The entire history of the directors of the Best Documentary nominees
Thursday, February 25, 2016 at 10:00PM Tim here. Since Glenn already did such a great job looking at the films that would ultimately be nominated for the Best Documentary Oscar, I wanted to approach that category from a different angle. You might call it the auteur studies approach: I've decided to highlight one film made by each of the directors whose films are up for that award.
And the best part is, you can follow along! Each of these movies is available for streaming...
Liz Garbus (What Happened, Miss Simone?) has been at the documentary game far longer than any of the other nominees. She co-directed the 1998 Oscar nominee The Farm: Angola, USA, but today I'd like to draw your attention to one of her other social issue documentaries: Girlhood (Netflix), a 2003 film studying two young women in the Maryland juvenile detention system.
Their names are Shanae (an African-American tween) and Megan (white, teenaged), and the film that Garbus built around them has epic enough ambitions to be worthy of such a sprawling title. It covers three years in their lives, as Shanae manages to turn herself around and, with the support of kind facility staffers, is able to return to society outside the corrections system with a clear head and wisdom, though no small amount of sadness. Megan, meanwhile, is dragged down by the toxic people in her family, making her own attempts to break away from her past and forge a new, stable adult identity much more daunting and difficult. It's a terrific piece of cinéma vérité, with Garbus and crew inserting themselves silently into the girls' lives and soaking up all their details; the one great disappointment it offers is that it was too resource-starved to match the scope and impact of its obvious forerunner, Hoop Dreams. At 82 minutes, one longs for even more of Girlhood than we get. Still, even this budget-conscious version of the film is an excellent piece of cinematic reportage.
Joshua Oppenheimer (The Look of Silence) and his producer Signe Byrge Sørensen are the only other second-time nominees besides Garbus. Before his explosive 2012 The Act of Killing, Oppenheimer worked in shorts, stretching all the way back to his time at Harvard, where he made his this film The Entire History of the Louisiana Purchase (Fandor) in 1998.
Might as well title it that as anything, though viewers expecting to see even a partial history of the Louisiana Purchase will walk away disappointed. By the two-minute mark, the film has revealed itself as a fantasia on delusion, religion, alien abduction, the Nuclear Age, and the culture of the American Southwest. And how they all blend together, surprisingly smoothly. Oppenheimer, working with Christine Cynn, was interested in exploring how faulty and self-serving memories form personal narratives at variance with reality, and he's later all but explicitly identified this as the dry run for The Act of Killing (which he also made with Cynn). It's a striking effort in its own right, though, marred by the unrestrained amibition of a feverish young person who wants to cram everything into 49 minutes, and allows himself to lose sight of the fact that his subjects are also human beings (the real-life story has a horrible ending that the film glides through). But as flaws go, "so much ambition that the filmmakers can't control of it" is one of the very best, and Louisiana Purchase is an extraordinary investigation into a particularly American form of willful madness.
Asif Kapadia (Amy) is responsible for only one other documentary feature, 2010's Senna. Prior to that, he worked exclusively in fiction, and had I wanted to be mean to him (and you), I might push you towards his dimwitted 2006 horror film The Return. But let's play nice and take one step farther back, to the meditative 2001 BAFTA-winning adventure film The Warrior (Netflix), starring the always great and always under-appreciated Irrfan Khan).
It's very much a fable, visually and in it story. Khan plays a warrior who serves a feudal lord in Rajasthan, India, in an indeterminate long-ago time; the action takes place on the edges of the vast Thar Desert and into the crags of icy mountains, settings that are as real-world as it gets (the British production was shot entirely on location), but which play onscreen as frankly mythic. Kapadia and co-writer Tim Miller play that up: enormous stretches of the film are completely wordless, and while the warrior has a name, he might as well not, for all the movie cares about him as a down-to-earth human. He's a vessel for philosophical profundity, as The Warrior walks him through the process of deciding to renounce violence, only to discover that this is a very hard thing to do. Everything is being treated as the most etched-in-stone Platonic ideal of itself, and Kapadia's handling of the material doesn't let much air in, nor does Dario Marianelli's luscious, too-rich score. But Khan is characteristically terrific in a morally thorny role that mostly plays out through his facial expressions, and anyway, Roman Osin's cinematography is eye-meltingly beautiful.
(Trivia: the film was rejected for Oscar consideration when the Academy concluded that, Hindi not being an official language in the United Kingdom, it didn't "count").
With just four credits, Matthew Heineman (Cartel Land) is arguably the greenest of these directors, but in that brief time he's worked with such prestigious brands as HBO and CNN. At the Sundance Film Festival in 2012, he won the first Candescent Award for Socially Conscious Documentary Filmmaking with Escape Fire: The Fight to Rescue American Healthcare (Amazon).
It's only four years old, but watching Escape Fire now is still a nostalgia trip. Not because the subject matter is dated – on the contrary, the film's gloomy diagnosis that medical care in the United States is corrupted by profit margins and thus disinclined towards actual "healing" is as in-the-moment in 2016 as it ever was. But the method it takes to get to that point, and the superficial, cafeteria-like approach it makes to suggesting answers, are so Late Aughts, right down to the closing-credits exhortation to visit the film's website, while the soundtrack shifts into an upbeat register after ninety minutes of tensed-up strings. Typical of the form, Heneiman and co-director Susan Froemke throw out aphorisms, anecdotes, and talking heads asking obvious rhetorical questions, all in service to a feel-goodish statement that We Can Change!, though the longer it goes, the more incremental the film's solutions turn out to be. Still, it's not like any of this is wrong.
Evgeny Afineevsky (Winter on Fire: Ukraine's Fight for Freedom) has been busy in the years since his 2009 feature debut, the dubiously-titled Oy Vey! My Son Is Gay!, making no fewer than three films of varying length about the Euromaidan protests in Ukraine. He's also worked in a more domestic sphere, with 2014's Divorce: A Journey through the Kids' Eyes (Amazon Prime) providing a snapshot of… well, he kind of has a habit of titles that give away the content, doesn't he?
The exact provenance of the film is hard to make out, but it's clear enough that Divorce was made with an eye towards therapeutic applications, both because of its bite-sized length (54 minutes), and the ending, title cards proclaiming expert testimony from family therapists discussing the right way for divorcing parents to treat their children during the process (one doctor even praises the film itself, which is weird thing to encounter from within). It seems, therefore, more than a little uncharitable to hold the film's essential lack of cinematic ingenuity against it; this was undoubtedly made on the cheap, to be easily understood by preteens. The entire movie consists of talking-heads interviews with children, describing their feelings about their parents's divorce, frequently with children's drawings expressing the emotional turmoil green-screened into the background. I cannot say if these testimonies, and the ultimate arc that the subjects make from misery to empowerment and self-assurance would serve to comfort its target audience, but I hope so. For the rest of us, there's really no earthly reason to bother.
Reader Comments (3)
Wow. I did not know Asif Kapadia directed THE RETURN. That's quite a swing.
I wasn't sold on LOUISIANA PURCHASE, but boy is it something!
Liz Garbus is pretty great. The Farm: Angola USA is somewhat dated now, but it is still worth watching. The scenes of the parole boards are heartbreaking. I'm looking forward to her upcoming Anderson Cooper/Gloria Vanderbilt film on HBO.
I loved Girlhood...I found it on Netflix one day because I was looking for the recent french film and it was before it was on there. But I stumbled upon the doc, and it was right up my alley.