5. “76 Days” (d. Hao Wu, Weixi Chen, Anonymous) – currently in virtual cinemas
It may seem like the last thing you want to watch right now, but believe me, this wrenching, engrossing yet inspiring film, tracing one Wuhan hospital’s response to the initial wave of Covid-19, lays a strong claim to being the most urgent film on this list. “76 Days” follows the honest-to-God heroics of the staff as they battle not only the virus, but equipment shortages, extreme fatigue, and the soul-shattering ethical misery of having to quarantine the dying from their loved ones, and having to turn some of the sick away. That they do so with not just exceptional professionalism, but extraordinary compassion and humor – from the superhuman affection shown toward a recalcitrant elderly patient, to the nurse who draws smiley faces on rubber-glove balloons to cheer up sleeping patients, to the way they decorate their plastic coveralls with pictures and slogans (“Claypot Chicken I Miss You” reads one) – is also a valuable corrective to the racist narrative that China’s containment of the virus’ early spread is due to some innate callousness toward human life in that society. While many of us grouchily stare down a second lockdown, this deceptively well-crafted, heart-piercing doc should be mandatory viewing as a galvanizing reminder that if putting on a mask and staying at home is the extent of the sacrifice we have to make, we are blessed indeed.
4. “Gunda” (d. Viktor Kossakovsky) – currently in virtual cinemas
You do need to be in a particular mood to give yourself over to this placid, dialogue-free observation of a sow and her litter of squalling piglets. That said, if you have the discipline to turn off all the lights and leave your phone in another room, a home viewing of the spellbinding “Gunda” might just be the closest approximation of “real” cinema you can get outside a real cinema. Not just because of its gorgeous monochrome cinematography (Amanda Seyfried‘s glowiness in “Mank” has nothing on Kossakovsky and co-DP Egil Haskjold Larsen‘s breathtaking key-lit profile of the noble mama pig). Nor even because of a soundscape so rich with the buzzing of flies, the huffing of cattle, the spludging of trotters through mud, that it’s almost sensory overload. More crucially, it’s the quiet, rapt attention that “Gunda” invites and rewards that reminds us of the way we watch films in a theater, and the way, when not spoonfed story, we simply create it for ourselves, cued by the soft galumphing of cows across a misty meadow, the slow-motion hopping of a plump one-legged chicken, or the way the animals often pose with a breathtaking disregard for the fourth wall. It ends, inevitably on a note of loss, but “Gunda” isn’t depressing, proving that where there’s life, human or animal, there’s not only hope, there’s drama.
3. “Welcome to Chechnya” (d. David France) – available through HBO Max
David France’s terrifying expose of the state-led torture, beating, “disappearance,” and murder of gay men and women in the Chechen Republic, which contains some viscerally upsetting cellphone-shot eyewitness footage, premiered back in January. Nearly 12 months later, its impact should be dulled, given all we have experienced since, and yet if anything it lands with even greater urgency. Always a story of borderline incomprehensible cruelty and persecution – as well as of the valor of the small band of activists trying painstakingly to smuggle the most endangered out of the country – now it acts as a stark reminder of the way strongman-led states could operate with impunity against their most vulnerable populations even before the world became distracted by a virus. The film’s sole artistic embellishment – the use of crude deepfake technology to anonymize the persecuted without rendering them featureless – is an unsettling ongoing reminder of having to hide your identity in a society that will kill you for it while its leader guffaws. But if the faces are blurry, the wrenching, often painfully unresolved stories make one thing clear: it is only through outside support and awareness that these fragile escape routes – presumably further imperiled by travel bans and lockdowns – exist at all.
2. “Time” (d. Garrett Bradley) – currently on Amazon Prime
If Garrett Bradley’s “Time” were “just” an activist doc, designed to motivate political and social change by chronicling subject Fox Rich (surely among the most towering characters in 2020 film, documentary and otherwise) in her decades-long campaign for the release of her imprisoned husband, it would be a highly effective one. But it’s both bigger and more intimate than that: by cutting together Bradley’s footage with Rich’s own home video diaries from the past 20 years as she raised six kids, built a thriving business, and became a community leader, it hops around in time, propelled less by chronology than by mood. This improvisational atmosphere is enhanced by a superb soundtrack that leans heavily on the piano compositions of Ethiopian pianist Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, which beautifully, if improbably, evoke the blues and ragtime traditions of the film’s New Orleans setting. It builds to a profound portrait of an extraordinary, embattled but undaunted woman, who has been shaped by deeply unjust outside forces, but whose strength of will has enabled her to transcend them, and through whose own words we gain an intensely vivid picture of the vulnerabilities and victories that mark – not as a straight line, but as experienced, in fits and starts, clamors and silences – the strange movement of time.
1. “Collective” (d. Alexander Nanau) – available On Demand
When “Spotlight” won Best Picture there was a weirdly vocal minority claiming a self-serving reason for the film’s popularity with critics, as though we somehow saw ourselves in the pioneering investigative journalists it admired. One can only presume those same idiots will also roll their eyes at “Collective” appearing on year-end lists, so let me be abundantly clear: there is nothing I have ever done that remotely compares to the work of the reporters of Romania’s Sports Gazette in doggedly pursuing the fallout from a disastrous fire in a Bucharest nightclub in 2015. In many ways, “Collective” provides almost a unified theory of every topic relevant to 2020 Western society, as the investigation joins the dots between governmental corruption, healthcare, the erosion of press freedoms, populist political rhetoric, corporate fraud, and plain old human greed. Yet somehow, within this tightly “plotted,” procedural morality thriller, Nanau never loses sight of the primary victims – some who survived, and far too many who did not – and the exhausted, risky heroism of men and women in strip-lit newsrooms battling to get the truth to a public that is simultaneously being manipulated to think, act and vote against its own best interests.
A few more recommendations for the still hungry:
Errol Morris‘ “My Psychedelic Love Story” would probably be in spot #21 if we had one; his biodoc on Timothy Leary‘s onetime paramour Joanna Harcourt-Smith is as mercurial as its subject, but as always, Morris’ deceptively direct interviewing technique reveals far more about her than her rather aggravatingly self-serving reminiscences do. Bonnie Cohen and Jon Schenk‘s “Athlete A” also pushed all my buttons, going into scathing detail over the sexual abuse and cover-up scandal in USA Gymnastics, that culminated in hours of harrowing but intensely cathartic survivor impact statements, yet ultimately emerging as a deeply admiring story of the courage and tenacity of the women who came forward. Alice Gu‘s glazed, sprinkled “The Donut King” is a fascinating look at the towering personality behind the Californian phenomenon of Cambodian-owned independent donut shops, though it’s most interesting after the first-generation bootstrap-rise narrative gives way and more complicated human frailties and fatal flaws are revealed, all of which could have used some more unpacking. Sam Pollard‘s “MLK/FBI” was on the main list until I realized I couldn’t find any non-festival 2020 release information – apologies if I’ve missed something there. It is however due to be released on January 15, 2021, and while it does feel a little like a precursor to a documentary that will happen in 2027 when the tapes of the FBI’s illegal wire-tapping of Martin Luther King Jr‘s private phone lines will be unsealed, still it’s a consummately well-made, intelligent and ethically probing doc. I wish I could say the same of Dawn Porter‘s “John Lewis: Good Trouble” which I found disappointingly cursory, though in even sketching out the rough details of Lewis’ extraordinary life it does necessarily give a quick overview of the 20th century Civil Rights movement in general, so there’s that. However, a more trenchant investigation of Lewis’ non-violence stance, of how he dealt with those segments of the Black community who accused him of courting white allyship too much, or indeed of how his political clashes with those he was friendly with personally were resolved (or not) might have yielded a richer, if no less overall admiring, film. Documentary-creation machine Alex Gibney had a very productive year again, so it would be perverse not to mention his 2020 output, although the best of it is probably his two-parter “Agents of Chaos” about Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election, which was excluded on the basis of my arbitrary no-serialized-TV rule. “Totally Under Control,” his Trump pandemic response doc feels just too of the moment, and too embroiled in a situation that has not even begun to play itself out yet, to be anything other than an exercise in masochism right now (I confess I have not had time to catch up with his other 2020 film, “Crazy, Not Insane“). And finally, Arthur Jones‘ “Feels Good Man,” is an entertaining and wide-ranging excavation of the Pepe the Frog meme, that provides a great overview of how uncontrolled IP can be subverted and weaponized entirely contrary to its creator’s intentions. But though the original cartoonist Matt Furie is clearly not at all complicit in the co-opting of his work by the extreme right, his dawning dismay and attempts at damage control are so late-breaking that it’s a little frustrating to witness now. That said, it does contain that clip of Richard Spencer getting clocked on the head, so five stars, unmissable, A+, etc.
Merry Christmas, everyone, especially to anyone who’s ever punched a Nazi.
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