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