Categories One-by-One: Documentary Feature

[Mister Tee]

The nominees:

Bobi Wine: the People's President
The Eternal Memory
Four Daughters
To Kill a Tiger
20 Days of Mariupol

Variety had an article a few weeks back: US documentarians complaining their branch had been so opened up to international filmmakers that they found themselves boxed out in this year's nominations. True: the five nominees are set all around the globe, and are mostly not shot in English. This general obscurity has made it one of the hardest slates to track down of recent times. It's also, I'd argue, the bummer-est roster I can recall. Finishing up my journey through the nominees this week -- alongside reading our domestic news developments -- makes me want to essentially crawl in a hole and die.

I think there's a pretty clear front-runner, but all the nominees are considerable, and worthy of attention (long as you've got Prozac nearby).

The Eternal Memory is a double-tiered narrative: to start, it shows us a couple in a long-time relationship having to deal with one partner's encroaching Alzheimer's. But, as it goes further, it shows that this pair has a good deal worth forgetting, as they were both part of the resistance during the Pinochet years in Chile. The result is a film that's both a sweeping chronicle of that era, as well as an intimate two-person story. Quite moving.

Bobi Wine: the People's President is an all-too-familiar international story -- a charismatic young challenger tries to win election against a repressive regime, and finds himself and his followers arrested/beaten/very likely cheated. It's Navalny transposed to Uganda -- with the exception that most of us probably knew nothing about it before seeing the film. (I knew so little that, for part of the way, I naively hoped for a positive outcome.) It says something about this year's competition that this film isn't even the most pessimistic in the field...but it does make one despair of just how invulnerable regimes like the Ugandan one remain despair all efforts to change them. (And, for me, made my anger fiercer that there are so many Americans not 100% devoted to seeing it doesn't happen here.)

My thought throughout To Kill a Tiger was, this feels like a script a Hollywood liberal would have churned out. The horrific act that sets the plot in motion, the incompetent (if not corrupt) performance of the local police, the fecklessness of politicians, the ugly turn the community takes against the righteous man -- this is the outline of a hundred do-good movies I've seen over the years (hell, it goes back to Ibsen/Enemy of the People). How depressing the story is 100% from life...but how semi-uplifting that a somewhat just ending was brought about. (Though the undercurrent is still despair over how awful so many people are.)

Four Daughters has a bit of meta to it -- actors playing the roles of two absent daughters, something the film emphasizes rather than downplays -- and it may put some people off. (I'll admit I got confused once or twice about who was real and who wasn't.) But I found this the most compelling of the five films, largely because of where the story went. (Once again, my ignorance of so much beyond US borders made the story more interesting to me.) It went to such a shocking place that I had to reconsider all that I'd seen leading up to it.

But 20 Days in Mariupol is a pretty clear front-runner, not least because Republican gamesmanship on funding has kept Ukraine prominently in US headlines. I think you can have multiple feelings about the film. The you-are-there feeling of the on-spot footage is very compelling, and puts into vivid focus a war of which we might (in standard American ADD fashion) grow weary. It's hard to think of a better chronicle of those early days, from rumor-of-war to full-blown conflict. On the other hand, I got a bit tired of the filmmakers repeatedly patting themselves on the back for their valiant efforts getting their footage out of Ukraine. It had a "You see all that? Thank ME for it" tone to it, which seemed above and beyond the film's purpose.

It may not bother most people. Hell, many may not even see anything but Mariupol, and vote for it simply to support Zelensky. I'd probably vote for Four Daughters, but I fully expect Mariupol to win.