Still a Big World Out There: New Documentaries to Stream
Good documentaries tell you a story; the great ones open your eyes. But even the most mediocre nonfiction movies serve a purpose: They provide a snapshot in time for what people in a particular place were doing, thinking, and planning. Or, to use another metaphor, they open a window into lives different than our own.
Those of us who are not — by choice or economic necessity — out there on the front lines right now are spending a lot of time in narrow circumstances. The virus limits our movements. Almost by definition it can then also limit our perceptions. We have our four walls, only occasionally escaped. Otherwise, we use the tools at hand: books, magazines, screens, music, napping.
There is escapism aplenty for those who want it. The entertainment ecosystem has always abounded in flights of fancy. But escapism can take many forms. It need not always be fantasy or wish fulfillment. Our worlds are small now. Seeing and remembering what the world looked and sounded like very recently can feel like an escape hatch. These are a couple documentaries set in the summer of 2017 that take you far away from your four walls.
The Hottest August
August 2017: New York City. Director Brett Story (The Prison in Twelve Landscapes) took her camera to the further stretches of the urban archipelago to listen, watch, and find out how the city was feeling as it sizzled in the summer sun. Ostensibly the topic of The Hottest August is climate change. Poking around at the watery edges of Staten Island and Brooklyn, she surveys leftover damage from Hurricane Sandy and talks flooding and mitigation efforts with the locals. It being New York, opinions flow freely and chaotically.
Her lens widens, though, from the specific to broader considerations of the future. Unsurprisingly, everyone seems anxious. A black skater kid talks about the carefree lives of his wealthier white friends and seems unsure about what life will look like post-high school. A recent college graduate building a sand sculpture wants to work for the EPA but there’s no jobs to be had. More abstractly, an artist wearing a fanciful retro-Afro-futurist spacesuit wanders the city like some other-dimensional linkage to a future that never was. Two old-timers in a bar quiz Story on her background and give her some good-natured eye-rolling: for them, a Canadian-to-Brooklyn transplant filmmaker seems as alien as if the artist had wandered through in his spacesuit.
Trump and white backlash are omnipresent but rarely acknowledged. Images of that month’s deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville flicker on TVs in a laundromat. A woman rhapsodizes about her once uniformly Irish-Italian (“some Jewish”) neighborhood before overemphasizing how much she is not racist about newer more diverse residents.
Environmental change hangs like a shroud over this frequently beautiful movie about the liminal spaces where the city meets and transforms the natural world — Story interleaves the interviews with moody and sometimes moon-lit reveries of beaches, apartment blocks, swamplands with skyscrapers standing sentinel in the distance.
A free-flowing and discursive essay about the future which already feels like a postcard from the past, The Hottest August received a limited release in 2019 but is worth seeking out now.
(Streaming via Grasshopper Films)
What You Gonna Do When the World’s On Fire?
Another discursive and sprawling movie about cities in transition, Robert Minervini’s What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire? trains its camera on a corner of New Orleans in the summer of 2017. He finds several parts of the black community in crisis years after Katrina and well before COVID-19 would rip through the city.
The movie weaves together a quartet of narratives about resilience in the face of mounting pressures. A woman fights to keep her bar open almost as much for economic as personal reasons. “We’re still slaves,” she laments during one of the movie’s many cathartic bull sessions about systemic racism. “We keep falling for nothing.” A cohort of the New Black Panthers chant slogans to mark the anniversary of the killing of Alton Sterling by Baton Rouge police and (in a callback to the original Panthers’ free breakfast program) give out food and water at a homeless encampment.
The city’s celebratory spirit in the face of hardship is shown in the sections following one of the Mardi Gras Indians’ Big Chiefs as he meticulously sews his costume for the big parade. Not surprisingly, the scenes with the Indians are among the movie’s most beautiful, from their call-and-response singing to the otherworldly dancing and signifying. The stretches following a pair of young brothers — Ronaldo and Titus — as they amble around and try to find their safe space in a threatening world have a heartbreaking beauty, hearkening back to David Gordon Green’s earlier work.
Filming in a crisp black-and-white that brings a timeless quality to what he finds, Minervini loops from one storyline to the next without preamble or setting the scene. Hovering unobtrusively around as lives fall apart or are held tightly together, he strives for a verite authenticity that does not always come together. Even though the movie could stand some trimming here and there, its repetitions ultimately reinforce the underlying theme. The year could be 2017 or 1917. The details of being black in America have changed but maybe not the underlying realities.
(Streaming on iTunes)
