Doc Corner: David France's 'How to Survive a Pandemic'

By Glenn Dunks

Documentaries about the COVID-19 pandemic aren’t rare. Just over two years into it, and already a long list of titles exist claiming to offer us insight into some area of the response. Some have worked (Nanfu Wang’s In The Same Breath, Hao Wu and Weixi Chen’s 76 Days—both shortlisted for the Oscar) while others haven’t delivered where you would expect. They have been sometimes rushed, likely out of sheer determination to be completed in time for relevance, little knowing just how deep we would be without a clear exit. Because of this reason, many are dated by the time we get to see them.

How to Survive a Pandemic is unfortunately more of the latter. The film is something of a curiosity for its director David France. Curious because despite having the weight of timeliness on its side, Pandemic lacks the propulsive immediacy of his earlier films How to Survive a Plague and Welcome to Chechnya.

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Interview: on "Welcome to Chechnya" and putting visual effects to humanitarian use.

by Nathaniel R

Director David France and Visual Effects Supervisor Ryan Laney on "Welcome to Chechnya"

If you haven't yet screened the documentary Welcome to Chechnya, a finalist for Best Documentary Feature, don't delay. The film details the journey of a group of incredibly brave LGBTQ activists in Russia, working to help people escape Russia and Chechnya where the government condones the abduction, torture, and murders of queer people, by denying that it's happening at all. The primary storyline involves "Grisha" (not his real name) a gay event planner who was abducted and tortured in Chechnya while working on a job there.

Due to the unique risks to the people involved and the need to protect their identities, Welcome to Chechnya opted to deploy innovative visual effects rather than the traditional "shot in shadow" or blurred faces you would usually see with anonymous voices in documentary. Now the film finds itself charting unfamiliar awards territory as a finalist for the Best Visual Effects Oscar, a category that's usually focused on sci-fi films, superheroes, and action blockbusters...

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Doc Corner: The Best Documentaries of 2020

By Glenn Dunks

Before this column takes a few weeks break, it’s that time of the year to make lists! I have spent the last few weeks churning through screeners trying to ensure I saw enough of 2020’s documentary output to justify a list of the year’s best, although I do not have the time nor the inclination to watch 238 of the damn things! Nevertheless, below are 30 non-fiction titles (or non-fiction adjacent, but we’ll get to that later) that I believe are among the year’s best movies. I stuck to the 2020 calendar as much as possible because, like Nathaniel, I want to keep some order to it all.

If you were to sit down and watch every film below, you would be taken from rural towns in the heart of the Florida peninsula to rural towns in the heart of the Ukraine via the protests of Hong Kong and a nursing home in Chile. There are serious themes, important subjects, powerful ideas... and hand sanitizer.

There’s also a stripper named Nomi. Something for everything, I reckon...

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Pride Month Doc Corner: 'Welcome to Chechnya' is brave, confronting cinema

Doc Corner is celebrating Pride Month with a focus on documentaries that tackle LGBTIQ themes. This week we are looking at the latest film from the Oscar-nominated director of How to Survive a Plague.

By Glenn Dunks

We may find ourselves every June celebrating “pride”, but it is important to remember that it started from a fireball of anger. A fist of societal and cultural agitation that in a single moment decided it was going to fight back against oppression and violence. It may be more than 50 years later, but it’s an unfortunate fact that even in the most modern of societies, people who identify as LGBTIQ or non-binary still face the world with varying degrees of awareness about our otherness. And while many may not choose to dwell on it, there is the ever-present knowledge that those like us around the world are being bullied, harassed, targeted, punished, hunted and killed on a daily basis --and that’s before we get into when sexuality and gender identity intersect with race, religion and nationality.

It’s hardly hidden but it can be easily neglected, which is where a film like David France’s Welcome to Chechnya comes in...

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