The Best Documentaries Of 2016

I know, it’s February, it’s a new year, lets put the awfulness that was 2016 to rest, right? You’re right. Ok bye!

Just kidding. Everyone knows that the year isn’t actual over until we know what the best films to come out of it were. With the Oscars Sunday, the focus, like it always is, will be on the year’s main match-ups and performances of films of fiction. Sometimes I just wanna grab an Academy member and go “you know they made that all up right?”

Well, until we finally get a documentary into the Best Picture, or Best Director, or Cinematography etc. categories, those of us with a passion for nonfiction film making will be focused on the Best Documentary category. Limited to half the number of nominees as Best Picture, the Documentary contenders this year are setting a new trend for the Academy, in that all of them were really good, some great, and definitely deserving of their nominations. But there are at least ten more deserving of similar recognition, some of them in my view even better than those up for the award.

Let me be clear, every film I’m about to bring up was fantastic and there’s very little separation between them. With maybe a few exceptions I think that after a few years we’ll realize many of these have stepped into the documentary canon. The quality last year was so consistent that I’ve slid around their order so many times it’s disgusting. With a loaded field like this there’s so much to consider: filmmaking, relevance, staying power, context, construction, other descriptors I’m sure. Some of these are clearly better films than others, but in the end what had to be the deciding factor was my enjoyment. That being said, I’m very excited to talk to you about the best documentaries of 2016.

15. Chicken People

Ok, Chicken People is basically Best in Show, but real, and instead of dogs, it’s chickens. If you’re not already sold I can’t help ya.

14. Off the Rails

Read my full review here

Off The Rails is a sort of hybrid, taking a quirky and entertaining nightly news story and finding within it hard truths about mental illness and the inadequacies of our criminal justice system. Following Darius McCollum, who has earned himself considerable notoriety in and around NYC for repeatedly hijacking MTA trains and busses, the film treats its subject with appropriate respect, letting him serve as the primary reporter to a story that has largely been wrested from him.

The result is a tale of a life dominated by passionate compulsion, which the world is ill-equipped to accommodate. In less-skilled hands, Darius’ story might’ve been played solely for laughs, but Adam Irving should get a lot of credit for revealing the humanity and universality that coverage of McCollum’s activities traditionally lacked.

It’s more than a little tragic that Darius’ fate was more or less sealed as a teenager, his dream of being an MTA employee unknowingly taken away by an overzealous mentor. The film is a plea for sanity; to recognize the tremendous gifts one man has to offer the public and for stubborn power structures to be able to treat people as individuals as opposed to a uniform entity. Its combination of light and heavy subject matter is a welcome tactic for an era where everything seems dire, and I hope more filmmakers look to it for inspiration.

13. Fire At Sea

Read Christopher Connor’s review here

Among the issues that have exploded since last year’s election (which is to say, all of them), arguably the most prominent has been the resettling of refugees from war torn countries. The recent executive order sent the country and world into a frenzy, as the nation with an ode to desperate immigrants on its front door reversed course on years of official policy in an attempt to keep out those coming here to escape unliveable chaos. The reasoning was dubious at best, straight up evil at worst, and undebateably hypocritical.

Gianfranco Rosi‘s Fire at Sea seeks to explore this issue both head-on and from a distance. In juxtaposing typical Western scenes of a boy’s life on the Italian island of Lampedusa with harrowing sequences of overpacked rafts and boats being rescued and processed by the Italian government, we see just how trivial the objections are to taking in refugees. Lives are at stake; all the migrants want is to be unburdened from constant violence so that they may get a little bit of that sweet sweet seeing the eye-doctor, building slingshot, taking our row-boats in the harbor action for their families.

It’s abundantly clear that no one with the intent to commit terrorist acts would attempt to enter a peaceful nation in such a way that death before having ever reached land is a very real possibility. This film is still not very widely seen, but I hope that its Oscar nomination raises its profile enough that it might cause those in opposition of a sound and sustainable refugee policy to realize the only reason for doing so is profound selfishness.

12. 13th

Read Emily Wheeler’s review here

How to tackle something as prevalent and totalizing, yet seemingly invisible to so many, as systemic, institutionalized racism? I don’t know, ask Ava DuVernay, whose film 13th made it look easy. I think one of the most important but under discussed aspects of this film is not only does it come from a Black director, but it’s almost entirely told through black voices.13th give such luminaries as Angela Davis and Van Jones an unprecedented and direct platform to educate the viewer on the narrative of race in America.

With Netflix as the distributor, that message was taken directly into the living rooms of the world. They actually went above and beyond their role here, encouraging the film to be used in classrooms even if an educator doesn’t have a Netflix subscription, helping to ensure a new generation will learn these hard and shameful truths right alongside the emancipation proclamation or Brown v. Board of Education. If you’ve somehow yet to see it, it’s absolutely required viewing; you may think you get it, and you might be right, but to condense the history of racial oppression in America so succinctly and effectively is an achievement that deserves to be witnessed and recognized.

13th isn’t a perfect film, I have some minor aesthetic gripes about how it’s structured and the somewhat jarring musical interstitials, but it’s one we so plainly and desperately need and that I’m grateful exists. It is as close to a lock for the Best Documentary Oscar as there is, as it unfortunately could not have been more prescient. In fact, just today it was not surprisingly announced that the current administration will backtrack on Obama’s commitment to phase out the federal use of private prisons. While the prospects are dim, less hope it doesn’t become more relevant as the year progresses.

11. Into The Inferno

Werner, Werner, Werner, you old dog you! Leave it to Herzog to find a way to discuss North Korea and giant chicken-shaped stone churches in a documentary about volcanoes. Another coup for Netflix, Into the Inferno, rather than solely investigating the scientific and geologic aspects of volcanoes, is more concerned with their cultural perceptions and how they’ve influenced societies. It also features the year’s cutest bromance, between Herzog and volcanologist Clive Oppenheimer, who the director first met in Antarctica while filming Encounters At the End of the World. They’re really cute, it’s delightful.

Due to the participation of longtime collaborator Peter Zeitlinger, Inferno is beautifully shot. His expert framing shines equally in spaceless lava pits and Pyongyang subway stations, always finding the most interesting actions while maintaining full control of their contextualization and somehow still managing to make it look composed.

But the best shot of the film, and my favorite shot of the year, wasn’t captured by Zeitlinger, but by French volcanologist Maurice Kraft, with his lens directed towards colleague and wife Katia. Behind her is an unfathomable wall of lava, seemingly endless in all directions, yet Katia is entirely nonplussed as she goes about her work; a comforting metaphor for stability in the face of chaos. The sequence alone is worth the price of admission, the fact that there’s an entire Herzog film around it is almost unfair.

10. Miss Sharon Jones!

Read my full review here

Music bio-docs often follow a tried-and-true template, somewhat codified by the Behind the Music narrative: humble beginnings, meteoric rise to fame, which is either sustained but more often threatened or all out destroyed by any one or combination of personal demons. Sharon Jones, being discovered in mid-life before finding her space in the Nu-Soul scene, defies all of that, so it should be no surprise that the film about her would do the same. In the hands documentary royalty Barbara Kopple, Miss Sharon Jones! takes us to places we don’t expect to go in such a film, while still highlighting sensational music and performances.

Kopple is mostly unconcerned with the easy story here, that Jones went from life as a corrections officer to a indie music darling, it gets only a passing mention. While the film culminates in a showstopping performance, music is really tangential to the story of the film as most of it is spent with Sharon as she tries to continue a normal life while fighting cancer.

It’s not often that a film chronicling an artist in there prime spends so much time with them watching Judge Judy. Due to events that took place after the release of the film, it has taken on a tragic aura that must’ve been considered while filming; as such Miss Sharon Jones! is a powerful exploration of the personal culture of dying.

9. I Am Not Your Negro

Read my full review here

If 13th is an education, I Am Not Your Negro is the agitation and incitement to organization. Raoul Peck, in co-authoring a completion of James Baldwin‘s unfinished novel Remember This House with the making of this film, has created a time capsule for multiple eras with limitless relevancy for the the present and future. It at once discusses the state of race relations in Baldwin’s time, through his words both written and in interviews, but it is immediately apparent that he is also speaking across the decades to our current era, in a frankly depressing demonstration on how little has changed, for all our so called “progress”.

I Am Not Your Negro is alternately sobering and infuriating, but it’s also a brilliant feature-length experiment in radical editing, and absolutely should have been recognized by the Academy as such with a nomination. Its messages are derived from and enhanced by the collision of disparate and inter-related words and images, which is how it achieves its transcendent relevance. This is probably the headiest film on my list, but it’s one that everyone should make an effort to see and hopefully ends up finding an enduring life in classrooms across America.

8. Life, Animated

The shining light of levity in an otherwise remarkably heavy field of Best Documentary nominees, Life, Animated is a kind of film often favored for the Best Picture category: a crowd-pleasing movie about movies. Even if you’re already familiar with Owen Suskind‘s story through the Radiolab piece from a view years ago, or the book by his father Ron, the film to me is the ultimate version and offers fresh insights that would be impossible in those other mediums.

Director Roger Ross Williams, as a seasoned documentarian, must have been aware of the inherent self-reflexivity of this subject. Just like Owen with Disney movies, I turn to documentaries in an effort to make some kind of sense with the world in which I live, and find a connection to other worlds from which I might feel distant. To further utilize the medium to tell a stronger story, Williams ingenuously employs the interrotron, most often associated with its inventor, Errol Morris, shooting Owen from behind a screen playing Disney classics so we can see his enthusiasm in real time.

It’s really unlike anything you’ve ever experienced, save for the few televisions reading out there. Think about it, how often are you as entertaining and engaging as a Disney cartoon? These sequences are just one way the film highlights Owen’s deep sincerity, which is really something to which we should all aspire, and resulted in one of my favorite lines in any film this year: “Mom, why is there so much unfair pain and suffering in the world?” I don’t know, Owen, but here’s to you for alleviating some of it.

7. OJ: Made in America

Of the nominated films, OJ: Made in America would be my personal pick for the most deserving of the little gold man, solely on the merits of its film making prowess. With this documentary epic, director Ezra Edelman achieves the impossible: breathing energy into the talking heads / stock footage film in a way that feels vital and compelling. The film is a representative example of the charges put forth by 13th and I Am Not Your Negro, that race is inextricably linked to everything in America, and OJ’s story exists at the intersection of many things. Sport, celebrity, Los Angeles, commerce, psychology, tabloids, there is just so much to explore and mine that no traditional news coverage could ever hope to touch, making the unconventional run time a necessity in order to this oft-told story true justice for the first time.

That run time, nearly 8 hours, and its primary distribution as a TV miniseries, has been the source of some controversy as to whether this film should even be considered for an Academy Award. As to the length, we need only bring up Shoah as an example. As for its life on television and online, Netflix continues to supply award quality non-fiction outside of traditional distribution methods, and as filmgoing habits continue to be reshaped by new technologies, and more channels look for original content to compete with the HBOs and Netflixes of the world, we’re going to see an increase in support and funding for independent filmmakers from these content providers that just doesn’t make sense for blockbuster hungry film studios. So I’m pro-Made in America, pro-breaking the stringent limitations and what constitutes of documentary “film”, and I hope it wins, though it definitely won’t.

6. Under The Sun

Read my full review here

The power of Under the Sun is derived from one simple concept: just keep filming. Vitaliy Manskiy has achieved with this film something which no other documentarian has been able, a truly authentic look behind the endless propaganda war of North Korea against its people. Typically, filmmakers seeking to find any truths about the DPRK are not necessarily combative, but are disappointed to learn of and reluctant to participate in officially sanctioned tours of Pyongyang, complete with government minders. Contrarily, Manskiy goes all in with collaboration, seemingly gaining the propagandists’ trust by allowing himself and his subjects to be directed. With their guard let down, honesty comes out, and with a camera with a disabled “recording” light, truth is captured.

What’s revealed is that everything, even the most mundane details, are entirely fabricated; the propaganda is totalizing. We were still in the throes of election season when I originally reviewed Under the Sun, so the analogies to “fake news” weren’t yet entirely apparent. But in an era where this young administration is already floating a state-run media, the film has taken on the persona of a cautionary tale.

Americans watched beffudled as an entire populace displays unimaginable grief for the loss of the great leader, someone who we know to be directly profiting from the exploitation of those he’s sworn to protect. Sounds familiar, no? Now, I don’t think we can be so high and mighty.

5. Tickled

Read my full review here, as well as Film Inquiry’s interview with star and co-director David Farrier

Easily the year’s strangest and most singular story, Tickled is a dark dive into the capacity for people to do evil. Yeah, I know it’s about tickling, I saw it. It was great. But the laughs one expects from such subject matter end early on, though absurdity persists even as the narrative takes to turn towards horror.

There’s not a lot I can say without giving away some of the mystery, but suffice to say that Tickled is the film that keeps on giving, as its subject and his representatives have taken it upon themselves to defend their actions publicly at screenings, giving us almost another feature worth of footage (in fact, HBO has repackaged some this additional content as a follow up to accompany their release of the film next week). And like many of the films on this list, it has taken on new meaning after the election, highlighting the destructive power of self-loathing resulting from self-inflicted shame cause by hidden pleasures :cough: STEELE :cough cough:

4. The Other Side

The Other Side is my pick for most criminally underseen movie of the year. That’s not entirely surprising, as its noncommercial themes and removed approach has kept its exposure limited and critics divided. A journey through rural Louisiana with those who call it home, Roberto Minervi trains his lens on those who some might classify as the “deplorables”, namely a transient meth addict and a far-right militia.

The film’s critics levy claims that it generalizes rural Americans, but I don’t think The Other Side is concerned with interpretations. Minervi seeks merely to present area of American culture many of us would never witness otherwise, let alone even considered. His subjects have interesting lives and continually spout shocking rhetoric on any range of topics, but that’s exactly what makes them compelling film subjects. No doubt they are performing, fully aware of the presence of the camera (I should mention the cinematography is documentary innovation), but they are performing their idealized selves knowing that this film will go out into the world. For better or worse, this is the image they mean to project.

There has been so much talk of how Democrats need to slow their roll on socially progressive issues to get those who voted Republican last year back to the table. But I ask do we really need to attempt to placate those who spend their leisure time getting publicly felated by a woman in an Obama mask as a precursor to destroying a car with assault rifles? I’m just going to let that one sit.

3. Cameraperson

Read Benjamin Wang’s review here, and follow it up with Sophia Cowley’s interview with director Kirsten Johnson

This was the biggest Oscar snub of the year as far as I’m concerned. Inarguably the best deleted scenes reel ever produced, Cameraperson is an instant classic. Compiled from years of Johnson‘s work as a foremost documentary cinematographer, the film finds freedom in having no central focus, allowing itself to speak on a wide range of issues without ever settling on any one, and with a consistent voice that transcends time and place. The cumulative effect of Cameraperson is akin to a religious experience, perhaps along with a bit of the associated exhaustion. The breadth of Johnson‘s work is so wide, covering so many tones and themes, that compiling it together into a cohesive film results in a unique processing that, for me, lasted days.

She has in fact arguably created a new form of nonfiction film making altogether, liberated from cause, or subject and headed toward feeling. In this era where facts are debatable and truth is spin, perhaps this is the direction documentaries towards which docs need to head, appealing to some base gut feeling, as the best art does. The film has a lot to say, but it doesn’t tell you anything directly. It’s really good, you should see it; it went straight to Criterion so you know it’s great. I’m only being half-sarcastic.

2. Weiner

Huma. Poor, poor Huma. You, not Anthony, are the tragic hero of this film. You never stopped believing that the man with whom you fell in love had hope for salvation. Even through the events of Weiner, you stood by his side. But alas, even a strong and determined woman like you could only withstand so much pain and humiliation. We all stand with you. I would love to see a Grendel style remake of this from Huma’s perspective someday.

Weiner draws its potency from access, as director Josh Kriegman was a former staffer of the embattled politician. Kriegman is there with Weiner in his home, in his car, on television sets, even as he escapes a hungry media through a back alley, Kriegman is there with his camera. At one point he steps outside his role as objective observer and ask Weiner a question that’s my other favorite line of the year: “Why are you letting me film this?” The answer, I think we all now know, is a compulsion for self-destruction. With Weiner, for maybe the first time ever, we have ringside seats as it plays out. As a documentary lover, what more could you ask for?

1. Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World

Read my full review here

Probably the best thing to happen last year was the arrival of two new documentaries from septagenarian Werner Herzog. Lo and Behold wasn’t just my favorite doc of the year, it was my favorite film, fiction or non. The internet and AI have become so enmeshed in our lives that making a film about them almost seems redundant, the assumption being that their perpetual use inherently carries some kind of understanding. Herzog, commissioned by a tech company to make a film on the internet, admits he never uses it and knows little about its machinations. Do any of us really though? It’s a series of tubes, right?

The director’s outsider perspective offers the audience an avatar through which to receive a digital education. Starting from zero opens the possibly to stroll through endless avenues in revealing our digital web, and Herzog takes us down many of them. But it’s not just a survey of this interesting tidbit or that piece of history; every exploration, from internet bullying to the threat of solar flares to robot soccer stars (💖 Robot 8), is a component towards a profound and refreshing whole. Always one for contradictions, Herzog shows us a world where modern technology’s terrifying omnipresence and omniscience is mediated by its inherent humanity; it is quite literally what we make it.

With all that was happening in the world this year and the prominence of some of the other films discussed here, Lo and Behold got a little overlooked. But like volcanoes, the internet itself doesn’t worry itself with changes in the fragile meat world, it will continue to exist in one form or another as long as we’re around. As such, this film will have continued relevance throughout the years, sometimes more so than others; how will the largely functionless robot pictured above seem in ten years to the worker whose job its descendants replaced? It is thus Lo and Behold‘s fate to serve as a snapshot of a moment where technology and its masters where at an existential crossroads, the futures of both startlingly unknown.

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These films, aside for their entertainment, educational and philosophical values, are now of a particular importance whose greatness has yet to be determined. Coming to us during a historically unique moment, they were all made with mindsets yet to be shaken by a national existential crisis, but acutely aware of the possibility. Some grapple with that notion directly, others allegorically, and some have different aims entirely.

But whatever their content, all 15 demonstrate the immense power of independent non-fiction film making to illuminate truths, serious and light, to which other genres and media are simply unable. No matter what happens to traditional media streams, and I’m optimistic that they’re not going anywhere, no one will ever be able to take all of our cameras.

We are all potential documentarians, lying in wait, texting away on devices that may one day be our eventual remaining means of illumination. If you made it this far I sincerely hope you find the time watch all of these docs; you’ll not only be treated to the strongest year for the form in recent memory, but maybe you’ll also find the inspiration to enter the fray yourself. It couldn’t hurt, and I’d love to see with what you come up. The future for documentaries is the brightest its ever looked, let’s keep it going. Sorry this got so political.

What was your favorite documentary of 2016?