Jan. 02, 2013 - Issue #898: Apocalypse Not?

A well-documented year

The best cinematic nonfiction of 2012

This year was so brimming with superb new films grounded in the real, we felt it only right to devote an entire feature to the year's best documentaries. Given that many docs, even more than fiction-films, stream our way through means other than your local projectionist's beam, the following titles didn't necessarily find their way to Edmonton cinemas, but you should be able to find them all on some sort of screen right now or in the near future.
Compiled by Josef Braun (JB) and Brian Gibson (BG).

The Forgotten Space (directed by Allan Sekula, Noël Burch)
Its discourse grounded in interviews with laborers, historians and the homeless, this elegantly structured, evocatively photographed critique of late capitalism traverses the globe to investigate the transportation industry, so much of which remains invisible to consumers, exploits labour and undercuts the economies of developing countries. The filmmakers are especially interested in sea transport: 90 percent of the world's commerce travels by sea, packed into shipping crates than render cargo anonymous, unloaded in yards where it's shuffled around by robots and rarely inspected, even in the post-9/11 US. (JB)

Gerhard Richter Painting (directed by Corinna Belz)
In a year crowded with compelling artist portraits (Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present, Ai Wei-wei: Never Sorry and Gregory Crewdson: Beneath the Roses all made either my or Brian's shortlists), this study of German painter Gerhard Richter stands out. Largely devoid of commentary, Gerhard Richter Painting is primarily concerned with bearing witness to the moment when something mysterious comes into being, with tracking the turning points in Richter's process, moments when he decides to revise the face of an entire canvas in a single broad gesture. Which makes this an unusually physical movie, its key recurring image being that of the very fit titular octogenarian taking his massive flat brush and pushing it slowly and carefully across the face of a work-in-progress. Squarely framed, the act appears mythical, almost Herculean, and the sound is equally impactful, that tremendous echoing whoomph as Richter lifts the brush away. These scenes are simultaneously meditative and exhilarating. (JB)

The Imposter (directed by Bart Layton)
A who's-fooling-whom? whydunit. Superb re-creations, eerie landscape shots and a story of suspending-disbelief in ... human identity. Its last twist, at least one critic's suggested, shows just how slyly and suavely the film reflects its shifty subject, serial imposter Frédéric Bourdin, stringing us along to the end with a story we want to buy. (BG)

The Invisible War (directed by Kirby Dick)
This doc can barely contain its anger. Within minutes, you'll see why and feel the same. The sheer number of women who've been raped in the US military, the ways in which they're re-victimized by the chain of command and the constant denial for basic treatment of just one of them—Kori Cioca—is beyond disgusting. The most gut-churning, extensive, investigative blast against systemic abuse and a patriarchy's protection of the guilty since Amy Berg's Deliver Us From Evil. (BG)

My Perestroika (directed by Robin Hessman)
A 7 Up-like look, through the eyes of five grade-school classmates now middle-aged, at the radical shift from Brezhnev-era Soviet Union to Putin's Russia. Black-and-white clips of the kids dance deftly among footage of them today, smoking in cramped flats. One ex-punk's bitter about his band just doing it for the money now; another tersely recalls her fiancé's murder in '90s Russia. "Here you can only count on yourself," she says. Party slogans are replaced by ad slogans; sham communism's replaced by bogus democracy. A photo-album intimate look at the zeitgeist of a country struggling to unshackle itself from a "serfdom" mentality. (BG)

The Queen of Versailles (directed by Lauren Greenfield)
A time-share tycoon's Florida bubble-world encapsulates the American dream, downgraded, in 2008. His family's future Xanadu ($110-million home-cum-Versailles theme park) mothballs as the US obsession with real estate starts to reflect an unreal state. Greenfield finds poetic metaphors: David Siegel's empire sold a "feel-rich" life, but so did the sub-prime banking system that's brought him down; his wife Jackie's past dogs, preserved by taxidermy, reflect her stuffed-model world; one kid echoes the obliviousness that comes with owning so much stuff: "We have a lizard?" A Citizen Kane-ish inquiry into just how toxic the gilded American Dream can get. (BG)

Searching For Sugar Man (directed by Malik Bendjelloul)
An expertly organized, elegantly shot investigation/quest doc that tracks down, in Detroit, the most enigmatic flop of '70s American music (who made it big in South Africa and, though not covered here, Australia). Amazingly, it becomes even more endearing and engrossing when we meet the man behind the mystery. (BG)

Stories We Tell (directed Sarah Polley)
Polley's third feature as director feels like the culmination of her preceding films, which used fiction as a way of thinking about domesticity, intimacy and betrayal between fascinating women and loyal, sturdy men. It combines interviews with family and friends—all providing conflicting speculations about Polley's biological parentage—with sometimes startling home movie footage, an investigation and other, more slippery tactics. An essay that becomes a portrait of a dead mother and, inevitably, of the director herself, Stories We Tell keeps changing its mind about what it is as it goes along, yet it never loses the thread of its search. (JB)

¡Vivan las antipodas! (directed by Victor Kossakovsky)
Antipodes are populations that have settled on precisely opposite ends of the planet. This hypnotic, unimposing, unspeakably gorgeous international coproduction visits four such pairings—in Argentina and China, Russia and Chile, Botswana and Hawaii, Spain and New Zealand—and slips between these locations until they blur into a travelogue, an anthropological poem and an exercise in visual rhymes: a single truck traverses a tiny rural bridge while on the other side of the world a swarm of bikes and scooters pour out of a massive ferry. Over and over, Kossakovsky turns the world upside down. Turns out it looks pretty beautiful that way. (JB)

Witness (directed David Frankham, Abdallah Omeish)
This four-part HBO series (executive-produced by Michael Mann), tracking three photojournalists, hits the ground running, flashing and snapping into four conflict zones: Juarez, Libya, South Sudan, Rio. Cinematographer Jared Moossy snatches at dingy streets, yellow sands, verdant jungle and shelled buildings. But lenses can only glance off the surface of people's pain, loss and suffering. These resolute pic-snappers' introspective questions are, justly, overwhelmed by the words, cries and silences of the surviving citizens around them. (BG)

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