Documentary gems: The 2023 World Poll of "Senses of Cinema".

In the issue 108, January 2024, of the Australian online magazine "Senses of Cinema", I published al list of documentaries I viewed in 2023. 

I have been reviewing documentary submissions for the Social Impact Media Awards for a few years. It is an annual competition run by the non-profit organization SIMA Studios, that also curates and distributes documentaries and media projects.
 
Here are 6 above par documentaries, richly deserving promotion and a worldwide audience.  
 

Al Djanat / Le paradis original  

Dir. Chloé Aïcha Boro, France, 2023

 

In this first-person documentary, Burkina Faso director Chloé Aïcha Boro, based in France, takes up the exploration of the self, as a woman split between cultures, religions and worldviews. She is also a synecdoche because her family in Dédoughou, Burkina Faso, represents a large swath of francophone Sub-Saharan Africa, where Islam coexists with animism, and is engaged in a complicated relationship with the West and modernity – a world richly explored by Ousmane Sembène and Abderrahmane Sissako. Shot over five years, it follows the daily lives of her extended family, recording conversations where polygamy and the role of women in an Islamic society are recurrent.  The director intervenes as a voiceover, commenting on a culture she knows from the inside – her original paradise - and yet appraising it from a distance.  It is a conflict she cannot resolve, well captured in the umbilical cord ceremony and the function of the “griottes”, the women who keep an oral singing record of family and culture.  
    Shown at Fespaco (Burkina Faso) and Visions du Réel (Switzerland) in 2023.
  

  Battleground: The Fight for the Future of  Abortion in America 

  Dir. Cynthia Lowen, U.S., 2023

 

Battleground is a piece of long form journalism designed to describe how political and religious pro-life groups worked for decades to revert Roe v. Wade, the 1972 Supreme Court ruling that adumbrated a right to abortion considered implicit in the U.S. Constitution.  Embedded in the organizations Students for Life, the Susan B. Anthony List and San Francisco Pro-Life, Lowen follows three charismatic female leaders. Their grassroots work is framed by a recording of evangelical leaders pledging support to Donald Trump. The conservative Christian vote was key to his win in the 2016 election. Eschewing a narrator, the contours of the battleground are clearly delineated: two diametrically opposed views about abortion, the human rights issue of our times. But unexpectedly, the pro-abortion arguments espoused by the documentary come up short, intellectually and morally, when engaging with pro-life ideas. In a surprising volte face, Battlegroundultimately becomes a persuasive explanation of why life inside the womb is human and matters. 
    Shown at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2022.

              Eat Bitter 

             Dir. Pacale Appora- Gnekindy, Ningyi Sun, 

              Central African Republic / US / Canada                   /Netherland / Kenya, 2023

 

Eat Bitter unfolds over several months in Bangui, the capital of the landlocked Central African Republic, where a Chinese contractor is building a bank with local workers. Briskly shot and edited with a killer score by Cal Freundlich, the film observes the contractor interacting in a foreign culture and the young African workers he employs, who dream of a better life.  The story is built with the tools of fiction cinema – à la Nanook of the North – including a skillful use of dramatizations. (I hesitate to use “reenactments” because it would give the idea that spontaneity is absent. Quite the opposite).  The camera is the real asset here, always in a good spot to catch character revelation and conflict.  Fresh, engaging and movingly insightful, the last two scenes push the documentary into a philosophical dimension: what is a life well lived.
 
                Landshaft 

                Dir. Daniel Kötter, Germany/Armenia, 2023
 

Essayistic and intimate, without a first-person narrator, nor drama on screen or a thesis to develop, and no characters to follow, Landshaft, or “landscape”, is a startling documentary about the ethnic Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan. “What is not filmed and is not seen” is its subject, noted the director. The conversations are divorced from the images, and they only match when the viewer slowly puts them together. People are shown from far away or framed without their faces. Stunning cinematography, hypnotic long takes, recurrent motifs dotting the landscape (a beaten-up Lada car, long freight trains) and free flowing comments and memories about war by ordinary people function like pieces of a puzzle.  In the ten-minute final sequence– the director shot at eye level an unruly flock of sheep descending on a village– the meaning of the film is encapsulated in an oblique yet tangible manner.
    Shown at Visions du Réel (Switzerland) in 2023.
 
              La memoria infinita / The Eternal Memory 

              Dir. Maite Alberdi, Chile, 2023
 

At first sight, this observational film, shot from 2018 to 2022, about a married couple dealing with the husband’s Alzheimer’s, looks like a medical project. Confined to the couple’s home, the wife took over the camera in 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic. The protagonists are well-known, intelligent and camera-savvy figures in Chile’s cultural and political landscape. Layered over this diary-style record of a person’s failing memory, is a meditation on aging, and the preservation of historical memory: Augusto Góngora is a journalist and TV critic whose professional goal has been to remember traumatic historical events during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. The loving care of his wife Paulina Urrutia makes the tenderness of the relationship glow throughout the film. The couple’s personal and professional lives are shown through home movies, clips from the news, television shows and films. Wisely, The Eternal Memory avoids a chronological record of the illness’ progress, and organizes it around specific memories, building blocks that erase time and display the healing power of remembering.  Maite Alberdi’s work is characterized by patiently observing small worlds for a period of time – Tea Time (2014), Grown-Ups (2016) and The Mole (2020).  The “formula” is brilliantly, humanely at work here too.

   Shown at the Sundance Film Festival last January, 

   it won the World Cinema Documentary award. 

   A box-office hit in Chile, it had a limited theatrical    release in the U.S. in 2023.

             Mermaids of Africa

             Dir. William Collinson, South Africa, 2023

 

From its title, Mermaids of Africa is prima facie an ethnographic documentary about the beliefs of hunter-gatherers in a semi-desert territory (present-day South Africa), where the elements of nature, like water, are seen as deities. It is built, however, as a mutually exclusive counterpoint between the scientific view of two very articulate anthropologists who have studied the phenomenon of mermaids and water snakes as manifestations of ancient mythical beliefs connected to a dry area, in a culture untouched by Western rational thinking. On the other side are the native subjects who persuasively describe encountering mermaids and water snakes. The anthropologists conclude that scientific and mythical thinking are different orders of reality. From their Western perspective, they cannot pierce the phenomenon. The mythical is staged for the camera with realistic dramatizations of mermaids and snakes wrapped in an uncanny score.  One way into the mystery, the documentary suggests, is to understand that like Koyaanisqatsi poetically proposed in 1982, the world is out of joint. 

Source: https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2024/world-poll/world-poll-2023-part-2/