix’s “Chasing Coral“; not to mention the surprise Sundance Documentary winner, “Dina.”
I’m sure there are many more for our to-do list; if you think there’s one or more that we should be keeping an eye out for between now and the more definitive end-of-year list, do shout.