Out of the many striking shots captured in the docu-fiction hybrid A Cop Movie, one conveys the essence of director Alonso Ruizpalacios’ examination of Mexico’s police force unlike any other. In 499, Reyes weaves the intimacy of verite into the gauze of fantasy, crafting a documentary of rare breathless depth. A woman describes the horrific details of her daughter’s death a masked, anonymous outlaw gives the Conquistador a gun so he can confront the encroaching sins of his past. We hear: “They have so many ways of showing us, and making sure that we understand, just how much they hate us.” Gradually, the tales the Conquistador tells himself-his previous life tessellating the present the closer he gets to Mexico City-inform the tragedies he witnesses throughout. Many of the faces director Rodrigo Reyes shows us, faces the Conquistador comes upon, are Indigenous, are descendants of the people he once attempted to destroy. Everywhere the Conquistador goes, locals (referred in the film’s credits as “Real People”) tell their stories of losing loved ones to violence, to gangs or cartels or corrupt officials, to government neglect or casual hatred. He yells at uniformed school children, waits in line for food, falls into a highway ditch and discovers the wonder of urinals, but any potential for farce quickly vanishes. Unstuck in time, he begins marching back towards the capital, Tenochtitlán, his memories about conquering the Aztec civilization with Cortez conveyed in intimate voice over as he traverses coastal communities and the highlands and assorted urban sprawl, trying to piece together his past through making sense of the future unfolding around him. Though weighed with a carapace of somehow un-rusted armor, a Conquistador (Eduardo Sanjuan) washes ashore in present-day Mexico, the Atlantic Ocean and nearly 500 years of colonial oppression tumbling dreamily behind him. Here are our picks for the 25 best documentaries of 2021:
The following films navigate that liminality with grace and curiosity. It’s no great heroic gesture to lament the death of empathy in modern America imagine living alone through all of this, waiting for life to resemble something normal. Still-that’s OK! This new on-demand ecosystem has allowed wonderful services like Mubi and Kanopy and OVID to grow, specialty platforms that provide filmmakers who would otherwise only see festival play an opportunity for bigger audiences, while encouraging behemoths like Netflix to invest in such voices as Robert Greene’s.īut nowadays non-fiction filmmaking has to contend too with the atomization and isolation of the way we live, work and consume. I swell warmly with the misery of people I’ve never met. Non-fiction cinema, the ostensibly cheapest and easiest form of content, thrives in an age of streaming bounty, drowning your favorite streaming service in exploitation and unearned celebrity. The pandemic, natural disasters, environmental nightmares, political violence, immigration, grief, blah blah blah-there is no end to the human capacity to document pain, and no end to our readiness to put a huge digital screen between our lives and the suffering of so many others.