Ennio Morricone from the documentary Ennio: The Maestro
Daughters: The United States incarcerates our population at a rate 5 to 10 times that of our peer countries, and it’s not only the individuals in prison that suffer as a result. This point is brought to the forefront in Natalie Rae and Angela Patton’s Daughters, which focuses on four girls (ages 5-15) and their incarcerated fathers as they prepare for a Daddy Daughter Dance, a program intended to strengthen family bonds under truly difficult circumstances.
Ennio: The Maestro: Ennio Morricone composed so many iconic film scores—Once Upon a Time in the West, The Battle of Algiers, Days of Heaven, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly among them—that he deserves a whole mini-series just so we can hear them again. He’s a delightful interview subject as well, recalling his early days as a trumpeter and how he created some of the non-traditional sounds in his scores, so that even at over two hours Giuseppe Tornatore’s documentary does not overstay its welcome.
Ernest Cole: Lost and Found: Raoul Peck’s documentary celebrates the work of South African photographer Ernest Cole, whose life demonstrates the adage that no good deed goes unpunished. Cole brought apartheid to world notice with his 1967 book House of Bondage yet ended his years living in poverty in the United States, stateless for many years after being stripped of his South African passport. And somehow 60,000 of his negatives (many featured in this film) made their way to a bank vault in Stockholm.
Frida: I wasn’t sure there was anything more to say about Frida Kahlo, but Carla Gutierrez finds it in this documentary. Gutierrez combines extensive excerpts from Kahlo’s own writing, narrated by Fernanda Echevarria, with a rich selection of archival materials as well as original animations to create a first-person portrait of Kahlo.
In the Rearview: Polish director Maciek Hamela combines two roles in this documentary: a humanitarian directly aiding civilians fleeing the war in Ukraine, and a filmmaker capturing their experiences as he and his co-director drive them to safety. In the Rearview combines views of Hamela’s passengers (often from the vantage point of the rear-view mirror) with views of the landscape they are being driven through, creating a sense of how war affects the ordinary people who find themselves caught up in it.
Intercepted: Oksana Karpovych creates a unique view of the war in Ukraine by juxtaposing audio from the intercepted phone calls of Russian soldiers serving in Ukraine with shots of the war-ravaged country. The calls are what you would expect—a combination of longing to be home with absolute disrespect for the inhabitants of the land they are invading—while the visuals provide indisputable evidence of a land laid waste by war.
No Other Land: It’s easy to fall into a “both sides” trope when discussing an ongoing conflict, but No Other Land avoids that trap by highlighting the different lives led by its two main protagonists, the Palestinian Basel Adra and the Israeli Yuval Abraham (co-directors along with Hamdan Ballal and Rachel Szor). One has full civil rights and freedom of movement, the other is consumed with defending his home village and recording its destruction by soldiers of the country into which he was born.
Nocturnes: Easily the most beautiful film in this list, Anirban Dutta and Anupama Srinivasan’s film documents the work of ecologist Mansi Mungee, who studies hawk moths in northeast India. Watching the moths gather on sheets of fabric illuminated by lamps is magical, but there’s a serious purpose behind it: by measuring the size of the moths at different elevations, Mungee can determine how they are affected by a warming climate.
Queendom: Jenna (or Gena) Marvin is a non-binary drag artist in a most inhospitable part of the world for that kind of performance: Russia, where just expressing queerness can get you arrested. Still she persists in creating her art, appearing in Moscow in amazing costumes (beautifully captured by cinematographer Ruslan Fedotov) and trying to explain to her worried grandparents in her small home town of Magadan why she persists despite the danger.
Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat: Johan Grimonprez’s collage-like documentary makes connections that you wouldn’t believe, except that they happen to be true. Newly-independent African states create a threat to established powers in the United Nations; artists including Louis Armstrong are sent on tour in Africa, creating cover for CIA operatives while winning hearts and minds; the United States and Belgium, both desiring access to the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s rich supply of uranium, aid the assassination of Patrice Lumumba; and Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach organize a protest at the United Nations in response. | Sarah Boslaugh
*If it’s good enough for the New York Times, it’s good enough for me.
