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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Doc Corner: 'Rewind' and 'On the Record'

by Glenn Dunks

To put one’s own story to film often takes some form of personal courage. To not allow any sort of emotional distance between the traumas and the pains of life and the audience will always be a tough line for many to cross. It is why documentaries are so often labelled as merely grim or depressing and placed in a metaphorical too-hard basket. It’s true that many are indeed an emotional trial of sorts, but to watch survivors speak directly to us is one of the things I most cherish about non-fiction filmmaking.

As I watched and listened to the stories of Sasha Joseph Neulinger, Drew Dixon and others unfold in two new documentaries, Rewind and On the Record, I found myself captivated and angry. Angry that this happened in the first place and angry that these films aren’t being spoken about as important works of film...

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Doc Corner: The retro hippy futurism of 'Spaceship Earth'

By Glenn Dunks

Would you believe that I also dream about documentaries? You probably would. We surely all dream about movies in some form. Well, just a few weeks ago I found myself awakening after a dream about a (non-existent) documentary that went back to the first ever series of Big Brother and interviewed the participants—none of whom I would know or have any sort of facial recognition of as I surprisingly did not watch turn-of-the-century Dutch TV—about living in isolation and what we could all learn while in our own contemporary COVID-19 isolation.

At the time it struck me as actually quite an interesting concept, a rare occurrence of wishing I had any inclination towards actually making documentaries instead of simply watching them. I needn’t have spent the mental energy. While crass reality television isn’t the theme of Matt Wolf’s Spaceship Earth, what it is about is the futuristic science experiment of the early 1990s known as Biosphere 2, a trial in inter-planetary life preservation that began rather improbably with a San Franciscan experimental avant-garde art troupe and ended, somehow just as improbably, with Steve Bannon.

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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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