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

With Hasan in Gaza [2025]

 In 1989, during the 1^st Intifada, Palestinian filmmaker Kamal Aljafari – a teenager then – had befriended a fearless fellow inmate called Abdel Rahim upon being imprisoned. Twelve years later, during the 2^nd Intifada, Aljafari – he’d emigrated to Berlin by then and was still 2 years away from his debut short – returned to Gaza with a MiniDV camcorder and a guide named Hasan by his side, whose whereabouts remain unknown, in search of his lost friend. It would be another over two decades, as a ghastly genocide is being carried out with brazen impunity, that Aljafari – now with 5 feature-length films under his belt – recovered and strung together the found footage from 3 MiniDV tapes on roads, the sea, locales, people, destroyed homes and chance encounters, thereby providing a haunting and achingly intimate meditation on memory, oppression, loss, personal resistance, collective defiance, and the heartbreaking meaning of home for a Palestinian. Interspersed with lyrical Arab songs, the restrained images – of living under oppression, apartheid, surveillance, and daily violence – foreshadowed the devastation being wreaked upon Gaza. Recalling Eyal Sivan and Michel Khleifi’s magnificent docu essay Route 181: Fragments of a Journey in Israel-Palestine, this quietly melancholic road movie – bursting with understated vitality – captured a man enjoying his freedom after 8 years in jail; women on the edge due to incessant shelling; a wary young guy at a loss at the wanton destruction of homes; being warned of the risks of his camera getting mistaken for a gun by an overzealous military; people playing cards and enjoying family gatherings amidst the occupation; sights of a ravaged landscape from the car; and, most unforgettably, the infectious excitement among kids whenever they notice the friendly camera.

Director: Kamal Aljafari

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film/Road Movie

Language: Arabic

Country: Palestine

Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk [2025]

Mobile phones have made the world appear smaller than it actually is while also underlining the massive distances separating us; this remarkable film – a disillusioning tableau of a broken world, yet radiating with profound empathy and camaraderie – indelibly demonstrated this dichotomy. Iranian documentary filmmaker and activist Sepideh Farsi, living in exile in Paris since fleeing Tehran in 1984, and Palestinian photojournalist Fatima Hassouna, locked in Gaza City, were able to interact for a year and form a deep bond through video calls, allowing us to get a first-hand account of the horrors and the resilience, despite all three – Farsi, Fatima, and us – fundamentally unable to bridge the irreconcilable chasms, barrier and borders. The devastating state-backed genocide in Palestine has killed 250+ journalists, and Fatima’s death – a targeted missile, just as this docu was selected for screening at Cannes, wiped out her entire family to stop her from recording, archiving and bearing witness using her camera – would’ve been just another count on paper if not for this personal memorial and remembrance. Their seeming differences notwithstanding – Farsi is older, left-wing, atheist, feminist, cynical, was once a political prisoner, and now able to roam the world; Fatima was in her mid-20s, devout, filled with irrepressible hope despite the despair surrounding her, never able to explore her dreams and aspirations, and forever a doomed refugee in her own land – the two women engaged in candid conversations through patchy mobile networks, blockade and bombings. Two facets made this a particularly stirring and expansive ode to courage and resistance – Fatima’s contagious smile, in defiance of the deaths, food shortage and loss of loved ones; and her terrific street photographs that Farsi displayed at regular intervals. 

Director: Sepideh Farsi

Genre: Documentary/Diary Film/Essay Film/Epistolary Film/War

Language: English/Arabic

Country: Palestine/France

The Encampments [2025]

 There’s something magical about documentaries that capture, with rousing political urgency and here-and-now, the collective resistance by civilians who’ve taken to the streets to protest against a boorish establishment. The electrifying co-directed docu The Encampments, simultaneously observational and immersive, belongs to that breed where the throbbing crowd – in this case progressive, defiant and courageous college students – is its protagonist, as they decide to go about being on the right side of the history with daring abandon. The agitprop filmmaking, blending on-ground reportage with political activism, chronicled the Gaza Solidarity Encampment that the Columbia University’s students set up in April 2024, demanding complete financial divestiture by the institute’s complicit management from companies enabling Israel’s horrific genocide in Gaza, and amnesty for students censured by it. Their stirring pro-Palestine dissent and speaking of truth to power in the face of ugly vilification and repression by politicians and the media spread like a contagious wildfire across university campuses in the US and beyond, and – in parallel – eloquently recalled how, during the 1960s, Columbia’s students had similarly defended that era’s civil rights movement and opposed the Vietnam War against similarly heavy-handed authorities. The organic and decentralized movement, whose lead spokespersons were Mahmoud Khalil and Sueda Polat (among others), witnessed student and alumni participation that cut across religious, ethnic and national backgrounds, and their intoxicating passion and resilience were paralleled with gut-wrenching footage from Gaza and shocking brutality by NYC cops inside the campus. In perhaps the film’s most enduring moment, the students briefly occupy Hamilton Hall and rename it Hind Hall, in honour of the martyred seven-year-old girl whose harrowing story was memorialized by Kaouther Ben Hania in The Voice of Hind Rajab.

Directors: Michael T. Workman & Kei Pritsker

Genre: Documentary/Political Reportage

Language: English

Country: US/Palestine

Our Land (Nuestra Tierra) [2025]

 The rotten history of settler-colonialism in Argentina – and the accompanying erasure of indigenous communities – has undergone progressive explorations in Lucrecia Martel’s blazing filmography. Ethnic populace – and their treatment by white bourgeois Argentines – manifested on the fringes of La Ciénaga, became a narrative catalyst in The Headless Woman, and provided the backdrop in Zama. And now, in her incisive and magnificent feature-length documentary Our Land (which was initially conceived as a hybrid essay), they’ve now moved into the foreground. Based on the 2009 murder of Javier Chocobar, 68-year-old leader of the Chuschagasta community and land rights’ activist in the country’s Tucumán Province, while resisting eviction by three men who claimed ownership of the place where they’ve existed for generations, and the much-belated trial of that in 2018, Martel trained her gaze for a rich portrayal of both the community and the deceased individual alongside a cutting reportage on the crime and the trial. The film, consequently, operated along multiple intersecting strands, coalescing murky historical contexts with contemporary fault-lines, and collective with the personal. Alongside, it navigated through “real time” legal proceedings; investigations into the incident from 9 years back; profoundly affecting memories of Chocobar through his widowed wife; seething examination of exploitation, otherization, power imbalances and persisting colonialist tendencies; and a kaleidoscopic testament to the Chuschagasta peoples’ resistance and resilience through a blend of oral and archival histories. Co-written with María Alché, her mischievous heroine from The Holy Girl, Martel stitched this multilayered tapestry through disparate visual choices – static images and jerky handycams juxtaposed with ravishing panoramic and drone shots – and reminded me of Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia for the Light by prefacing the grimy incident with majestic images from space.

Director: Lucrecia Martel

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film/Political History

Language: Spanish

Country: Argentina

One or Two Questions [2018]

 The wave of military dictatorships that spread through Latin America during the 20^th century, competed with one another on state-sponsored repression, human rights abuses, extra-judicial punishments, and most notably, enforced disappearances. The one that ruled Uruguay for over a decade – it began with the 1973 coup d'état and brutal crackdown on the Marxist-Leninist Tapamaros, and finally ended in 1985 following massive demonstrations and strikes – was no less draconian. Hence, when an amnesty law was passed by the government in 1986, shielding the armed forces from prosecutions, it inevitably led to widespread protests by the civil society and human rights groups against it, which ultimately paved the way for a country-wide referendum in 1989. This remarkable 4-hour-long documentary – shot between 1987 and 1989 on the streets of Montevideo and neighbouring towns and villages; and finally released nearly 3 decades later – provided a rare glimpse of the wheels of democracy and the voice of journalism in action as the event, and associated political forces, unfolded. Two journalists, María Barhoum and Graciela Salsamendi, interviewed multiple everyday folks for Swiss television – both those favouring the amnesty, for reasons ranging from fascist beliefs, apologia and apathy to underlying fear of fresh retributions, and those steadfastly opposing it – and the recorded footage was edited by globetrotting Swiss documentarian Kristina Konrad into this 4-hour-long reportage on the shifting meanings of “peace” and “justice”, and a nuanced investigation into political trauma, anger and amnesia. The interviews were interspersed with electoral television commercials from that period, which added ironic qualities to the engrossing audio-visual collage. The docu remains part of an ever-growing pantheon of powerful Latin American political documentaries and films connected by their shared refusal to forget.

Director: Kristina Konrad

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film/Political History/Reportage

Language: Spanish

Country: Uruguay

The Sorrow and the Pity [1969]

 Few films have so powerfully combatted collective historical amnesia like Marcel Ophüls’ monumental 4-½-hour-long documentary did by dismantling the carefully established Gaullist myth – much to everyone’s chagrin – that the French populace had resisted the Nazi Occupation en masse and were tragically martyred by it. No wonder, he had to secure funding from German and Swiss television after the French network refused to support an exercise as unpalatable as this, and a French release was made finally possible at a small left bank theatre thanks to Truffaut. This engrossing work – its colossal runtime notwithstanding – was a complex, multi-perspective investigation into the puppet, autocratic and collaborationist regime that was helmed by Philippe Pétain and Pierre Laval, which made France the sole occupied country during WW2 that had a functioning government that actively cooperated with German occupiers. Ophüls documented this dark chapter through an assemblage of diverse personal testimonies, memories and reflections – perpetrators, apologists and bystanders, as well as heroes, dissidents, and those who realized their folly on hindsight; fascists and antifascists; French people, of course, but also former Wehrmacht officers and British agents – which made this a simultaneously lucid, desolate and devastating oral history. Broken into two halves – “The Collapse” covered France’s rapid surrender, armistice, the disgraceful Vichy government, and how most people were okay with it; “The Choice” focussed on the active and passive collaborators, fearless members of Resistance groups, and the murky liberation process – its most unforgettable section comprised of a freewheeling conversation with working-class former Resistance fighters who melancholically share how easily everyone had embraced virulent racism, anti-Communism and xenophobia, the associated moral rot, the futility of seeking revenge against informants, and the eventual whitewashing of wartime culpability.

Director: Marcel Ophuls

Genre: Documentary/War

Language: French/German/English

Country: France

Close-Up [1990]

 Abbas Kiarostami, right from his 1973 debut feature The Experience till the end of 1980s – Homework was his last film of that decade – had been making narrative films with underlying documentary attributes and documentaries with discernible performative elements. With Close-Up, he blurred the already porous boundaries between the two into something indistinguishable. That he also crafted a work that was simultaneously audacious in its formal conception and deceptively simple in its execution, playfully self-conscious and profoundly humane, radically metatextual and deeply moving, made this an extraordinary gem. The film’s unforgettable protagonist is Hossain Sabzian, a poor and unassuming cinephile who impersonated the well-known Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf, and faced trial and a short jail-term when the Ahankhahs – a well-off Tehran family who he promised to cast in the fictious film that he was supposedly planning to make – caught his fraudulence. Kiarostami cast Sabzian, members of the Ahankhah family and Farazmand – a journalist who too was drawn to the story – as themselves for recreating the interactions and moments that formed the backstory, as well as convinced the compassionate judge to allow him to shoot the trial – which he did using two 16mm cameras and where he casually inserted himself into the cross-examinations. Through this extraordinarily hybrid approach, an absorbing multilayered meditation unfolded on art, cinema, identity, representation, and originality vis-à-vis artifice, and perhaps paved the way for Makhmalbaf’s own similarly hybrid and beguiling masterpiece A Moment of Innocence. The film, interestingly, comprised of impish asides – as in the remarkable opening taxi-ride sequence –, an emotionally naked evocation of Sabzian for whom truth is subjective and art is absolute, and a haunting coda when the fake and real Makhmalbafs finally meet.

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

Director: Abbas Kiarostami

Genre: Documentary/Drama

Language: Persian

Country: Iran

Fellow Citizen [1983]

 Fellow Citizen was Abbas Kiarostami’s first full-length work foregrounded on cars, aside from being his first longform documentary. Cars blur the boundaries between the private and the public, representing a liminal space coalescing the two, and that facet became an absorbing motif in his cinema hereon, which made this playful, deadpan, and deceptively observational essay a significant entry for aficionados of his filmography. The Iranian giant had incidentally worked as part-time traffic cop during his student days at the University of Tehran, to support his studies, and that injected a personal connect into this work that was steadfastly focused on traffic officer Reza Mansouri. Owing to traffic woes, the city’s authorities decided in 1980 to impose a limited hours’ ban on private cars in the city centre. Kiarostami, sensing the possibility of drama within the mundane, and the battle of wits between regulation and disorderliness, set up his camera to capture – through close-ups using telephoto lens – the mix of matter-of-fact, amusing, conciliatory, exasperated and argumentative conversations between Mansouri – whose role is being a gatekeeper to the forbidden zone – and a flurry of automobile drivers cajoling, coaxing and convincing him to let them through as an exception. There was, therefore, also this fascinating element of performativity as the citizens try using a variety of techniques – from drawing his sympathy and laying importance to his position of power, even though he’s in essence a simple cop, to impromptu storytelling and even demonstrating their social positions – in order to be allowed into the forbidden zone. The series of impassively recorded interactions, consequently, ended up taking deceptively layered allegories. The documented vignettes, by the way, were edited from over 18 hours of footage!

Director: Abbas Kiarostami

Genre: Documentary

Language: Persian

Country: Iran

As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty [2000]

 Jonas Mekas’ magnum opus – with a title that mirrored its achingly intimate self-expression, moving tone and expansive length – both underpinned and subverted the idea of experimental filmmaking. At close to 5 hours runtime, it was his longest film; that, along with its fragmentary, loosely-strung, collage-like nature, bereft of any narrative patterns or pay-offs, and unhurriedly paced, emphasized its alternative form. Covering a staggering 30 years – from 1970 to 1999 – it was also the most monumental diary film of his career. That said, it was plaintive, lyrical, effervescent and self-effacing – a “masterpiece of nothing” in his words – which imbued it with joyous simplicity and accessibility. Forming an unintended New York triptych along with Walden and Lost, Lost, Lost – and ‘Diary of an Exile’ tetralogy of sorts when one also includes Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania – this was a home movie in the purest sense as it captured moments that weren’t just autobiographical but also profoundly personal. Composed of a vibrant flurry of 16mm footage shot primarily in New York City but also elsewhere in the US and Europe – which he then assembled in a randomized order (as opposed to chronologically) – it’s lovingly centred on his vivacious wife Hollis, their cherubic daughter Oona and their son Sebastian. These three individuals and the memories they shared – daily life in their Manhattan apartment and outside, lazy Sundays at Central Park, noticing his children’s first steps, celebrating birthdays, loving moments with his wife, playing with his pet, experiencing new places, observing seasons change – represented paradise for him. These laced this exquisitely poetic memoir and most unassuming epic – accompanied by Mekas’ lilting narration and a wistful score – with radiance, melancholy and a gossamer-like delicacy.

Director: Jonas Mekas

Genre: Documentary/Diary Film/Essay Film/Experimental Film

Language: English

Country: US