Doc Corner: The best of this year's virtual documentary festivals

By Glenn Dunks

Despite what may be happening across the rest of film distribution, the documentary realm has barely had a chance to breathe. Just as there ever was, there are so many titles coming out each and every week that it is impossible to keep up with in a weekly column. This includes not just new releases to streaming, VOD and virtual cinemas (and now, as lockdowns cease around the globe, theatrical), but also festivals.

In fact, I’ve been able to attend more than any before. Whereas I wouldn’t have had the time nor the access to ‘attend’ England’s Sheffield Doc/Fest or the United States’ AFI Docs or Canada’s Hot Docs, I was able to finish my day job in the afternoon and take a quick world tour of some of the finest documentary and non-fiction festivals around. And there’s still more of them to come (like DocNYC) because, folks? There’s just so.many.movies. 

I wanted to highlight the best that I saw across each of the three festivals and give a spotlight to movies that took me to a poisoned Martinique, the frontlines of the women’s liberation movement, and the underground dance scene of Baltimore...

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Doc Corner: Hubert Sauper's 'Epicentro'

By Glenn Dunks

White faces invading Cuba is one of reoccurring images in Hubert Sauper’s Epicentro. And this includes the director himself. It is surely not lost on him that in examining the country’s place as “the epicentre of the three dystopian chapters of history” he at least somewhat places himself among the throngs of white, stickybeak tourists who get their ethnic cultural kicks by swarming barbershops to photograph young black boys getting haircuts before retreating to their glamorous five-star hotels.

But this is what the Austrian filmmaker does, embedding himself within a place that has become a wrestling point of contention for lands beyond its borders... 

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Doc Corner: Barbara Kopple's 'Desert One'

By Glenn Dunks

Barbara Kopple’s new film is an interesting one. But not necessarily for any reason related to style or form and potentially completely by accident. Rather, it’s interesting for how well it encapsulates America’s idealised image of itself. For Desert One is a documentary that charts the various ins and outs of a top secret military mission that was, to be perfectly frank, an utter shit show. A botched rescue attempt in 1980 of American hostages in Tehran that, in retrospect, was lucky to take off in the first place.

It’s in part because of this debacle that we got Argo.

And yet…

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Doc Corner: A24's 'Boys State'

By Glenn Dunks

I watched the new Apple+ and A24 documentary Boys State and, sorry to break it to you, but America is nuts. Like, really. A lot. I’m allergic to nuts—anaphylactic, send me hospital kind of allergic—and I felt as if I were about to break out in hives watching Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss’ compelling and unsettling new movie. A film about the next generation of wannabe political leaders that stands as a frightening neon-lit (just barely) metaphor for the country’s political climate.

The premise here is something that sounds far more bizarrely foreign to me than anything with subtitles. A strange, long-standing experiment known as Boys State, a social summer camp of sorts that requires military interviews for some reason where 1,200 young Texan teenage boys seek the life-changing opportunity to seemingly learn how to best weaponize their gender, their race and adopt all the sleazy tricks in the political book. "That’s politics—you play to win...”

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Doc Corner: 'Mucho Mucho Amor' and 'House of Cardin'

By Glenn Dunks

When we look back at our 2020 times stuck indoors for endless hours, I wonder what people will remember. Among the much more high profile television series and surprise album drops, I suspect one title many will find themselves reaching for in their memories is Mucho Mucho Amor: The Legend of Walter Mercado. I have to admit to being entirely oblivious to the focus of Cristina Costantini and Kareem Tabsch's documentary except a well-timed ‘appearance’ on RuPaul’s Drag Race just a week before the film premiered on Netflix. Unless I caught him on an episode of Sally Jessy Raphael, I guess. 

What I discovered—and what I imagine is what will allow for fond remembrance of the movie once we are long out of isolation hubs—was something so very sweetly tender. A film that’s every bit as fabulous as the elaborate, bejewelled cloaks and capes its subject was famed for.

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