This Week In Documentary
Theatrical & Streaming Releases - New & Recommended - April 5-11, 2024
As we enter the first full week of April, consider what the month is all about. Showers? As in rain? Perhaps it’s time to watch one of my favorite films, Joris Ivens and Mannus Franken’s Regen, which you can find all over YouTube, Vimeo, and the Internet Archive. It’s also a time for nature and environmental films ahead of Earth Day, but if you’re tired of the usual stuff in that genre of documentary, I recommend checking out The Criterion Channel’s current curation of “Surreal Nature Films,” most of them of the nonfiction variety. April is Autism Acceptance Month, and you can find many docs related to that spotlight. I recommend How to Dance in Ohio (currently streaming on Max), which is the basis of the hit new Broadway musical.
For this specific week, three important documentary filmmakers celebrate birthdays. Both Sheila Nevins, the former head of HBO Documentary Films, current head of MTV Documentary Films, and recent Oscar nominee for co-directing the short The ABCs of Book Banning (now streaming on Paramount+), and two-time Oscar winner Rob Epstein, who has given us some the best documentary portraits of LGBTQI+ culture, share their birthday on April 6. Since she produced his and Jeremy Friedman’s films Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt (on The Criterion Channel and Kanopy) and The Celluloid Closet (on Tubi), it’s a good day to watch them (Nevins has also named Epstein’s film The Times of Harvey Milk as one of her favorite docs if you need a third — it’s on Max and The Criterion Channel).
Then Liz Garbus’s birthday is April 11, and Nevins also produced many of her works, including the must-see docs A Dangerous Son, The Execution of Wanda Jean, and Bobby Fischer Against the World. The first one is understandably now streaming on Max, but the latter two are strangely not available to stream anywhere (legally anyway), let alone on an HBO platform. You should also watch her incredible docuseries I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, which is on Max, and her biographical feature Becoming Cousteau (Hulu and Disney+), and since it’s another presidential election year, check out All In: The Fight for Democracy (Prime Video), which she co-directed with Liz Cortes.
In this edition of This Week in Documentary, we have a bunch of other documentaries to showcase. I’m trying to list as many notable films and series as possible in the highlights section — including major new releases, great works hitting home video, and classics celebrating anniversaries — for those subscribers who aren’t able to pay for Nonfics and access our day-by-day guide. If you can support us as a paid subscriber, though, you still have the exclusive benefit of seeing what’s coming out over the next seven days, including the large number of nonfiction films and series hitting DVD and Blu-ray each Tuesday. If we miss anything, we’re happy to add it to the listings. We also encourage everyone to share what they watched or want to watch, if not in a comment here then in a thread in our chat section.
Nonfics Picks Of The Week: Girls State (2024) & Boys State (2020)
This week sees the release of Girls State, Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine’s follow-up to Boys State. It’s not a sequel — they’ve been calling it a “sister” or “sibling” — and both films can be watched as standalone features, but they are companion documentaries that could certainly be viewed together as a double feature. Also, Girls State references and features Boys State (the program not the film) so much that it’s worth seeing the earlier, completely Girls State-free documentary for more context. It doesn’t matter which order you watch them in. If you watch Girls State first, Boys State provides some further background on the other gender’s program that may help you appreciate the new doc even more. If you watch Boys State first, you’ll have the benefit of finishing the pairing with the more enjoyable of the two.
I avoided comparing the two documentaries in my review of Girls State so that I could point out some of their likenesses and differences here. I originally disliked Boys State for not being thematically or narratively compelling, but having rewatched it after Girls State, I recognize it as a tighter, more cohesive documentary in terms of its story and characters. Still, it’s not as enjoyable, in part because of all the male aggression, the shiftiness of some of the characters, and the negative political horizon it reveals. Of course, it’s a film of its time and place — Texas in 2018, the middle of the Trump presidency and the continued rise of political discord in America. The words “impeach” and “secession” (often mispronounced as “succession”) were hot terms for the mostly conservative-leaning kids then and there, with little hope for compromises.
Girls State is also a product of the time and place in which it was made — Missouri in 2022. The threat against women’s right to choose in the U.S. is on the girls’ minds and a big part of their discussions in the film, while the state’s mix of attendees from rural flyover country and the still-relevant racial-political hotspot of St. Louis is a less-addressed context but still present in the background. Girls State also heavily deals with the fact that a Boys State program is being held the same week on the same campus. Additionally, the second documentary shows us more of the program than just the gubernatorial race, including a mock Supreme Court trial. The girls also seem more genuine, more serious, more positive, and less competitive than the boys. When some boys flex as they pass the girls in a scene from Girls State, that’s a good reminder of what Boys State is like overall.
However, both films’ most prominent characters — Boys State’s Steven Garza and Girls State’s Emily Worthmore — are very similar in attitude and strategy despite being politically very different. They both want to meet and listen to as many other people as possible more than just spout their beliefs at them, and it’s not just to appear neutral so much as to show a willingness to work with and serve those who don’t agree with their preferred policies. That Garza is a progressive Democrat and Worthmore is a faith-driven Republican adds to the way Boys State and Girls State go together but as two sides of a coin more than a singular franchise. It’s a relationship that will change, though, if a third movie ever happens, maybe if one day a co-ed program is created and Garza’s idea of “People State” comes to fruition.
Both Boys State and Girls State are now available to stream on Apple TV+.
Other Documentary Highlights
26.2 To Life (2022)
The winner of jury and audience awards at a lot of film festivals, including a Grand Jury Prize at the Independent Film Festival Boston, 26.2 to Life is a documentary about incarcerated men running in the San Quentin Prison Marathon. The film was also nominated at last year’s Critics Choice Documentary Awards for Best First Documentary Feature, and I bet it would have been a contender for Best Sports Documentary too if that wasn’t such a competitive category. I don’t think it was attached to ESPN as an installment of 30 for 30 at the time, but it is now and will deservedly receive an even bigger audience when it’s released anew this week, specifically on Monday, April 8.
Attica (1974)
Cinda Firestone’s Attica turns 50 years old on Thursday, April 11. The documentary, which Firestone made when she was only 23, was the first substantial look back at the Attica Prison riot that occurred three years prior. At the time of its release in 1974, Vincent Canby wrote in the New York Times, “Attica is a superior example of committed filmmaking.” In 2022, the Library of Congress chose the documentary for preservation via the National Film Registry, and yet it’s not legally available to watch with ease (unless one YouTube account’s claim of fair use stands). Instead, it’s for rent for hundreds of dollars for academic and public viewings. There’s no reason for such a significant work to be so obscure, but maybe now that it’s a half-century in age, someone will see that it’s also a historical artifact in need of proper distribution.
Ennio (2021)
It took a while for Giuseppe Tornatore’s Ennio, about composer Ennio Morricone, to finally hit theaters in the U.S. But it’s now quickly following up that run with a home video release, despite the film still playing well at the documentary box office. It’s still one of my favorite docs of the year, and I saw it on a small screen so it’s perfectly fine if you do as well. As I wrote in my review of Ennio, “The editing, in particular, by Tornatore regular Massimo Quaglia with Annalisa Schillaci, is brilliant, as it maintains a breakneck pace, even while giving many remarks and film clips adequate space to breathe, nothing feeling rushed despite how much of Morricone’s prolific output is covered.” You can rent or buy it on VOD starting Tuesday, April 9.
Food, Inc. 2 (2023)
The original Food, Inc. brought together food industry experts Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser, hot from their respective bestselling books The Omnivores Dilemma and Fast Food Nation. It was nominated for an Oscar. More importantly, it may have been a huge influence on the now-ubiquitous access to organic foods and farmer’s markets. Fifteen years later, there’s a sequel, again prominently featuring Pollan and Schlosser. This time, post-pandemic, they’re again very concerned about the state of the food industry and what current products are doing to our health. The film is also interested in food chemistry (one segment is titled “Food, Technically”), farm labor, monopolies, and much more. I wasn’t a fan of the original Food, Inc., but I may have liked Food, Inc. 2 even less due to how many issues it’s throwing at us during a runtime of just 94 minutes. It did remind me that I want to eat fewer ultra-processed foods and never eat chicken meat that’s grown without the chicken, so there’s that.
Food, Inc. 2 plays in theaters nationwide on Tuesday, April 9, before being released on VOD on April 12.
Grey Gardens (1975)
Earlier this year, the different branches of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences each selected one favorite film as their representative for a screening series held at the Academy Museum in Los Angeles and the Paris Theatre in New York City. The Documentary Branch chose Grey Gardens, the classic film about a mother and daughter living in a decaying mansion in the Hamptons. The event happened on April 3, with the East Coast version being extra special for featuring an appearance from Grey Gardens editor and associate producer Susan Froemke and for the fact that the documentary originally played at the Paris almost 50 years ago. If you didn’t get to watch Big Edie and Little Edie on the big screen, you can still celebrate the Academy’s selection by watching the film now on Max or The Criterion Channel.
Kim’s Video (2023)
I am still processing Kim’s Video, a documentary about a New York City institution I remember well from my college days, featuring several people I’ve known personally, and somewhat repeating a story that I found more unbelievable the first time I read it back in 2012. There’s a lot about this documentary that seems purposefully unsophisticated, from how it was shot to the way the story plays out. David Redmon (with his wife and usual directing partner, Ashley Sabin) has made a film geek noir in which he chronicles his globe-trotting investigation into what happened to the 55,000 VHS tapes and DVDs from the titular video store chain after the company went out of business. Was the mafia involved? Do Italian politicians always have to be such enigmas? Is the heist shown in the film real? Like any good neo-noir, this one has a serpentine plot with plenty of absurd elements and a lot of unanswered questions, but it also has a conclusive and rather happy ending, which is not noirish at all.
Kim’s Video is now playing in theaters.
Quiet On The Set: The Dark Side Of Kids TV (2024)
I didn’t highlight this docuseries when it first came out on Investigation Discovery last month because I had no idea the attention it would receive. I eventually streamed it on Max and wrote about the right way to watch and think about it. Now, given that so many people are talking about the documentary (apparently it’s the most-watched unscripted series in Max’s history), I think it’s worth finally acknowledging it here. Also, a fifth episode is being added this week. This will not be so much a continuation of the story as a reunion and discussion of the content of the first four episodes. You can see that on Investigation Discovery on Sunday, April 7.
Documentary Release Calendar 4/5/24 - 4/11/24
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