By Glenn Dunks
The Academy may have released their shortlist for the Best Documentary Feature category, but we’re going to continue our A to Z skim through the 144-wide longlist as a means of playing catch-up before I do my annual best of documentary list for the year. Last time we looked at Shaunak Sen’s sorta-frontrunner All That Breathes, Paweł Łoziński’s EFA nominee The Balcony Movie, and Hà Lệ Diễm’s dark horse contender Children of the Mist.
DESCENDANT
This week, themes of racism, authoritarianism and war are a heady and heavy mix. All of them come with some sort of Oscar pedigree, although only one has made it to the next round of the Academy’s race to a nomination...
One of this year’s big contenders, and one of the 15 titles now in the hunt for a nomination, is Margaret Brown’s Descendant. Brown’s film is not unique in its exploration of America’s slave history, but through a relatively little-known wedge of it out of her hometown of Mobile, Alabama, she has found herself telling a singular story of racism through the generations. One that carries with it the weight of America’s barbaric past that’s told with clarity and vision, and that shines a spotlight on the names and faces of some who hold the distinct claim of being the descendants of the last African slave ship to arrive in America.
Brown smartly uses the quietly compelling narrative device of the hunt for the Clotilda ship’s final resting place to unpack the systemic and continued racist ideology of America’s south. The vessel was said to have been burnt upon its arrival in Alabama once its cargo was promptly removed—by 1860, the transportation of slaves was illegal so burning the ship was a necessary act of vandalism against its owner’s (the wealthy Timothy Meaher; the family name still prominent in the area) own property. The loss of this evidence meant the story of the Clotilda and the people who were huddled aboard it have rarely been allowed the status that the stories, passed down from family to family, suggest it deserves.
Through this story, Brown weaves the spoken words of Zora Neale Hurston’s book, Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo”, which told in its subjects original voice the story of Cudjoe Lewis who was the last presumed living survivor of the Clotilda. Punctuating the documentary with passages as written in Lewis’ own vernacular give the story a rich, textural element that mere history experts and academics could never come close to offering. Furthermore, Brown uses those who still live in Mobile and nearby Africatown, founded by some of the Clotilda’s survivors, to impart their stories to us through words on film. With Descendant, their story is etched forever those that may be more famous and written about more frequently. This is a powerful film, and one full of beautiful imagery that attempts to capture both the beauty and the pain found in the air and the trees and the waters of what is an important, symbolic location.
Awards chances: It’s on the cusp, helped by being among the most easily accessible of the 15-wide shortlist + being produced by Higher Ground, the company of Michelle and Barack Obama, can only help.
Release: Streaming globally on Netflix.
The success of Flee surely inspired Canada to submit the animated documentary Eternal Spring to the international film category. Unfortunately for the filmmakers, this title made neither the international nor documentary shortlist. Like Flee, director Jason Loftus uses animation to tell a story of brute determination involving real-life people who did not have the luxury of carrying a camera around with them. Uniquely to Eternal Spring, many of the individuals are also no longer alive. But whereas Flee used animation with real intent and purpose, here it comes across as much less resolved. Not a second thought necessarily, but despite some impressive sequences (and, it must be said, some not-so impressive sequences that look like start-up videogame art) it’s never made clear why exactly the animation is needed for what would have actually been a pretty compelling story without it build around archival footage and one man's search for answers.
I tend to have complicated feelings about animation in non-fiction, anyway. Even Flee or another famous title, Waltz with Bashir. Like it does here, it ceases to actually be documentary (at least as we know it), and rather just tells a dramatic narrative using animation. I think the story here—the so-called hijacking of Chinese state-owned television by a group of activists to neutralise the government’s violent attacks on the Falun Gong movement—would have actually made a fascinating dramatic feature, I suspect. Here, however, Loftus struggles with the balance of the various elements (alongside animated reconstructions, he follows a survivor who seeks to tell the story through comic illustrations) and how much we can possibly know about the story—or how much he chooses to tell.
Release: Still in some theatres in the USA and Australia with a digital release this year.
Equally frustrating is Freedom on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom, which comes seven years after director Evgeny Afineevsky’s Oscar-nominated Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom. I remember that film being something of a surprise nominee (it hadn’t factored into the pre-season much at all, although I had predicted it given that it was an accessible and compelling look at Ukraine’s maidan revolution). Where the earlier film smartly focused on a narrative that was likely much easier to grapple with, Freedom on Fire attempts to tackle the bigger and broader Russian war against Ukraine. It does so with mixed results.
The footage here is fascinating and the story is obviously one of intense poignancy. But Afineevsky struggles to focus the material, constantly hopping from one narrative or location to another with little time to allow the audience to become embedded. There are many stories told here, all of which could have made compelling films. I think that's particularly true of the lives of those in the underground bunkers of Mariupol’s Azovstal steel plant. The strongest might have been the story of roaming news broadcaster Nataliia Nagorna given that the film is dedicated to journalists. But the director and his team of editors (Jan Supa, Ted Woerner and Will Znidaric) have instead created something of a criss-crossing jumble that fails to penetrate beyond the sort of stories we may have seen on news reports.
Release: Qualified for the Oscars, but will likely be properly released in 2023. Without the Oscar attention, it could go direct to streaming where I think it would find an appreciative audience.
Next week we'll look at some heavy hitters from the short-list plus one big snub as we reach G, H and I.