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 documentaries and media projects through its online platform.
Here are five documentaries, richly deserving promotion and a worldwide audience. The January 2025 issue of "Senses of Cinema", number 112, published my selection.
Black Snow
Dir. Alina Simone, U.S., 2024
A profile of the Russian eco-activist Natalia Zubkova, begun in 2019. Black Snow more than meets the challenges of the observational mode about finding story form: it is constructed with bits and parts, including home movies, Zubkova’s own journalistic footage, archival materials and elegant animation. The two narrative blocks are skillfully integrated: first comes the work of a citizen journalist, recording the damage of the open-pit coal mines in her Siberian hometown in a successful blog. Then, the viral impact of her denunciations that leads to her exile in Georgia.
Black Snow is staged for the camera – Flaherty style – to make the key intellectual and dramatic points effectively, like its opening scene with Zubkova recording what she thinks may be her last blog, a chronicle of a death announced. It has many similarities with the remarkable Navalny (Daniel Roher, 2022), another political film aiming at the larger picture of Putin’s Russia from the testimony of one courageous individual.
Emergent City
Dir. Kelly Anderson, Jay Arthur Sterrenberg, U.S., 2024
Made over a decade by veteran filmmakers Kelly Anderson and Jay Arthur Sterrenberg, Emergent City is a triumph of observational documentary. It captures the conflict in the Sunset Park riverfront of Brooklyn between its traditional working-class community and the developers of the Industry City complex of decayed industrial buildings.
An X-ray of the centrifugal forces at play triggered by gentrification, the film assembles an extraordinarily detailed world of characters and situations, carefully edited to build a powerful narrative that never loses sight of what makes a neighborhood alive.
I Hope This Helps!
Dir. Daniel Freed, U.S., 2024
I Hope This Helps! is a 50-minute clever gimmick disguised as a documentary, à la Exit Through the Giftshop (Banksy, 2010). Entertaining and sleek, the film demurely asks if A.I. is good or bad for humans. It does so with a fun story about its writer/director Daniel Freed “building” a relationship with the A.I. program Bard to make this documentary.
The comedy springs from the stilted answers the program provides, rendered as a fuzzy screen creature with a British-accented female voice. This one-joke film is predicated on – but coyly avoiding – the non-sentient nature of artificial intelligence. It milks the gag cleverly, expanding on its absurd “reasoning” and structural incapacity to understand context and nuances.
Dir. David Gutnik, Ukraine, 2024
Combining a semi-experimental poetic format with interviews to show the devastation of war on the home front, like the German/Armenian Landschaft (Daniel Kötter, 2023), Rule of Two Walls is an intelligent documentary about the experience of war as lived and thought through by several artists in Kyiv and Lviv, shot between February and November of 2022, the first months of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
It works remarkably well as a war record (images of corpses are particularly haunting, à la Night and Fog); a survey of ideas about national, cultural and religious identity, as culled from insights provided by the artists interviewed; a reflection on the art of documentary; and, ultimately, a celebration of the human spirit.
The self-reflexive aspect of Rule of Two Walls – the strategy to be used when being bombed – is particularly to guide a filmmaker in the craft of filming and editing situations of upheaval. It movingly records the grit and endurance of a proud people and their culture refusing to surrender to a neighbour’s imperial designs.
The Sixth
Dir. Andrea Nix Fine, Sean Fine, U.S., 2024
The Sixth is a gripping record of January 6, 2021, the day a mob entered the Capitol building by violent means, disrupting the electoral certification process of president-elect Joe Biden. It weaves interviews with two policemen, their chief, a House representative, a photographer covering the scene, and an administrative employee. Eloquently and with emotional restraint, in polished interviews, these six witnesses meticulously recount the day in chronological order.
The documentary deftly combines footage from bodycams, cell phones, security cameras and television news, strictly from the point of view of those defending the Capitol from the assault.
The Sixth is a chronicle, not an explanation, of the fateful January 6. It interestingly eschews a voiceover narrator, thus providing an unmediated immersive experience. A few reenactments make it flow organically. A recurring diagram of the Capitol and its environs shows with dots where the interviewees were during specific incidents, so that the viewers can see in real time what the assault on the Bastille must have looked like in 1789.
We Will Dance Again
Dir. Yariv Mozer, Israel, 2024
We Will Dance Again is the Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog, Alain Resnais, 1956) of our times. It provides a brutal account of October 7, 2023, the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Chronicling the Hamas terrorist attack on the Nova Music Festival, it combines harrowing cellphone footage from young Israelis attending the concert with the terrorists’ bodycams and security cameras.
This remarkable documentary captures in real time, from multiple witnesses, what it was to find oneself in a split second on a journey through hell. The audience is literally made to share first the incomprehension, then the incredulity and finally the terror of the slaughter.
Those interviewed become fully-fleshed characters in the documentary – with a background story illustrated by comments and photos of a happier time. It is a counterpoint to that day’s videos, the most haunting perhaps is the now well-known of the young man who kept throwing back to Hamas the grenades lobbed at his group in a shelter. Like Homer in the Iliad, writer/director Yariv Mozer gives each one individuality and the full measure of a life.
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