TIFF' 24: Three Documentaries, Three Portraits of Resistance

by Cláudio Alves

A moment of joyful defiance in SUDAN, REMEMBER US.

Documentary cinema tends to get the short shrift regarding festival coverage, unless one's dealing with a strictly non-fiction fest. It seems made-up stories and dramatized truths will always excite mainstream audiences in ways that documentaries won't. Perchance, it all comes down to the need for cinema as escape. Perhaps it's more about historical trends and industry prescriptiveness. Whatever the case, it's a pity because the medium's future is often found outside the confines of narrative filmmaking. Moreover, when looking at political cinema, the potential directness of documentaries cannot be overstated, charging at issues head-on rather than through the oblique avenues of fiction. 

At TIFF 2024, three documentaries felt especially urgent, even when regarding the historical past. They're stories of resistance in its many forms – Hind Meddeb's Sudan, Remember Us, Raoul Peck's Ernest Cole: Lost and Found, and Santiago Esteinou's The Freedom of Fierro…

SUDAN, REMEMBER US, Hind Meddeb

When Omar Al-Bashir fell, many felt it was the start of a new era for the Sudanese people. Empowered by activist movements, they rose against a dictator whose regime was marked by genocide and other unimaginable violences. Religious pluralism was in sight, a feminist uprising, the shackles of tribalism finally dismantled and left to rot in the dirt. With that in mind, Paris-based journalist and documentarian Hind Meddeb traveled to the country with her camera, ready to register this moment of renewal after revolution, the end of dictatorship and the birth of something altogether different. Hope was high, not only for those behind the camera but also for those in front of it.

For Sudan, Remember Us, Meddeb focused on the experiences of young activists, privileging their perspective over older generations whose past revolts echo through today's movements. Maha, Shajane, Muzamil, and Khatab are her protagonists, giving shape to a film whose collective subject could have easily led to a diffuse structure. Instead, Sudan, Remember Us feels tightly controlled, circling these four figures over the years, witnessing how optimism collapsed, shattered into pieces where one can still glimpse a glimmer of that original hope, no matter how dim it might be. Or not. Maybe the shattering never happens, though the viewer's mind wants to fill in the gaps with that depressing outcome.

In the film's swift 76 minutes, Meddeb covers much ground, leaving ellipsis scattered across surges of outrage and direct action. Sometimes, she moves forward to then abruptly retrocede, showing the present crisis before stepping back to the dictator's fall, today's ongoing resistance against the looming shadow of the Khartoum Massacre of June 2019. These spaces in between beckon speculation, but they also emphasize the project's lyrical properties. Within the realm of cinema and beyond, Meddeb's documentarian proposes poetry as the highest form of resistance – in this, it reminded me of the masterful Silvered Water, Syria Self-Portrait and it wasn't the only TIFF title to do so. 

By the end of Sudan, Remember Us, the glimmer of hope isn't dim at all. It's blinding bright from under a patina of dried blood, confirming the young people's unshakeable conviction, perseverance undefeated even in the face of brutality. The film is thus a document and a song of sacred heroes, a voice manifest that joins a thousand others in begging for the world's attention. Don't ignore what's happening in Sudan, its bloody Civil War and paramilitary conflict borne out of a colonialist legacy. And don't forget those who gave it all up in the fight for a better life, who clamor for change and resound into eternity. Through Sudan, Remember Us and other such efforts, their lament, their battle cry, will never be silenced.

ERNEST COLE: LOST AND FOUND, Raoul Peck

In 1967, at the height of the South African apartheid, Ernest Cole published House of Bondage, a book of photography that revealed the regime's violence through the rarely publicized Black perspective. The work was a phenomenon, yet for it to be seen, the artist had to flee his home country, a motherland to which he'd never return. Raoul Peck's Ernest Cole: Lost and Found is a story of the exiled dedicated to those who, like the film's subject, died displaced. It's a study, but it's also a self-portrait of sorts, trying to use Cole's work and words, the testimony of friends and family reshaped into a monologue, as the building blocks from which the documentary emerges a monument and an elegy.

This is no easy feat, for photography isn't inherently cinematic, discarding the seventh art's time and movement for a frozen instant. Peck's most common device is the use of editing as a tool for juxtaposition, giving Cole's work a new verve befitting this alternative presentation. When the camera pans, moves through the image, pushes in, or scrolls horizontally across it, there's the feeling of being at an exhibition, letting one's eye travel through the works on the wall. It's not an especially innovative mechanism – only half a step removed from Movie Maker – but it works remarkably well, especially when the director insinuates sound as a way to subtly enliven the stillness on screen. 

Some of the film's most interesting passages happen when Peck takes his camera to the same places Cole shot, implying a frightening continuity, sometimes a benign contrast, to the social dynamics documented in the original photographs. And through this, the portrait expands past Cole himself to become bigger than the small scale of man. Ernest Cole: Lost and Found sometimes reaches for the same scope as House of Bondage, capturing the fundamental truths of a nation and a revolution. It's a tricky balance to strike since Cole's work already does these examinations. For a filmmaker to impose their personal perspective, a retroactive reading, could undercut the artist in focus.

But would it be right to consider Cole without following through on his political thought? Wouldn't a single-minded, flat portrait of the artist be a more significant betrayal of what Cole stood for? Peck doesn't pretend to have the answer, nor does he deliver definite solutions. Instead, his film grapples with its limitations, sometimes succeeding and often erring – as when the voice-over explains an image too much, detracting from the photograph's impact. It's bold, restless, work that only gains in urgency as Cole's biography moves away from South Africa to his American exile, where things are different but also the same, sometimes worse.

Voice-over narration isn't usually the place where one goes to find superlative performances, but this documentary deserves recognition in that field. LaKeith Stanfield's take on Ernest Cole is a heart-wrenching self-reflection, often articulating the wound-like agonies within the text. As the film transforms historical collage into curatorial procedural into ghost soliloquy, the tension of the voice's presence and Ernest Cole's visual absence becomes more acute, leading to a tragic end. Peck depicts the photographer's death as a whimper, a lonely gasp lost in the constant buzz of New York City. He juxtaposes it with Nelson Mandela's release, South Africa achieving freedom at long last. The apartheid is over and the crowd rejoices while the photographer fades, far away, forever kept from his home. A crushing dichotomy, it hits like a sledgehammer straight to the chest.

THE FREEDOM OF FIERRO, Santiago Esteinou

With the recent execution of Marcellus Williams, The Freedom of Fierro feels more urgent than ever. Then again, as long as the carceral system reigns supreme, and justice is understood as the dispensing of punishment, stories like these will be relevant. It's a perpetuity that shouldn't be so, one more mark of horror in a world that's littered with them. Not that the tale of César Fierro ends with execution, mind you. At 63 years old, the Mexican-born convict has just been released from prison in Texas. He had been wrongfully sentenced to death and spent the best part of four decades trapped behind bars, often in solitary confinement. Even with the mercy of a judicial error made right, the effects of isolation don't disappear as if by magic. 

They're permanent scars all over one man's soul and sense of self, erecting barriers to communication and defining the limits of autonomy one can possess in such a state. In this and other ways, The Freedom of Fierro is a portrait of the aftermath, an epilogue stretched to feature length. Indeed, the documentary comprises a follow-up to Santiago Esteinou's The Years of Fierro where the toll of prison life was considered in greater detail. Some would prefer the open confrontation of the first film, but that shouldn't invalidate the new work's existence. There's something powerful in examining what comes after, questioning what freedom entails when the system has turned the mind into its own prison.

Adding fuel to the fire, César Fierro reencountered the world at a point of unexpected crisis, stuck in the middle of a global pandemic and lockdown. If this were fiction, Esteinou might be accused of gilding the lily, tracing too many connections between Fierro's struggles to adapt and a society going through a struggle of its own, condemning all to isolation when the heart yearns for connection, proximity, anything that will spell away the curse of solitude. But this is reality. And in such context, César Fierro's resilience, his refusal to succumb to despair, becomes a form of resistance. That said, one shouldn't presume that The Freedom of Fierro is a punishing bout of misery porn, only concerned with one man's capacity for enduring iniquity.

Through candid conversations, Esteinou finds light in the darkness, new dreams and aspirations grown out of old dashed ones. He further indulges in quotidian contemplation, letting the film meander aimlessly through commonplace actions that gain new weight when performed by the newly freed. The humanism of this approach shouldn't be taken for granted, for it adds grace notes into what could have been an invariable dirge. It's a profoundly generous approach to filmmaking. But one must also admit how it limits a picture that can't quite overcome its framework, too focused on the granularity of César Fierro's journey to cogently dissect the systems that put him there in the first place.

Of these three documentaries, only Raoul Peck's Ernest Cole: Lost and Found has a planned 2024 release. It'll come out this fall, distributed by Magnolia Pictures.