The Film Experience

by Josh Bierman

I’m sure I’m not the only contributor/reader on this site who upon Oscar nomination morning wakes to find they’ve already seen just about every above the line nominee. Or if they haven’t, they come to terms with having to sit through Hillbilly Elegy after managing to avoid it for months.

This season, like in so many past ones, it’s those below the line nominees that I spent time getting to know after the nomination announcement. I didn't expect to be so far behind on Best Documentary Feature ahead of nomination morning...

AppleTV+’s Boys State had been gaining momentum as a potential nominee as had Kirsten Johnson’s Netflix venture, Dick Johnson is Dead. However, the documentary branch threw us a curveball like they did in 2018 when buzzy documentaries like Won’t You Be My Neighbor? and Three Identical Strangers, frontrunners all season long, were shafted. And much like 2018, we’re still left with a pretty strong line up. While AppleTV+ missed out, Netflix has two nominees in contention, Amazon Prime has one, and our two foreign language documentaries can be found on Hulu. Without further ado, let’s meet our nominees in the order I personally met them...

My Octopus Teacher explores filmmaker and marine life enthusiast Craig Foster’s relationship with an octopus he spent a year observing off the coast of Cape Town. Directors James Reed and Pippa Ehrlich interecut Foster’s narration with footage Foster himself shot underwater. While the underwater shots do a great job of showing what this experience must have been like, Foster’s narration goes a long way in helping you understand his aquatic reality. In the first few minutes, he describes how frigid the water was on his first few visits and his description was so vivid that I felt cold hearing about it. I won’t lie, I was hoping for a bigger octopus than the one we got, but then again this wasn’t my octopus teacher, it was someone else’s. And like Foster it was hard not to fall in love with this octopus and the relationship that Foster creates with her. The documentary is at its most interesting (and heartrending) when dealing with the hardest part of documenting nature--the helplessness of the human observer in the animal world’s most violent moments. In most nature documentaries we accept the reality that documentarians can’t insert themselves into the environment they are filming, but most don’t have the relationships that Foster built with the octopus. Both Foster and the audience are left reeling as we watch our octopus fend for her life against sharks. Ultimately, My Octopus Teacher hits all of its marks. Foster clearly sets up in the beginning a relationship he always dreamed of being able to have with animals, he creates that relationship, and then we see how it serves to bring him closer to the people already in his life, like his son who he begins to include in his underwater adventures. And it all happens in a snappy 85 minutes, the perfect feature length.

The first of the two foreign language documentaries I watched was Chile’s The Mole Agent. A private investigator is contacted by the daughter of a woman in a nursing home who believes her mother is being mistreated. The PI advertises in local listings for an elderly person to go undercover in the facility. Enter Sergio, a recently widowed man looking for a way to fill his days. What follows is a heartwarming portrait of a man finding a purpose later in life, but also a sobering look at aging. There are delightful moments of Sergio learning how to use technological devices like an octogenarian Maxwell Smart. We see him become the flavor of the month at the home with every woman making a move including a woman who has been there for 25 years. (Where’s that movie? That means she would have been in this facility starting in her mid 60s and she seemed completely with it, both mentally and physically, in her 80s!).

I don’t know if I’ve been in the house too long and watching the news too much, but I was convinced Sergio was Dr. Fauci’s long lost twin. Like his American counterpart, he takes his job so seriously and with a degree of empathy that is so rare. That level of thoughtfulness for other people should be necessary in every single job. Ultimately, while I loved watching Sergio’s journey and the friendships he makes, this didn’t feel like a documentary. It didn’t feel like a documentary about an elderly man going undercover to find abuse in a nursing home, it almost felt like they were documenting a social experiment. And yet, I was completely charmed by the movie and would be happy to see it win on Oscar night. It also doesn’t hurt that it was less than 90 minutes. If you haven’t watched I Care a Lot yet, the two films would make an interesting double feature. And for what it’s worth, The Mole Agent has what Dick Johnson is Dead wants.

The next documentary was Netflix’s Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution which explores the lives of a group of disabled kids who attended Camp Jened, a summer camp that let them be surrounded by people just like themselves. It ultimately empowered many of them to be leading forces in the disability rights movement when they grew up. All the documentaries in this category do a really wonderful job of getting us to fall in love with the figures they’re spotlighting. No documentary in this list has a better cast of characters. They are brimming with life, particularly Denise Sherer Jacobson who has a wicked sense of humor. My hang up with the film was based on what I was assuming it would be from the title. I was hoping to see more of their life at camp. I had an uncle who was a quadrapalegic and his greatest joy in life was going to summer camp every year from childhood through adulthood. He would paint and make friends and talk about it all year until the next summer came around. I wish we got to experience more of the camp life, because ultimately Camp Jened closed and we deserve the oral history leading to that moment. That being said, the latter half of the title leads to a rousing and empowering second half. This is a must watch for younger generations including my own. I was embarrassed I didn’t know how recent the fight for the civil rights of handicapped folks was in our history. Ultimately, I think this will be our winner come Oscar night. I hope there’s a way that all the Camp Jened alumni who made this film so special will be able to be included on Oscar night. I think a virtual ceremony will make that more likely than a regular Oscar night. I think back to Ali Stroker winning a Tony for Oklahoma! and having to wait backstage to then take the stage upon winning. While these amazing crusaders fought hard for an accessible world and succeeded, you don’t have to look further than an awards show as recent as 2019 to see that we still have a ways to go.

If anything can spoil Crip Camp’s win I think it’s Garrett Bradley’s Time. Bradley shows us Fox Rich’s two decade long battle to get her husband, Rob, out of prison following a conviction for armed robbery using both home video footage Fox herself shot over the course of years interspliced with Bradley’s own camerawork beginning in 2016. Fox is endlessly watchable. Eloquent and savvy, we watch her come into her voice over the course of twenty years. It is impossible not to root for her and for what she is fighting. The ingeniousness of bouncing back and forth between the present day and the past shows not just Fox’s growth, but how her children have forged a path while not having a father figure present in the way most children do. Following the protests of last June and the recent fight in New York State to vaccinate the incarcerated community, this film highlights the struggle black people have been facing for decades in and out of the prison system. Time is a movie for the moment we are living in. The last five minutes hit like a ton of bricks. It is an emotional release like none other. I well up even at the thought of it. In addition to the story itself, no documentary in this list tells its story as innovatively as Time. If a spoiler happens in this category it will be here. And it would be pretty neat to have two female POC directors winning in one night.

Rounding out the category is Collective. For the second time in history and the second year in a row, one of the nominees in this category is also a nominee in Best International Feature. The Romanian doc tells the story of a 2015 fire at a Bucharest nightclub that killed 27 and injured 180. In the months after the fire, 37 more people died due to the hospital's inability to treat burn victims as well as the discovery that hospitals had been using diluted disinfectants. As journalists continue to investigate the mismanagement of the healthcare system, it becomes clear how broken the system is and ultimately how hopeless reform will be. Like Time, Collective is a film that comments on the moment we are currently living through.For over a year now, we’ve all been focused on the flaws of healthcare systems the world over. It’s impressive how timely it is considering it was technically released in 2019. It does a great job of exploring the healthcare crisis while also showing us how one particular survivor coped with her new reality. I’m not sure this makes sense, but of all the documentaries this felt the most like a capital D documentary. It is Serious. It is the biggest downer and it felt like a spiral of things getting worse. There are images that made my stomach turn for myriad reasons. I didn’t find any hope in this film, not that it was their job or intention to give the viewer that feeling. Ultimately, I wonder if that will hurt it’s chances. Maybe next year we’ll have our third year in a row where we have a foreign language film in both International Feature and Documentary and it’ll emerge victorious in one category. But this year is not that year.

My predictions in order of most likely winner to least...

Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution
Time
Collective
My Octopus Teacher
The Mole Agent

What say you, reader? Do you also think Crip Camp will emerge victorious? Or are you still bitter that Dick Johnson’s Oscar chances are dead?

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