5 Must See Documentaries - First Edition

5 Must See Documentaries   - First Edition

This will be the first part of a multipart series on must see documentaries.  As a former high school history teacher, I always felt the best way to explain the actions of a group of people to my students was for them to see it firsthand which is why I have always loved documentaries in the classroom.  I believe they are the most important genre of filmmaking because it is the most authentic way to explain how and why other cultures respond or act.  The documentaries listed below are mostly meant for an adult audience, as the subject matter is too difficult for younger people to watch without it being overly traumatizing. There are so many brilliant documentaries out there, and this is just the first batch of truly essential documentaries.  More to come…

20 Days in Mariupol- Ukraine (2023)

This film is one of the bravest pieces of filmmaking in the history of war documentaries and well deserving of this year's Academy Award for Best Documentary.  The ability to document 21st urban warfare is a pivotal way of potentially halting genocides and totally unnecessary wars.  We get a front row seat to the devastation of Ukraine; the indiscriminate massacres and war crimes committed by the Russians.   War reporting has been the subject of many films, and this is authentic and real as it gets.   The ability to use smaller cameras like a phone is essential to capturing modern atrocities by extracting the visuals of genocidal campaigns to sway people away from the horrors of mass indiscriminate killing.  This is a very unsettling film to watch, but that's what makes it so important.

Searching for Sugarman – South Africa (2010)

What if you were a musician in your younger days and then went on living a blue color life in Detroit while unbeknownst to you, you were the most famous musician in a country you’ve never been to?  This sounds like the plot to some crazy movie script that strains credulity.  But this is the real-life story of Sixto Rodriguez whose music spoke to an entire generation of a country’s people halfway across the globe.  The Late 60’s were a tumultuous time in South Africa, but a progressive generational shift was taking place, and the music that was their north star was that of a man who quickly faded into obscurity in his own country.   Rodriguez was an extremely talented folk pop musician in the late 60’s who recorded a record that was beloved by an entire nation, just not his own, and then had all this information relayed to him only because a couple of diehard fans wanted to see if he was even still alive.  Rodriguez stopped playing music and became a handyman, and then 40 years later, he’s playing his old music to a raucous audience to which he had been their music icon for almost a half century!  Imagine a much older Rodriguez, who had no idea of his cult like status, performing in front of a sold-out crowd who is literally freaking out over the fact their favorite artist is alive and playing live in front of them.  It sounds like a dream, but it happened. This movie is pure magic.  The movie also heavily uses his song Crucify Your Mind, which became one of my favorite songs after I saw this gem. 

The Act of Killing - Indonesia (2012)

The Look of Silence - Indonesia (2014)

Joshua Oppenheimer’s pair of Indonesian documentaries sheds a spotlight on the horrors of a society in which those who committed genocide still remain in power.  How do you willingly get a bunch of old genocidal maniacs to direct their own fantastical depictions of their horrid actions and manage to combine that film into a cohesive documentary as in The Act of Killing. When the “star” of the film finally sees the finished project he more or less has his soul leave his body in a powerful climactic nighttime scene on a rooftop, which essentially sends him into convulsions, as he finally realizes that he’s the monster.   The Look of Silence is less showy but just as powerful in its ability to call out the old yet resilient powers that still prevails in modern Indonesia.   The Look of Silence’s setup is slightly different and more restrained by having an optometrist whose family was victim to the Indonesian genocide of the 1960’s meet with some of the perpetrators under the guise of helping them to see, only to get a chance to directly confront his literal demons.  This is an essential look into how minds can become so warped as to feel content and justified in killing countless countrymen.  By the way this was more or less US sanctioned, as we would do just about anything including backing strongmen if that meant the stop of the proliferation of communism in East Asia and Latin America.  Thanks Henry Kissinger, how did you live to over 100? 

Chasing Ice - Greenland, Iceland, United States (2012)

I showed this visually stunning movie about glacier melting to my students and asked them what genre of film this felt like even though it was a documentary.  The most common response was that this felt like a real-life horror film.  In Chasing Ice, we see the drastic effects of climate change as we see massive glaciers in icefields throughout the northern hemisphere calve off icebergs the size of Manhattan.  Gen Z and future generations will have to deal with massive global unrest due to forced migration by people who live to close to the ocean or places that will become so hot that they are uninhabitable for humans.  The frustration younger people feel toward the apathy of older generations who don’t really care what happens to a future planet is entirely justified, and seeing a primary source like this film really hits home the idea that we are in an existential crisis.  If people really saw how fast things were going downhill, they might be more inclined to work to preserve our planet for the future, but this is not currently the case.  This movie is over a decade old and things have unfortunately gotten exponentially worse.

Part 2 coming next month