Hamara Sahar (Bombay: Our City) [1985]

 Anand Patwardhan, with his remarkable fourth film Hamara Shahar, firmly established himself as India’s foremost documentary filmmaker. Made using grass-root financing, shot with a mobile 16mm sync-sound camera, and distributed through alternative working-class channels to sidestep restrictions imposed by state authorities and corporate powers, this was like a bristling pocket-sized dynamite. Patwardhan – who blended political resistance into his filmmaking, influenced by the manifestos of Third Cinema and Imperfect Cinema – resorted to a deliberately dialectical approach while recording the extreme plight of the impoverished and disenfranchised slum and pavement dwellers of Bombay. The megapolis’ middle and upper classes, on one hand, cruelly and callously exploit their labours for building high-rises, disposing wastes, getting domestic help, and whatnot, while on the other treating them like bottom-feeders, complaining how they pollute the city’s shiny ambiance, illegally occupy lands that’re screaming to be monetized, and simply refuse to disappear. Along with proudly expressing their monstrous apathy, they also weaponize the police into destroying their shanty homes and forcibly evicting them through wanton violence. The director demonstrated radical empathy for the poor – across caste and religious lines – while recording their extreme tribulations and capturing their devastating misery; in parallel, he made his biting scorn eminently clear by allowing the city’s Municipal Commissioner, Police Commissioner, wealthy industrialists and pompous residents to express their classism, hypocrisy and casual apathy in the comfort of their sprawling homes, exclusive clubs and posh surroundings. These alternating and arresting interrogative segments were anchored by a song dripping with cutting anger and profound pathos performed by a street theatre troupe led by the Marxist-Dalit poet-singer-activist Vilas Ghogre. His shocking demise 12 years later would provoke Patwardhan’s magnum opus, Jai Bhim Comrade.

Director: Anand Patwardhan

Genre: Documentary

Language: Marathi/Hindi/English

Country: India

A Man Vanishes [1967]

 Shōhei Imamura’s fascinating hybrid documentary A Man Vanishes was like a virtuosic jazz composition – freely improvisational, filled with syncopated rhythms, and subverting formal boundaries over a progressively experimental jamming session. His first foray into non-fiction cinema was made at the peak of his remarkable creative burst. Imamura, being who he was, radically pushed the envelope in his deadpan style and turned it into a teasing metatextual exercise on the overlaps between truth, reality, artifice and performativity, and thereby sardonically reinforced the ironic idea that “objectivity is [nothing but] one of the fifty-seven kinds of subjectivity.” It began in the veins of a matter-of-fact investigative account. Post-War Japan was plagued by “Jōhatsu” – or “evaporated people” – as numerous ordinary individuals were walking away and disappearing from their lives, families and jobs. The film zooms in on 32-year-old salesman Tadashi Oshima, who went missing 2 years back. With actor Shigeru Tsuyuguchi serving as the interviewer, and accompanied by the missing man’s enigmatic fiancée Yoshie Hayakawa who’s looking for closure, the director starts unearthing this supposedly timid man’s murky existence – he was caught upon committing financial embezzlement at his workplace, had a three-way torrid affair with an older woman, his samurai background was offended upon finding out Yoshie’s elder sister’s sexual relationships, and even supposedly demonstrated growing intimacy with the latter – and then did a volte face by shifting his focus to Yoshie instead and then on cinema itself. Strikingly shot in grainy, high-contrast B/W, sparingly laced with a deliciously idiosyncratic score, and the conversations and visuals often running out-of-sync, the DNA of this complex exercise was carried by such future Iranian masterworks as Kiarostami’s Close-Up and Makhmalbaf’s A Moment of Innocence.

p.s. This is a revisit. My earlier review of this film can be found here.

Director: Shohei Imamura

Genre: Documentary/Mystery/Avant-Garde Film

Language: Japanese

Country: Japan

In Memoriam: Patricio Guzmán – Filming the Haunted Memories of a Nation

 Few filmmakers have chronicled their country’s story with such devastating brilliance, uncompromising commitment and unflagging defiance as Patricio Guzmán, who passed away on 15^th Sep 2026. His oeuvre formed an interconnected story of Chile – encompassing Allende’s revolutionary hope, the brutal military coup and Pinochet’s repressive dictatorship, heroic resistance and enforced disappearances of leftists, collective and personal memories, and finally the pulsating 2019 uprising that reconnected the thread with Allende’s presidency.

Filmmakers who readily come to mind, whose filmographies have similarly served as tireless and disobedient mirrors to their countries’ political histories, faultlines and memories, include such radical storytellers and documentarians as Theo Angelopoulos (Greece), Francesco Rosi (Italy), Andrzej Wajda (Poland), Carlos Saura (Spain), Mrinal Sen (India), Hou Hsiao-hsien (Taiwan), Jia Zhangke (China), Lav Diaz (Philippines), Wang Bing (China), and Anand Patwardhan (India), among others.

On a personal note, my knowledge of Chile during my school days had largely been linked to Ivan Zamorano and Marcelo Salas, stars of their fine football team during the 1990s. It was thanks to Guzmán, and my immense admiration for his unforgettable documentaries, that I came to really know and understand this Latin American country, and develop a rather deep connection with it – one that has only grown since then. Along with other masters of this exciting yet often-neglected form, he also helped establish my profound love for non-fiction cinema.

Presenting a collage of the 9 films by the Chilean maestro – or 11, if one considers The Battle of Chile trilogy as three separate films – that I’ve watched. Also list below the links to my reviews of these titles, in chronological order of their release:

• The First Year (1972)
• The Battle of Chile (1975, 1976, 1979)
• Chile, Obstinate Memory (1997)
• The Pinochet Case (2001)
• Salvador Allende (2004)
• Nostalgia for the Light (2010)
• The Pearl Button (2015)
• The Cordillera of Dreams (2019)
• My Imaginary Country (2022)

The First Year [1972]

 3^rd November 1970 was a momentous date as Salvador Allende became the first democratically elected Marxist head of state for Chile and overall Latin America. A then 31-year-old Patricio Guzmán, who’d just completed his diploma in filmmaking from the prestigious Escuela Oficial de Cinematografía in Madrid in 1970, returned to Chile and jumped into his feature-length directorial debut with the bustling enthusiasm and creative energy of a young man witnessing extraordinary social and political transformation unfold in front of his eyes. The First Year recorded the radical and jubilant first year of Allende’s presidency. He interacted with the country’s poor and working-class citizens – miners, farmers, fishermen, factory workers, and indigenous people who’d all been exploited and denied their fundamental and historical rights – and through that recounted the astonishing changes that were underway, from nationalization of resources and industries to land redistribution programmes that started liberating people from the abusive grip of neo-colonialist American corporations, predatory businessmen and entitled landowners. His reportage culminated with Fidel Castro’s visit that drew vast crowds. Alongside these ecstatic developments, he also captured – with sardonic undertones – deliberate reactionary attempts by the wealthy and the bourgeoisie; these foreboding undercurrents take grim and fatalistic meanings with the hindsight of what would transpire for Chileans and Allende two years later. This crackling work, made in grainy B/W and filled with dynamic music, formed a memorable prologue to his titanic The Battle of Chile trilogy that he made next, as well as a fine companion piece to both Salvador Allende and My Imaginary Country. Chris Marker, incidentally, saw an early cut while visiting Chile, became an immediate admirer, added a prologue in French and enabled its distribution in Europe.

Director: Patricio Guzman

Genre: Documentary/Reportage

Language: Spanish

Country: Chile

Hôtel Terminus [1988]

 With Hôtel Terminus, Marcel Ophüls completed a trilogy of Holocaust-themed films – monumental exposés on guilt, complicity, inconvenient truths and the broken consciences of nations – following his two earlier magisterial works with similarly mammoth runtimes, The Sorry and the Pity and The Memory of Justice. The defiant preserver of closeted political memories had stunningly dismantled cherished French narratives in the former film and crafted a complex, multi-geographic tapestry in the latter, and brought both aspects together in this 4-½-hour exploration of individual and collective evil, and the Machiavellian crimes of nations and institutions. Its putative subject was Klaus Barbie, the Nazi war criminal and sadistic Gestapo chief in Occupied France (which earned him the moniker “Butcher of Lyon”); he was recruited by the US intelligence after the war for anti-communist activities, and was then helped by them and the Vatican to flee to Bolivia using rat-lines, where he established a successful career advising the country’s repressive right-wing military dictatorship and other illegal pursuits; he was eventually extradited to France upon Bolivia’s return to democracy and convicted for crimes against humanity. Ophüls expanded the film beyond a conventional biography for a devastating commentary on historical trauma and hideous machinations driven by realpolitik, through interconnected threads, anecdotes and an extraordinary assemblage of people he interviewed. It was formally audacious – in the way complementary and contrasting responses were juxtaposed through cross-editing –, sprawling in its scope – spanning three continents, four languages and nearly five decades –, and a powerful public expression of “J'accuse”. It was also engrossing in how it unfolded like a detective story, with Ophüls, as its deeply moral anchor, teasing out confessionals through disarmingly incisive questions and a masterclass in interviewing techniques.

Director: Marcel Ophuls

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film/War/Biopic

Language: English/German/French/Spanish

Country: US

The Memory of Justice [1976]

 The Memory of Justice, Marcel Ophüls’s 2^nd meditation and inquiry into the Holocaust, following his masterful The Sorrow and the Pity which remains his best-known work, was a monumental work in every respect. At 4 hours and 40 minutes –albeit, consistently immersive through its mammoth runtime, complex layers and disquieting topics –, and containing interviews with around 50 individuals – Germans, Americans, English and French, representing a staggering breath of backgrounds and political views – that were interweaved with archival footage, the film’s sheer formal audacity was clearly discernible. Add to that the massive turmoil that Ophüls had to navigate in order to realize his uncompromising vision, a daring act of heist by two women from the film’s crew to unite him with his original edit, and its lengthy and painstaking restoration after it was lost for many years, and one even has sufficient material for a thrilling behind-the-scenes story. However, what ultimately made it such a powerful and unforgettable exercise lay in the great documentarian’s nuanced, morally courageous, multilayered, sharply intelligent and self-reflexive examination of individual and collective guilt, political memory, nature of justice, and the utmost necessity of universal doctrines for judging crimes against humanity. Ophüls employed a dialectical and digressive approach – at once absorbing and nuanced – while juxtaposing the Nuremberg trials – a momentous event despite some failings – with the “victors” going unpunished for Hiroshima, Dresden and other atrocities during WW2, and Vietnam (particularly My Lai) and Algeria thereafter, and interfaced with war criminals and victims, strident “patriots” and fearless dissenters, nationalists and universalists, statesmen and civilians, old and young, and even his wife, daughter and students, thus folding both historical interpretation and personal expression into this extraordinary document.

Director: Marcel Ophuls

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film/War

Language: English/German/French

Country: Germany/UK/US

The Hour of the Furnaces [1968]

 The Hour of the Furnaces – the title being a double reference to American imperialism by Che Guevara and Spanish colonialism by Cuban poet José Martí – was an underground revolutionary manifesto, agitprop audiovisual essay on the Marxist idea of praxis, powerful dialectical treatise on Argentine and Latin American political history, a diptych to Eduardo Galeano’s masterful Open Veins of Latin America, a rebellious poem for the oppressed and the abused, and an explosive battle cry for liberation through violence. Co-directed by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, co-founders of the film movement Grupo Cine Liberación, the monumental work presaged their influential essay on ‘Third Cinema’ – viz. militant guerilla filmmaking where cinema is a collective “weapon of truth”, as opposed to vacuous commercial movies (First Cinema) and artistic auteur-driven films (Second Cinema) – and served as a blueprint for such radical trailblazers as Godard (and Dziga Vertov Group), Marker, Rocha, Guzmán and Mrinal Sen. Its nearly 4-½-hour “notes and testimonies on neocolonialism, violence and liberation” was broken into a three-act structure of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. The 1^st part, filled with white-hot rage, was a sprawling indictment against relentless exploitation of Argentina’s impoverished working-class; the alternately mournful and arresting 2^nd part chronicled Peron’s popular left-wing democracy and its brutal crushing by the military dictatorship; the final part was an electrifying call for arms. Made in secrecy and distributed through clandestine networks, watching the film was an act of resistance in itself. Aside from its scorching political discourse, it was also a blazing exercise in the interplay of images and sounds through assemblage of newsreels, film footage, still photos, dazzling montages, incendiary sloganeering, riveting sound design, protest songs, talking heads, narrations and haunting silences.

Directors: Octavio Getino & Fernando Solanas

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film/Agitprop Cinema

Language: Spanish

Country: Argentina

Public Housing [1997]

 Through his extensive, sprawling and immersive documentation of the Ida B. Wells public housing development in Chicago, Frederick Wiseman traversed both the particular (a specific public housing community) and the universal (what we see in this desolate, messy and yet furiously “alive” complex resonates far beyond its specific geographic and temporal milieus). Emerging through this disarmingly ambitious 3-½-hour piece of unsparing, novelistic and observational portraiture – that can very well be classified as “Wisemanian” – was therefore a radical and humanistic ethnographic study of a ghettoized community and a marginalized people. The apartment building complex, named after the eponymous civil rights activist – that was eventually demolished between 2002 and 2011 – housed over 5000 African-American residents. Impoverished, mostly unemployed, mired in familial dysfunction and teenage pregnancies and addiction, under constant surveillance and harassment of cops permanently stationed around the society who treat the residents as drug peddlers and criminals by default, frequently patronized by unctuous authority figures who lecture them how they can easily improve their economic conditions if only they put in some efforts and enterprise, and at the absolute mercy of a distant and bureaucratic state, this is less a habitat and more an oppressive architecture. Yet, despite the hardships, squalor and violence, it also thrives through its feisty community leader Helen Finner who isn’t afraid of picking battles with those in positions of power, joyous expressions of fleeting freedoms through hip-hop dance celebrations and lively basketball games, selfless community programs hoping to drive micro improvements in the inhabitants’ lives, and incremental steps to elevate themselves from the daily grind of survival. Wiseman stitched these myriad interweaving vignettes – shot on low-fi 16mm colours – with nuance, compassion and undercurrents of irony.

Director: Frederick Wiseman

Genre: Documentary

Language: English

Country: US

Juvenile Court [1973]

 Both formally and topically Juvenile Court continued Frederick Wiseman’s exceptional fly-on-the-wall portraits of American institutions that he began 6 years back. His 7^th film, however, marked a pivotal shift, as with this he started transitioning towards more long-form documentaries that he’s most strongly associated with. It also carried a notable personal connect, as he’d graduated in law from Yale and also briefly taught the subject at Boston University before his foray into filmmaking. In this magnificent 2-½-hour work, he brought in his consummate observational, reportage and editorial eyes, and fused deep social empathy for young offenders and victims from working-class and impoverished families with sharp underlying critiques on America’s carceral society, while covering a complex variety of cases that’re brought before the Shelby County’s juvenile court in Memphis, Tennessee. Presided over by the paternalistic Judge Kenneth Turner – a surprisingly even-tempered and ostensibly fair-minded man, who nevertheless lays considerable importance on conventional sociolegal structures, must frequently take prejudicial stances and wields life-changing powers – prosecution and defence lawyers, along with cops and social workers, debate on cases ranging from domestic abuse by parents and guardians to kids running away from foster homes, from accusations of sexual molestation to charges of prostitution, from consumption of drugs to their distribution on the streets, and from petty shoplifting to allegations of being an accomplice in armed burglaries. The piercing, absorbing and richly nuanced film, pieced together from grainy B/W footage shot over 2 months that Wiseman spent at the courtrooms and its adjoining halls, offices and detention centres, breaks your heart with its bleak accounts of broken homes, destroyed lives and how guilt gets assigned (or not) based on casual conversations behind locked chambers.

Director: Frederick Wiseman

Genre: Documentary/Legal Documentary

Language: English

Country: US

Law and Order [1969]

 1960s were marked by fierce civil rights movements and anti-Vietnam War protests that deeply reshaped the US. Hence, when Frederick Wiseman decided to make a documentary on Kansas City’s police department – in the same year when the city, like many others, were rocked by massive unrest following Martin Luther King’s assassination and the ensuing police brutality – he planned an avowedly anti-police film. His approach, however, evolved as he and cameraman Bill Brayne embedded themselves into the daily patrols and rode with the cops for over 400 hours all-day long. The viscerally unsettling work, that remains topical to this day, was consequently more nuanced than what Wiseman had originally intended, while delivering a powerful critique on the entrenched institutional racism, sexism and violence blatantly cloaked in impunity. The filmmaker’s observational and “neutral” posture, along with the grainy 16mm B/W images, lent rich undercurrents to his freewheeling street reportage of a string of sequences both significant and mundane. The most chilling moment occurs midway when a group of cops viciously break into an apartment and one of them holds a helpless black sex worker in a chokehold; one can only guess if the camera’s presence stopped him from crossing the line, or if that even made any difference. Other unnerving instances included two teenagers carrying guns being apprehended in a clothing store, along with an unrelated guy with the same skin colour; and a delinquent young man, accused of hit-and-run, being handled with visible roughness upon his arrest. The crisscrossing episodes together underscored the brazen power imbalance that was on display where a majorly black town – mired in impoverishment, ghettoization and systemic oppression – is controlled by a decidedly white police force.

Director: Frederick Wiseman

Genre: Documentary/Institutional Documentary

Language: English

Country: US

Cities of Sleep [2015]

 Shaunak Sen’s gritty and hypnotic debut Cities of Sleep – filled with dystopian poetry and cutting irony – was a miniature act of marvel. Made 7 years before his magnificent docu essay All That Breathes that earned him global acclaim, he composed this compact work using loads of footage that he shot over 2 ½ years. A subaltern city symphony and observational essay – with its deadpan gaze on Delhi’s most impoverished and marginalized inhabitants representing the city’s bottom-most socioeconomic rung – was themed around the politics and class dynamics of sleep. Two grim locales which the city’s destitute homeless outcasts frequent at nights were intermeshed into the loose-limbed narrative – Meena Bazaar and Loha Pul. Jamaal, a tea seller, is a tough but mercurial sleep entrepreneur who runs a night shelter at the former locality, often raising the rent for cots and blankets as temperatures plummet, while also oftentimes breaking the trend by waiving charges in lieu of a good Mohd. Rafi song or calling an ambulance for free. The dominant protagonist of the former strand, however, was the slippery, eccentric and roguish Shakeel, a cadaverous yet colourful migrant man obsessed with his relationship with sleep. As he’d frequently disappear for weeks, Sen included a parallel strand covering a sleep commune situated, rather befittingly, in the underbelly of an historic iron bridge on the Yamuna River (the latter site). Ranjeet runs an improvised movie theatre there where, for a pittance, people can choose to watch three back-to-back Bollywood flicks or sleep while the film runs in the background, and hands out pithy maxims on the philosophy and economics of sleep. These interwoven netherworlds were brilliantly shot and sparingly set to a haunting score.

Director: Shaunak Sen

Genre: Documentary

Language: Hindi

Country: India

Land Of My Dreams [2023]

 Nausheen Khan’s debut feature-length documentary essay Land of My Dreams was simultaneously expansive and intimate, joyous and elegiac, political and personal, and was situated at the intersectionality of religious agency, feminist expression and political activism. As a protest film by a young and courageous woman filmmaker, where resistance is tampered with quiet melancholy, it reminded me of Payal Kapadia’s magnificent essay film A Night of Knowing Nothing, while the rousing 2025 docu The Encampments – committed, amateur, extended, on-field reportage on the spontaneous birth and spread of a collective movement underpinned by peaceful public dissent, and its brutal crushing by repressive state apparatus – reminded me to once again attempt getting access to this film (having tried and failed previously). The Jamia Millia Islamia university alumnus decided to grab her camera and head for her alma mater in Delhi when its students fearlessly raised their voice against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the violent crackdown they faced at the hands of right-wing lumpen and complicit cops. That organically catalysed the historic Shaheen Bagh protests – a valiant, peaceful, multifaith sit-in that was spearheaded by women – and the filmmaker jumped right in to participate, archive and resist in solidarity. Alongside extensively recording the vitality, camaraderie, warmth, generosity, defiance and rousing sense of community that was on display, and the chilling ruthlessness with which it was dismantled and criminalized, she also leveraged this canvas for private meditations on her identity as a Muslim woman, her fading hopes for a pluralist society, and the collapse of her land of dreams. The film, therefore, was as much an act of bearing witness and a refusal to forget, as a personal confessional and a journalistic diary.

Director: Nausheen Khan

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film/Reportage/Protest Film

Language: English/Hindi

Country: India

Gulabi Gang [2012]

 The colour of revolution – against gender, caste and domestic violence – is hot pink in Nishtha Jain’s fierce documentary Gulabi Gang. The said “gang” is a grassroot feminist collective headed by Sampat Pal, a charismatic leader and feisty social activist combatting patriarchy, oppression and injustices faced by women of rural India. Clad in pink sarees, the group’s impoverished and mostly illiterate Dalit and Muslim women – representing exceptionally repressed social segments driving for voice and strength through numbers – jump in whenever there’s a cry for help. Jain, who spent weeks travelling with them, forewent historical details, and instead documented – as observer and participant – a series of episodes which were variously harrowing, uplifting and disquieting, leading to a blunt, episodic, essayistic and quietly powerful reportage. The gruesome death of a woman – made to look like suicide while all evidences point towards gruesome murder by her husband – and the callous complicity of her in-laws, father, brother, villagers, and local cops, are vocally challenged by Pal. The dead girl’s aged mother – blind, voiceless and ignored – decides to speak up; even her lack of eyesight doesn’t prevent her from detecting this brazen crime, and that made this part a particularly damning and heartbreaking indictment of a world shorn of justice and compassion! While that served as the film’s pivotal thread, Jain also covered their recruitment drives, decision to take their fight forward by standing for local elections, and – in what added a nuanced subtext to the proceedings, that were often interspersed with lyrical shots of the rugged landscapes of the Badlands of Bundelkhand – a member’s pig-headed support of her brother who’s slain her sister for displaying agency, in tragic opposition to their organization’s foundational principles.

Director: Nishtha Jain

Genre: Documentary/Investigative Reportage

Language: Hindi

Country: India

State Funeral [2019]

 On 5^th March 1953, upon the death of Soviet leader Josef Stalin, the massive erstwhile nation descended into 4 days of state-enforced grief and mourning. The spectacle – at once solemn and carnivalesque – was filmed in extensive details, in both colours and B/W, by a cohort of 6 Soviet filmmakers, and turned into a eulogistic documentary titled The Great Farewell; ironically, as de-Stalinization commenced soon after, it was buried. Sergei Loznitsa – the great purveyor of Soviet and post-Soviet experiences and identities, frequently through extraordinary found-footage and archival documentaries – discovered over 35 hours of the original material in the Russian State Film and Photo Archive in Krasnogorsk, and transformed that largely unseen stash into State Funeral, a simultaneously droll, kaleidoscopic and mesmerizing observational reportage bordering on the surreal, on the final climactic gasp of the massive cult of personality that defined the Soviet tyrant’s dictatorial rule that lasted nearly three decades. The gorgeous Agfacolor images, with their striking maroons and greens, contrasted with muted B/W and a slyly designed soundscape, as we’re given a tour through the unfolding exhibition. The remarkable assemblage crisscrossed through the grand streets and buildings of Moscow, multiple cities and villages across the USSR, and even desolate landscapes and offshore oilfields, accompanied by drone-like voices from loudspeakers extolling the generalissimus’ greatness and providing excruciating details on how he died, alternated with absorbing classical music. The faces and gestures of the teeming crowds – both candid and performative – formed the most fascinating aspect of this symphonic montage, while the underlying disingenuity that underline the dry speeches made by Khrushchev, Beria, Malenkov and Molotov gains additional meanings if one has watched Armando Ianucci’s terrific black comedy The Death of Stalin.

Director: Sergei Loznitsa

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film/Reportage

Language: Russian

Country: Ukraine

General Report on Certain Matters of Interest For a Public Screening [1977]

 Pere Portabella, a giant of Spanish political cinema and documentary filmmaking, fused formal experimentation with dissident activism through his films, and carried his progressive commitments into post-Franco Spain and Catalonia through active political participations and drafting the new Spanish Constitution. His involvements, as Spain begun its complex transition from dictatorship to democracy in the late-1970s, found a rich and sprawling manifestation in this hybrid documentary essay – made following the fascist Generalissimo’s death – that remains a landmark of radical cinema. Clocking at over 2 ½ hours, it began on a moody note as we’re given a sombre tour of the Valley of the Fallen memorial. It switched gears right after, and the next 10-odd minutes contained some of the most thrilling footage of protests by Spain’s antifascist brigade – public demonstrations, furious battles with the cops on the streets, and brutal reprisals – set to a pulsating score. The work, thereafter, drifted into deep political discourses, debates and conversations. While these were primarily between representatives from various left-wing parties – Communists, socialists, trade unionists, social democrats, independent Marxists, reformists, Catalan left intellectuals – Portabella included even a conservative and a monarchist into the mix, as they explored the routes that Spain must pursue as it prepares for democratic elections and electoral coalitions. In a fascinating formal choice, he alternated these pluralist viewpoints, and parallel meditations on the past – through collective memories, narrations and visuals – with performative elements. The latter facet was daringly expressed through a particularly unnerving sequence wherein violent interrogation and torture sequences by Franco’s extrajudicial security apparatus, enacted by actors and carrying the feel of a visceral political thriller, were juxtaposed with articles being read out from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Director: Pere Portabella

Genre: Documentary/Political Documentary/Essay Film/Experimental Film

Language: Spanish/Catalan

Country: Spain

Grands Soirs et Petits Matins [1978]

 May 68 remains a defining political, social and cultural touchstone in France; many French films and books, consequently, have sprung from and meditated upon this epochal moment. However, while they largely did that post facto, William Klein’s absorbing documentary recorded it in the present. He was smoking outside a ciné-club when, upon hearing students asking around if anyone’s interested in making “Cinema Sorbonne”, he jumped right in. As  intellectuals engaged in Marxist and dialectical discourses in the quintessential French spirit of debates, in between demonstration marches and inside the hallowed institution; militants verbally sparred with moderates; blue-collar workers argued with students, Klein’s roving hand-held camera observed the electrifying revolutionary fervour with the curiosity and empathy of a radical participant, and archived them in gorgeous B/W images with the consummate skills of a street photographer. These were often interspersed with protestors collectively singing Internazionale; regularly complemented with flareups, violent unrest and furious street battles with cops; and culminated into a short and energetic climactic montage. Klein assembled his visceral footage – charged with the immediacy of direct cinema and the reflexive qualities of an essay – ten years later, but avoided the ensuing disillusionment from seeping in. In French parlance, as he explained in an interview, a grand soir signifies “revolution” that lights up an evening, while petit matin implies the “hangover” of the following morning, and these complementary aspects suffused haunting undercurrents into this dazzling exercise that Joao Moreira Salles actively referenced in his blazing docu-essay In the Intense Now. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, with his cool charisma and sharp wit, featured prominently, along with blink-and-you-miss glimpses of Resnais, Rivette and Duras, though I was hoping to catch a view of Godard too.

Director: William Klein

Genre: Documentary/Political Reportage

Language: French

Country: France

Harlan County, USA [1976]

 Barbara Kopple’s debut feature Harlan County USA – a stunning potpourri of cinéma vérité, leftwing political advocacy, reportage, and newsreel – remains a cornerstone for protest films and working-class cinema. The cinematic equivalent of the immortal labour anthem “Which Side Are You On?” that was written by Florence Reece and popularized by Pete Seeger – the song served as a recurring motif throughout – Kopple took a steadfastly partisan stance (she was no neutral) while delivering a riveting account of the fierce and defiant 13-month-long strike by the coalminers from the titular Kentucky town, against Duke Powers Company, to secure the right to join organized labour union. When she arrived to document the miners’ struggle and resistance, she was initially viewed with suspicion and scepticism as a hippie New York filmmaker; however, she won their hearts, stayed at their homes, became part of their community, joined them in the charged picket lines, heard their stories of exploitation and suffering, and filmed their dogged fight for survival for over a year. What particularly emerged through her images, with unforgettable impact, was the role played by women – who were fearlessly at the forefront, going heads-on with violent company-paid strike-breakers, thugs and cops – thereby making this a great feminist exercise too. The film’s extraordinary soundtrack comprised of a string of rousing protest songs by bluegrass and folk artists – Reece, Hazel Dickens, Marle Travis, David Morris et al – while the chronicle of the bloody labour battle was interspersed with historical reference points, ugly manoeuverings by those hungry for power and profit, exposé on the abominable working conditions, and a heartbreaking death that finally turned the tide, thus making this a haunting mosaic of moments, actions and voices.

Director: Barbara Kopple

Genre: Documentary/Protest Film/Reportage

Language: English

Country: US

The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On [1987]

 Iconoclastic and rebellious Japanese filmmaker Kazuo Hara’s most emblematic work – and groundbreaking “action documentary” – The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On focused its gaze on a man who’s so fervently anti-war that, ironically, he’s even ready to use violence for his activism. Kenzō Okuzaki, a veteran of Japan’s notorious campaign in Papua New Guinea during WW2, was a one-man truth squad and defiantly anti-establishmentarian agitator – driven by righteous fury bordering on madness – against his country’s hideous war-time atrocities, and his monomaniac crusade to hold Emperor Hirohito and Japan’s military to account often landed him in long prison stints. Introduced to this fascinating provocateur by his idol and mentor Shōhei Imamura, Hara made a film – amalgamating anti-imperialist politics with gripping investigative journalism, cinéma vérité techniques and searing condemnation of militarism and blind nationalist obedience – that was as radical, complex and riveting as its subject. Okuzaki, with Hara’s camera in tow, goes about exposing a particularly horrific chapter from over 40 years back when two low-ranking privates were executed – supposedly for desertion – even though the war was already over by then. With their respective brother and sister as company – later, when they decide to part ways, replaced by his stoical wife and a fellow-anarchist as stand-ins – he goes about confronting the now-ageing officers and perpetrators, often bullying and even beating them to extract confessions. Hara alternated the edgy interactions in closed spaces, shot using handheld cams and unbroken long takes, with stunning panoramic shots and street footage of Okuzaki driving his van filled with political slogans and having passive-aggressive altercations with cops, for a work that pushed the limits of nonfiction filmmaking by inciting reactions, shattering social conventions and uncovering buried truths.

Director: Kazuo Hara

Genre: Documentary/Investigative Documentary/Biopic

Language: Japanese

Country: Japan

Man Marked for Death, 20 Years Later [1984]

 A landmark political documentary and masterpiece of Latin American cinema, Brazilian filmmaker Eduardo Coutinho’s genre-fluid cinema vérité essay traversed from resistance to lamentation to healing over the course of three episodes that were woven into it. In 1964, he started making a hybrid docu-drama – blending neorealism with agitprop – on João Pedro Teixeira, a fearless activist who was brutally murdered 2 years back by the military police and lackeys of local landowners, for his outspoken advocation of land reforms and peasant rights. Coutinho cast non-actors, including Teixeira’s widowed wife Elizabeth playing herself, and shot for 35 days at a recently collectivised farm before being shut down by the military coup d’état in Brazil. Nearly everything was seized, some folks were arrested, and rest – including Elizabeth, who’d become a rebellious voice herself after her husband’s death – went into hiding. The self-reflexive and kaleidoscopic middle chapter, shot in 1981 as the dictatorship was losing its grip, sees Coutinho returning and reconnecting with the stalled film’s participants, screening the recovered footage, and recording memories from 17 years back, reflections on lost years, and stories of harsh punishments, reconciliations and survival. In the extraordinary final segment filmed over the following 3 years, Coutinho first tracks down Elizabeth – she’d escaped overnight and had been living incognito ever since – so that she’s finally able to reclaim her identity, voice and life, and then her many children, most of whom have grown up dispersed, carrying fading recollections of their mother. This deeply moving final chapter powerfully extended the individual histories of direct participants, for a meditation on the personal costs of resistance, chronicle of interruption, and expression of cinema’s capacity for defiance, endurance, remembrance and driving closure.

Director: Eduardo Coutinho

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film/Political Film

Language: Portuguese

Country: Brazil