The Oscars may be self-congratulatory—and were first created as a union-busting scheme. But when viewed at a macro level, the annual event is still an instrument for good. It regularly highlights quality films that aren’t necessarily financially successful, prompting many to seek them out. (What that means this year is that everyone should fire up their Netflix accounts and watch the small-but-marvelous Train Dreams, about a railroad worker in the early 20th century, nominated for four Oscars but likely to win none of them.)
This extra attention is even more valuable to feature length documentaries, but this years’ spotlight must come with a warning. Four of the five nominated pictures are pretty damn depressing, and the fifth one is “life affirming,” which is marketing code for “still very sad.” It’s not out of the ordinary for this category to be a bit of a downer—it’s been five years since Summer of Soul, Questlove’s reminiscence of a mostly forgotten 1969 concert series in Harlem, won the prize—but these choices are reflective of the times we live in.
Unlike last year, where the subject matter of all five nominees extended beyond U.S. borders, this year just two of the films are “foreign”—one about Russia, the other Iran. But of the remaining three “domestic” films, two are still likely of interest to those who follow policy news. With this in mind, however, after my overview of what’s in the running, I’ve added some further suggestions, in case you plan to program your own mini-festival from the comfort of your own home—including a choice or two that won’t leave you reaching for a bottle of ibuprofen afterwards.
THE NOMINEES
Mr Nobody Against Putin
Directed by David Borenstein and Pavel Talankin
When I was 7 years old, a controversial (though now mostly forgotten) half-hour of television aired on the Mobil Showcase anthology series called The Children’s Story. The short film promised to show what ordinary life would be like if the United States lost a war. As a Cold War kid, this terrified me, so I expected something gruesome. What I got was an adaptation of a James Clavell short story about how a new teacher would one day come to class and, with smiles and good cheer, slyly indoctrinate children with anti-Americanism. (It included the kids slicing up an American flag.)
I thought the show was lame and ribbed my parents for making it appointment viewing, but the fact that I remember it so well 44 years later clearly means something. And it came to mind watching Mr Nobody Against Putin, which takes us inside a Russian school undergoing a radical, immediate shift from teaching to indoctrination.
Pavel “Pasha” Talankin is the young, cool teacher at a school in Karabash, a small town in the Urals known for its ugly copper smelting plant and pollution. (There is a bit of gallows humor, even a sense of pride, about living in such a notorious spot; I’m from New Jersey, I get it.) Talankin organizes and records the school’s special events and teaches video production, so he soon finds himself sitting on a growing archive documenting the immediate shift in policy once Russia invades Ukraine.
Overnight, teachers are ordered to throw out old lesson plans and start new ones which emphasize the correctness of Putin’s military aims. Talankin is told to record flag-waving assemblies and marches and must upload his footage to a database where it can be checked. One of his favorite students worries as her older brother heads to war, and he watches one of his favorite graduates get called up. Things go from bad to worse.
Talankin is not a born dissident. He’s a friendly guy who likes Harry Potter, is kind to his mother (a weary librarian), and, more importantly, has a great fondness for his warts-and-all community. He would likely call himself a Russian patriot. But he’s sickened by the changes he witnesses—and how some of his toadying colleagues are rewarded by the state. He even quits his post in disgust but returns after he makes online contact with the Denmark-based U.S. documentarian David Borenstein, who has connections with the BBC. (Talankin now lives in exile in Europe.) He realizes he can best fight by exposing Putin’s changes from the inside, and this eerie, dystopian movie—a real life version of that Twilight Zone-like propaganda short I watched as a kid—is the result.
Cutting Through Rocks
Directed by Mohammadreza Eyni and Sara Khaki
The second non-U.S. film nominated for best feature length documentary is Cutting Through Rocks, a film about a political situation so volatile there may well be vast changes between the time Oscar voting ends and the awards ceremony.
Its subject is Sara Shahverdi, a motorcycle-riding, unwed, childless woman who is the first of her sex to be elected to the local town council in a rural part of Northern Iran. Though the film is a little unclear about how much of what’s been captured has been staged for the camera, we see how Shahverdi is fearless in the face of institutional sexism. Raised by a father who was tired of having girls—and therefore encouraged to take on more masculine roles—Shahverdi turns her office into an oasis for wives, sisters, and daughters who are deliberately kept legally illiterate, and who come to her with unfair contracts and wills.
While there are triumphs (she indeed wins the election, which is in itself a miracle), there are quick setbacks. It is agreed that she can be allowed to serve on the council, but she is not permitted to have ownership of a legally binding seal. (She takes it anyway.)
Quite upsettingly, the specter of child marriages looms over the entire story. A 16-year-old girl named Fereshteh soon comes under Shahverdi’s wing. She’s already been married for four years to someone 23 years older, and wants a divorce. A judge hears her case and somewhat bemusedly responds, “You should accept your life for what it is.” As Shahverdi continues to make waves, rumors float that she is transgender, and she is pressured to prove otherwise with a medical check-up. Eventually the scrutiny begins to take a toll on her health.
It is a frustrating film to watch, especially as the young girls who initially look up to Shahverdi recognize their families still intend to marry them off, but it does contain glimmers of hope, and the directors exploit the expansive natural setting to their benefit. It screams for a follow-up, considering the convulsive changes happening in Iran right now.
The Perfect Neighbor
Directed by Geeta Gandbhir
The film most likely to win the Oscar for best documentary feature is Geeta Gandbhir’s The Perfect Neighbor, a slow-motion horror film in which a mild neighborhood nuisance turns into (possibly premeditated) murder. Of the nominees, it’s the one people most likely saw (it is streaming on Netflix) and then recommended, as it’s the kind of movie you watch while getting nauseous and mumbling, “I can’t believe what I am seeing.”
Composed almost entirely of footage from police bodycams and private surveillance videos, Gandbhir lets you know up front that this tale will end in bloodshed, then hits rewind to lay it all out incident by incident. Florida woman Susan Lorincz lives alone in a small bungalow next to a common area lawn. The neighborhood kids are used to playing there, and the noise understandably annoys her, but her confrontational manner quickly leads to static in the area. It did not help that the short-fused Lorincz is white and almost everyone else on the block is Black.
Lorincz calls the police again and again, growing more manic with each grievance. Neighborhood parents consistently offer alternate versions of events. The police (who come across quite professionally in this film) do all they can to diffuse the situation, but there is only so much they can do. Try to stay away from her, they shrug. Events build until finally Lorincz fires a gun through her locked door, killing a neighbor. Florida prosecutors are then confronted with stand your ground laws, and delay in making an arrest.
As a film, The Perfect Neighbor is nearly flawless in its pacing. The problem, of course, is that these are real people. We witness, through bodycam footage, the moment when several children are told that their mother has died. It is absolutely brutal. So is the whole scenario—clearly this was a ticking time bomb, but what more could the police have done? Lorincz, who occasionally deploys racial slurs, claims to be a victim of abuse and allows her environment to drum her up into panic mode. But instead of seeking counseling, she grabs a gun.
The Alabama Solution
Directed by Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman
If you thought The Perfect Neighbor was bleak, you better hold on to something. The Alabama Solution is another film that simply could not have been made years ago because the technology to capture the imagery did not exist. A great deal of the footage we see was recorded on cellphone cameras smuggled into prisons. And even allowing for selective editing, a close look at this hell on Earth will make even the most hardened “do the crime, do the time” stalwarts wince.
The problem, at least in Alabama, is straightforward, if an opening graphic is to be believed. Prisons are at 200% capacity. Staffing is at one-third. This inequality explains how cellphones (and hard drugs) are so easily smuggled in. No supervisor wants to go to the boss and suggest that someone needs to be fired (and thus lose more manpower).
As you might expect, this kind of lopsided institution leads to gross corruption and violence. The spine of The Alabama Solution is the case of Steven Davis, a man who was beaten to death by a guard. Guards claim he charged at them with shivs, but witnesses say this is false. As Davis’ family pushes for information (and eventually initiates a lawsuit), other inmates begin a strike across several prisons. This leads to even worse conditions, including decreased meals and solitary confinement for the instigators. (Well, not entirely solitary. There are several rats in the cells with them, as videos show.)
Despite the title, there are no solutions in this film. It does, however, offer a greater understanding of how prison labor has quietly been woven into wider society, and a reminder of how easily sealed-off institutions can plunge into the abyss. It is a deeply compelling but terrifying film.
Come See Me in the Good Light
Directed by Ryan White
As promised, here is the life affirming but still very sad documentary. It profiles Andrea Gibson, a heralded performance poet who died last year of cancer.
Gibson was small in stature but had an enormous, illuminative personality. The film will resonate with anyone who has dealt with cancer up close—the constant doctor visits, the one-step-forward-two-steps-back of treatment, the eventual acceptance of a terminal prognosis. These daily horrors are countered by the warmth Gibson shares with their partner, fellow poet Megan Falley, as well as recitations of their insightful work. The film functions as a roadmap of how to approach mortality with honesty, balancing humor, rage, and kindness. Though on one level this is the most narrowly focused of all the movies up for a nomination, it is likely the most universal.
SOME OVERLOOKED CHOICES
I do not actively dislike any of the five nominees, but I’m not sure that all of them would be my top picks. Here is an alternative slate that stays focused on international issues.
My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow
Directed by Julia Loktev
About three-and-a-half times as long as Mr Nobody Against Putin, but incalculably more intense, is Russian American director Julia Loktev’s frog-in-a-boiling-pot documentary My Undesirable Friends. It intimately shows journalists (mostly young women) realizing that honest journalism has no place in Russia as the nation prepares to invade Ukraine. While the film is terrifying and infuriating, it also succeeds as a “hanging out” picture, in which you get to know and care about all the subjects as they come to terms with their precarious futures. It is, however, well over five hours long, and while I maintain that earns every minute, its defiant length is likely the reason it did not get a nomination. But it is one of the best films in any category from the last year.
Holding Liat
Directed by Brandon Kramer
The Israel-Gaza war is represented at the Oscars with the based-on-real-life narrative The Voice of Hind Rajab in the best international feature category, but I was surprised that Holding Liat didn’t make it past the short list for documentary. The film details the agonies endured by an Israeli family whose daughter/sister/mother is held hostage by Hamas. The twist, such as it is, is that the central figure in the film, who holds Israeli and U.S. citizenship and whose brother is an anti-Zionist professor of some renown, is staunchly anti-Netanyahu. He is nevertheless deployed by the Israeli government to raise awareness for the hostages in the halls of the U.S. Capitol, leading to significant inner tumult. This is a fascinating film about identity and allegiances that refuses to easily fit into a political box.
Riefenstahl
Directed by Andres Veiel
For decades, Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s favorite filmmaker, argued that she was never a true believer of Nazism, just a documentarian. A newly opened cache of audio and video throws a lot of cold water on her claims. Andres Veiel’s film doesn’t just relitigate the culpability of a woman long dead, it exposes the malleability of truth and the power of documentation. (There is also a revelation that her actions may have indirectly led to a massacre of Polish Jews.) But as befitting a project about a great film artist (as few deny Riefenstahl was), the picture is put together with style and elegance, a work of art unto itself.
One to One: John & Yoko
Directed by Kevin Macdonald and Sam Rice-Edwards
I promised one or two less-upsetting films and here they come. One to One: John & Yoko is a riveting portrait of two unusual immigrants to New York City: one British, the other Japanese, and together arguably the most famous couple on the planet at the time. Before they settled in at the Dakota Apartments uptown, they lived a “tatami lifestyle” akin to college students in Greenwich Village from 1971 to 1973. From a modest apartment they helped to plan rallies, went to art galleries, talked on the phone, and watched TV. This articulate recreation of that period (which also included some legal issues and immigration woes) is a must-see for any fans of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, but is also a revelatory portrait of a time and place.
Viva Verdi!
Directed by Yvonne Russo
Before he died, Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi initiated the construction of a retirement home for musicians who had fallen on hard times. The gorgeous structure, with its elegant ballrooms filled with grand paintings and handcrafted decorations, still stands in the center of Milan well over 125 years later. This charming documentary takes us inside, where retired singers and musicians—incredible characters, all of them—keep busy while putting on shows and, importantly, imparting wisdom to a rotating class of students who apply to live alongside their elders for a time. This independently produced and absolutely charming 77-minute film took years to finance and complete, which just makes it more of a marvel.
