Doc Corner: Rithy Panh's 'Graves Without a Name'

By Glenn Dunks

It is not very often an autobiographical documentary about genocide is selected to open a prestigious strand of one of the biggest film festivals in the world. I suppose that’s what being the first filmmaker to, among other things, land an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film with a work of non-fiction does to one’s reputation. Director Rithy Panh has forged his career through telling the stories of his Cambodian homeland and it’s a testament that despite what may be considered tunnel vision for other filmmakers, this is his 18th feature, he continues to find new and interesting angles to investigate.

After detours through a colonial archival scrap-book in France is Our Mother Country and meditative stargazing experimental curiosity Exile, Panh has returned to the more earthbound terrain of his Oscar-nominated The Missing Picture (my no. 1 documentary of the decade). A film as rooted in the mud and the dirt that built that film its signature image of gaunt and decaying figurines, Graves finds Panh on an even more personal mission than that film...

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Doc Corner: Tribeca Film Festival x4

By Glenn Dunks

The Tribeca Film Festival is sadly a no-go for 2020, but the teams behind some of the festival’s documentary selections have made their films available for press so we’re going to take a look at a few and hope that one day they make their way to screens for you in the future.

Let us start with a delight of a drag kiki in P.S. Burn This Letter Please, tracing an underground circuit of drag queens, female impersonators and gender illusionists in 1950s pre-Stonewall New York City. Prompted by the discovery of a box of letters all addressed to a mysterious man named Reno -- I won’t spoil the fun, but the recipient has ties to Michelle Pfeiffer! -- who kept them secret, and in doing so has kept alive a part of queer history that is too fabulous to stay hidden away. Through these letters and interviews with some of the surviving queens, directors Jennifer Tiexiera (an excellent editor of works such as Dragonslayer, one of my top documentaries of the decade, and 17 Blocks) and Michael Seligman (a producer on RuPaul’s Drag Race) untangle the insignificant dramas and life-changing moments of Daphne, Adrian, Claudia, Rita George and the rest of the gang.

Before Paris is Burning and even before The Queen, P.S. Burn This Letter Please offers insight where there has historically been so little. As one talking head explains, this is real gay history in black and white.

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Doc Corner: Spike Jonze's 'Beastie Boys Story' + 'Coachella: 20 Years in the Desert'

By Glenn Dunks

If live experiences are one of the things you are missing most about being in isolation, then documentaries can be one small way of getting that groove back. Beastie Boys Story and Coachella: 20 Years in the Desert probably won’t be enough to recreate the experience—certainly, both are limited in their creative and technical scopes, nor are they the sort of concert extravaganzas that the subjects have released before—but for music-loving watchers, they may just offer at least something that approximates the joy of being among the throngs of others enthralled in musical rapture.

Beastie Boys Story in particular feels like a greater missed opportunity given it is directed by none other than Spike Jonze (he also directed the stage-show that it captures). But the band at its core are so interesting in their history and captivating in their stage presence that is almost doesn’t matter. Almost.

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Doc Corner: Is 'Crip Camp' an early Oscar frontrunner?

By Glenn Dunks

As if on cue to allow isolated audiences one hell of an emotional purge, James Lebrecht and Nicole Newnham’s sublime Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution is here. Seemingly built to make audiences burst into tears out of honest to goodness heart-melting positivity and righteous activist anger in equal measure (a delicate balance to say the least), it is perhaps for the first time since this pandemic began that I contemplated my own small place in this big world outside of COVID-19.

It’s big-hearted and impassioned; an unsurprising winner of Sundance’s audience award and an obvious frontrunner for the Academy Award.

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Doc Corner: The politics of 'Slay the Dragon'

By Glenn Dunks

I had expected 2020 to be jam-packed with political documentaries. We have already had Hulu’s four-part Hillary and in the lead-up America’s presidential election had assumed that nary a week would go without a documentary about some sort of politics examination, exploration or expose. Who knows what the rest of the year holds for us anymore in terms of release for the sort of niche, boutique non-fiction fare and whether they will make their way to audiences, but I am sure they will hold lessons and important interrogations nonetheless.

Case in point: Slay the Dragon. A feature-length documentary that is getting out somewhat ahead of the pack and which picks up where digitally-released short films like Crooked Lines and Suppressed: The Fight to Vote left off on the issue of gerrymandering and the efforts (by let’s be honest: Republican politicians) to manipulate the voting process...

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