Unfolding like a plotless reality show that was shot by Emmanuel Lubezki, this lucid dream of a movie paints an unmoored portrait of a city in the throes of an orgastic reawakening. A mesmeric, free-floating odyssey that wends its way through a hazy year in the molten lives of two Polish twentysomethings, this unclassifiable wonder obscures the divide between fiction and documentary until the distinction is ultimately irrelevant. It would be reductive and unfair to say that Michal Marczak’s “All These Sleepless Nights” is the film that Terrence Malick has been trying to make for the last 10 years, but it certainly feels that way while you’re watching it. “All These Sleepless Nights” (2016) “All These Sleepless Nights” It’s required viewing that only grows more essential with each passing day. The documentary, which followed DuVernay’s feature hits like “Selma” and her early, music-focused documentary works, consolidates some 150 years of American history to show how the country’s current problems with race didn’t happen overnight. Visually, the movie offers little more than the standard arrangement of talking heads, archival footage, and animated visual aids, but that’s all it takes to make its incendiary statements resonate across time. The broad scope is made palatable by the consistency of its focus, and the collective anger it represents. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation” to the war on drugs. It combines the rage of Black Lives Matter and the cool intelligence of a focused dissertation.ĭuVernay aligns many historical details into an infuriating arrangement of statistics and cogent explanations for the evolution of racial bias in the United States, folding in everything from D.W.
The film, which opened the 2016 New York Film Festival, tracks the criminalization of African Americans from the end of the Civil War to the present day, assailing a broken prison system and other examples of institutionalized racial bias with a measured gaze. “13th” (2016) Angela Davis in “13th” NetflixĪva DuVernay’s documentary “13th” has the precision of a foolproof argument underscored by decades of frustration. While it unfolds, you’ll experience something magical: you’ll see the world again as if through the eyes of a child. Through her long takes, Speth creates a deep immersion in the classroom, like you’re part of their conversations too. Not one disconnected from the history of its setting either: Bachmann tells the kids about how their town hosted slave labor during the Third Reich. Watching the film is a kind of Zen experience in hope and tranquility. There are various culture clashes among the children, all hailing from very different backgrounds, and some kinder-crises, but this classroom could practically be a model for a future where our differences are respected and we can all get along together. 64-year-old Dieter Bachmann is not a perfect teacher, but an exceptionally kind and empathetic one. Maria Speth proves herself a cinematic heir to Frederick Wiseman with this 217-minute “fly on the wall” depiction of about six months in the classroom of an elementary school for immigrant children in a small German town.
On the other hand, these tools haven’t just granted us new ways of seeing, they’ve also galvanized our desire to look, which in turn has stoked an unprecedented degree of interest in the documentary format on the whole. On one hand, digital technology has infinitely expanded our range of vision, and some of the modern era’s most essential docs have been shot on consumer-grade equipment like iPhones and GoPro cameras. Not only do they reveal our world to us, but they shape how we view it, and the early years of the 21st century have proven that to be more true than ever before. From the a ctualités of the Lumière brothers in the late 19th century to the heavily manipulated ethnographic films of the 1920, from the vérité films of the Maysles brothers to the man-on-the-street agitprop popularized by Michael Moore, documentaries have naturally always been more responsive to their times than any other mode of filmmaking. Non-fiction cinema has been evolving since the birth of the medium while capturing a world in motion.
What better time for documentary filmmaking? This young century has been defined by harrowing disasters both natural and man-made, political tribalism, and existential threats to the future of the planet.
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