Doc Corner: Five Highlights from the 159-deep Documentary Longlist

By Glenn Dunks

Have you heard? The Academy has announced the longlist of eligible titles for the 2019 Best Documentary Feature category. All 159 of ‘em; they don’t call it a longlist for nothing. The 15-wide shortlist will be derived from these and from there the five nominees will be chosen by the documentary branch.

As I suspected, Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old is not on the list. It is also worth noting – as I have done all year – that Amazing Grace gambled with the odds last year on a qualifying run and sadly didn’t make it. There were only a few films that we have written about in Doc Corner that either did not submit or were not eligible including Vision Portraits, The Raft, Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché and Beyoncé’s Homecoming would be the best of that lot.

All the big titles that we have long expected to show up, however, did. Box office hits like Apollo 11, The Biggest Little Farm, Maiden and Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice sit next to streaming heavyweights American Factory, The Edge of Democracy and Knock Down the House (Netflix), One Child Nation and Citizen K (Amazon), Gay Chorus Deep South (MTV), The Apollo (HBO) and big-name specialty titles like Western Stars and Diego Maradona with buzzy, low-key titles waiting to pounce like Advocate, Honeyland, The Kingmaker, 5B and Roll Red Roll.

We still have many of the movies featured on there to watch and (hopefully) get the chance to discuss. But we’re going to cheat and use this as a moment to play catch-up with some short paragraphs on some of the titles featured on the long list.

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Doc Corner: Chinese Rappers, Wildfires, Queer History and More in These 8 Documentary Shorts

By Glenn Dunks

Short films, whether they be documentary or fiction, are a curious form. What may work in a feature-length film may not work in a short and vice versa, and this can make critiquing them a sometimes tricky prospect. To sit down and watch one often means to set aside the sort of internal critical devices we may use for a feature-length film, typically eschewing the things we may normally look for in films.

By their very nature, we don’t get to spend enough time in their ephemeral worlds but I do not care for short films that feel like truncated version of larger stories. They don’t necessarily have to tell an entire story, but they have to feel like a completed thought, mood, or idea.

Some of the short documentaries that I have been watching have been just that, others less so.

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Doc Corner: Asif Kapadia's 'Diego Maradona'

By Glenn Dunks

It is a case of diminishing returns for British director Asif Kapadia and the latest of his video tape collages, Diego Maradona. As one of the few dissenting voices to his Oscar-winning Amy – more on ethical grounds than technical – but an admirer of his earlier Senna, this portrait of the superstar Argentinian footballer never reaches the narrative heights of either. While Ayrton Senna and Amy Winehouse proved fascinating subjects in their own ways outside of whatever one thinks of Kapadia’s grave-robbing approach to their personal lives, the athletic hero at the center here is simply far less interesting and is not well served by this style of filmmaking.

As seen in Kapadia’s film, Diego Maradona’s life is something of a selfish downfall rather than a tragic response to fame or the inevitable culmination of a career of risk like his other subjects. By the time his career flamed out in a cloud of cocaine, extra-marital affairs and larrikin boozing, he had well and truly shown the world that he was one of – if not the – greatest footballer to ever live (I personally wouldn’t know more than five players off of the top of my head, but even I had heard of his feats with a soccer ball). Yet despite the dramatic highs and lows, his story as told on screen here is frustrating.

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Doc Corner: Musical Chairs with Linda, Miles, Aretha and... Bros

By Glenn Dunks

It’s that time of the year where we play musical chairs and look at some of the music documentaries that have come along because there are just too many. Not all that much connects this batch of musicians – other than I am a fan of them to a degree, I suppose – but watching the films and there is a surprising spread of style and form. Surprising, also, because the artist that comes out on top is the most unexpected of them all.

The most informal, yet ultimately least satisfying of the batch is Linda Ronstadt: Sound of My Voice. It is somewhat disappointing that Oscar-winning filmmakers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman (The Celluloid Closet) decided on such a rudimentary structure considering their subject was somebody who repeatedly coloured outside of the lines of the artform.

But any film about somebody as talented and interesting as Ronstadt, there is always going to be much enjoyment even if it is assembled rather blandly.

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Doc Corner: 'American Factory' has Oscar in its sight

By Glenn Dunks

Because not everybody can be in Toronto or Venice, there are still plenty of great movies to watch!

American Factory is a film that hovers over the precipice of tragedy for its entire runtime. Its subjects exist in a state of perpetual uncertainty, never sure about whether they have a future or if the rug is going to be pulled out from under them yet - again. They are all workers from the Moraine Assembly Plant, once owned by General Motors, in Dayton, Ohio, that closed down during the recession, but which has since been purchased by Chinese company Fuyao to begin operation producing glass for (cars that America no longer seems to make).

Directors Steve Bognar and Julie Reichert return to the location of their Oscar-nominated short documentary The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant. That film, which charted the factory’s production of its final automobile, filmed its subjects predominantly from inside cars as they arrive at work or in bars as they mulled over their futures. American Factory, then, is a major step up from a production stand-point, but offers just as humane a portrait of people struggling to find their place in a changing world. A world that is rapidly moving away from the old ideas of the “American Dream”.

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