The run-up to the OSCARS 2023

[Chris Knipp]

Catching up: shortlisted documentaries.
Just some brief comments. This is a work in progress.



BAD AXE
THe title is the name of a remote northern 3,000+ population largely Trump supporter Michigan town. The filmamker David Siev who grew up here came back from NYC and moved in with parents and siblings to escape the pandemic, or share the lockdown, with his mixed Cambodian-Mexican-American family of origin whose members collaborate in running a restaurant called "Rachel's." His father is a childhood refugee from the Cambodian Killing Fields, his mother Mexican-American. One sister's husband is white, the other's husband's adopted black raised by a white couple. David turns his camera on the family. The film follows the tumultuous year 2020, month by month, including the George Floyd-Black Lives Matter demos, even in this small town, leading to a confrontation with skull-mask-wearing armed white suprematists, repeated menace from what turn out to be members of a terrorist cell who wind up bing arrested by the FBI, anti-Asian slurs prompted by Trump's calling COVID "Kung Flu," and finally the election of Joe Biden. And so the film is an astonishingly vivid mirroring of America at the period it covers. You can say the filmmaking is messy and reads like a home movie, that the score is loud and crude, but you can't get away from how central this material is to the American experience at this moment. And what an engaging, beautiful, sometimes embarrassing family this is.

NOVALNY
You probably know what this is. He is the prominent would-be Russian rival to Putin who Putin (or somebody) attempted to kill by poisoning but who miraculously survived, and went back to Russia, and was put into jail. Novalny is cool, so is his wife. The whole sequence of events is like a political thriller. It is also sometimes amusing. For me this is not as interesting or as important a theme as the threat to the Amazon rainforest (TERRITORY), climate change and the undermining of the natural world (ALL THAT BREATHES), discovering the legacy of slavery and racism in America (DESCENDANT), the opioid crisis and the culpability in it of the billionaire ackler famiily (ALL THE BEAUTY AND THE BLOODSHED), Biden's disastrous, abrupt withdrawal from Afghanistan (RETROGRADE), even maybe the stunning art of David Bowie (MOONAGE DAYDREAM. Sometimes it's a question of how beautifully made these documentaries are. NOVALNY is a conventionally slick and competent film, but there is nothing distinctive about it; it could just be an episode of some TV news feature series episode. BAD AXE may be home-movie-ish and raw, but Chun Siev and his family are vital and unique as well as emblematic, and hence memorable.




A HOUSE MADE OF SPLINTERS
I recently reported on this as part of the SF Jewish series WinterFest: it's by the maker of the previous award-winning THE DISTANT BARKING OF DOGS (which I liked better) by the risk-taking Danish documentarian Simon Lereng Wilmont, also made in Ukraine, about a sort of halfway house for children rescued from dangerous families hopefully awaiting adoption. It is touching and beautifully and delicately made, also a little bit sentimental and more conventional and less risk--taking than DISTANT BARKING.

HIDDEN LETTERS
About a secret language subjugated Chinese women used to communicate among themselves, a language now just barely saved from dying out.

THE JANES
Abouta band of women in Chicago who conspired to help women have abortions, and enabled thousands of them.

LAST FLIGHT HOME
About a family and a dying man whose remarkable life they celebrate. (I could have watched this film but avoided it because it sounded depressing.)