Doc Corner: '76 Days' and 'CoroNation' go inside Wuhan

By Glenn Dunks

Alex Gibney isn’t the only one who can crush a deadline and produce a documentary about COVID-19 in time for the new year. While Gibney’s Totally Under Control, made alongside (but appropriately socially distanced, of course) Ophelia Harutyunyan and Suzanne Hillinger, came out in October in an attempt to radicalise the American voters with tales of the then Trump-led American government’s inept response to the coronavirus outbreak. In doing so it already looks out of date.

Two other features, however, hone in more precisely on the pandemic’s beginnings in the city of Wuhan of the Hubei Province in the heart of China. Hao Wu and Weixu Chen’s 76 Days (made in collaboration with ‘Anonymous’) and Ai Weiwei’s CoroNation take different tacts with this setting, showing a city in chaos and alarming stillness at once.

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Doc Corner: Sundance winner 'Acasă, My Home'

By Glenn Dunks

Acasă, My Home’s opening passage ends with a single shot that is so startling it would normally be quite hard for the rest of the film to live up to its surprise. It’s little wonder then that it won a Special Jury Award for cinematography at 2020’s Sundance Film Festival, having some of the best use of drone documentary photography I’ve seen—something that should silence the naysayers of this common doc tool, at least for a little bit.

It’s lucky then for first-time Romanian filmmaker Radu Ciorniciuc—previously only known as a journalist and for featuring in something called, yes, Sick Chicken: What You Need to Know—that drama follows his subjects wherever they go...

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Doc Corner: Lynne Sachs' 'Film About a Father Who'

By Glenn Dunks

You can keep your MCU. You can have your… whatever DC’s is. For me, the only cinematic universe that matters right now is the Sachs and Johnson Cinematic Universe. What’s that you ask? Well, it’s the films of brother and sister pair Ira and Lynne Sachs as well as Kristen Johnson with whom the brother Sachs has children, all of whom seem to make movies about and/or featuring one another. I feel like I know these people in very intimate ways because of the way their works reflects each other’s. It’s a curious little enclave of filmmaking that only enriches each additional film that I see.

I lead off with this somewhat facetious observation because the latest film, Lynne Sachs’ Film About a Father Who is about her father, which only seeks to expand and enlighten the story of this fascinating bunch of New York filmmakers...

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Doc Corner: 'Gunda'

By Glenn Dunks

I’m not going to lie. There are times in Viktor Kosakovskiy’s buzzy new barnyard documentary, Gunda, that feel a bit like a colossal piss-take. Literally if you’re talking about that one extended scene of piglet urination. But between that, the one-legged chicken, the continued attention to the titular pig’s shaking udder, and its shiny black and white photography, the entire enterprise often feels like the punchline of an extended arthouse joke about what people perceive documentaries and international cinema to be.

That isn’t to say it isn’t impressive. It is, frequently. Especially from a purely logistical standpoint as Kosakovskiy and Egil Håskjold Larsen’s camera fluidly encircles and follows its animal subjects with access that often defies belief...

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Doc Corner: Werner Herzog's 'Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin'

by Glenn Dunks

Is it a coincidence that I watched Werner Herzog’s Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin on the same day as Nomadland? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Maybe it was more just serendipitous that I turned my screener of Herzog’s film off just before leaving the house to go and see Chloé Zhao’s Oscar favourite. Maybe I am just feeling emotional about the very idea of being out in nature and enmeshed in a broader human existence, but both left me quite affected.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this double feature left me with the desire to walk home under the glowing blue sky with earth and tar and grass and cement under my feet...

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