Documentary

MLK/FBI

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  • Title: MLK/FBI
  • IMDb: link

Director Sam Pollard‘s film examines J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI‘s extensive, and legally ambiguous, investigation into Martin Luther King Jr.‘s life through recently declassified documents, archival footage, and interviews from those involved.

The documentary is a sobering reminder how the broad brush of Communism could justify nearly anything during the height of the Red Scare, even allow Hoover and his minions to wiretap King in hopes of discrediting one of the leaders of the Civil Rights movement based not on his political or civil rights agenda but the man’s private life taking place behind closed doors. With the wiretaps themselves not declassified until at least 2027, the documentary mainly has to speculate what is on those tapes (and their legitimacy), but the range of the FBI’s dirty tricks to discredit a black man who they saw as dangerous to their own interests couldn’t be more clear.

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Found

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  • Title: Found
  • IMDb: link

Found, the documentary from Amanda Lipitz, introduces us to three American teenagers born in China, given up for adoption, and raised in the United States. Finding each other after genetic testing at 23andMe, which links them all as blood-related cousins, the three young woman connect with each other first visually and then in person when they travel to China in hopes of finding answers about their family history.

The documentary plays on themes of connection, discovery, friendship and family as we get to know a little of each of the three girls separately before putting them together on their journey to China. While the three girls aren’t the only ones Lipitz followed for the documentary, their combined story allows the director to capture their shared, but still deeply personal, journey as the search for answers (even if the film occasionally plays on the timing of revelations for a more cinematic experience).

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Flee

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  • Title: Flee
  • IMDb: link

Flee offers a deeply personal take on the refugee experience in a mostly-animated documentary of a man struggling even decades later to express his emotions and memories from harrowing experiences fleeing Afghanistan to Moscow and eventually to Denmark. Our guide, referred to only as Amin, offers his story which is fleshed-out and explored further in animation by director Jonas Poher Rasmussen and his animation team. 

Given that non-animated segments are also used, such as stock footage of the times, I don’t know that the documentary will get the exposure it deserves for an animated film as well as for a documentary. In a year without a breakout animated film, Flee is a mesmerizing and unique film experience that reminds us how the past can continue to haunt someone long after they have reached the relative safety of a new land.

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River’s End

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  • Title: River’s End: California’s Latest Water War
  • IMDb: link

Using California, specifically Southern California’s heavy irrigation and consumption of water pumped in from Northern California and elsewhere, director Jacob Morrison examines a growing water crisis involving far too many players fighting over far too scarce a resource.

At the heart of the film is the Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta which provides water to much of the state including Los Angeles, San Francisco, and one of the largest (and most profitable) corporate industrial agricultural businesses in the world. The Delta also provides water to its existing area, including farms and an increasingly fragile ecosystem feeling the effects of decades of too much water being taken out of the Delta. The documentary offers examples of the ecological disaster of Lake Erie and the destruction of the Owens Valley as potential futures for the Delta unless changes are made.

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Subnormal

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  • Title: Subnormal
  • IMDb: link

SubnormalThe British documentary from director Lyttanya Shannon looks back at a time when immigrant children with dark skin were being disproportionately labeled “educationally subnormal” and sent to special ESN schools where their chance at a proper education was drastically reduced. Including interviews from former students, their parents, educators, and advocates who helped bring the situation to light, Subnormal offers an intriguing look back a story that cuts to the heart of racism and disenfranchisement.

Although short, and a times a tad dry given the shocking subject matter, the documentary is informative delving into  the schools which started in the 1940s and only stopped because of investigation and activism in the 1960s and 1970s that the British Government eventually could no longer ignore.

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