Skip to Content

The Best Documentaries Of 2017 (So Far)

These films offer viewers incisive windows into other lives and worlds, as well as complex issues both big and small

By Nick Schager
this image is not available
Bear Grylls//Digital Spy

Alongside the standout dramas, comedies, and action-adventure blockbusters, a crop of superlative non-fiction films have helped turn 2017 into an exceptional cinematic year. Whether focusing on everyday citizens struggling with universal dilemmas, brave exiles battling injustice, or unique artists grappling with mortality, these features afford viewers incisive windows into other lives and worlds, as well as complex issues both big and small. Marked by formal daring, they're not only notable for their captivating tales, but also for their novel ways of recounting them. In doing so, they prove as adventurous and engaging as their subjects, and once again demonstrate that there's nothing quite as transfixing, or illuminating, as a well-told true story.

Obit

youtubeView full post on Youtube

On the face of it, few journalism jobs seem more depressing than penning obituaries. Yet Vanessa Gould's Obit is a penetrating and uplifting portrait of the men and women handling those duties at The New York Times. Long considered a dreary outpost for those who were either at the end of their careers or, just as likely, in the doghouse with their superiors, the obit beat has over the past few years turned into a spot for vibrant non-fiction writing about both the recently deceased and the times in which they existed. Through this detailed peek at the scribes behind these tributes, and at the strategy that goes into their construction, Gould's film shines a spotlight on a thought-to-be-macabre corner of the media landscape. In the process, she reveals how death can be used to celebrate life—and also to commemorate, and define, history. 

All This Panic

Female teenagerdom is presented in all its raw, messy, complicated glory by All This Panic, a documentary from Jenny Gage that charts the ups and downs of a collection of New York City girls over the course of three years. While the most compelling subject of this sterling non-fiction film is lanky Lena—whose plight involves drinking to excess with friends, coping with divorced parents who are equally incapable of maintaining a stable residence, and trying to make it through college despite little financial aid from mom and dad—Gage splits her time between a variety of fascinating subjects, her gaze intimate and empathetic throughout. In the figure of Ginger, who opts to stay at home and find her own way while her best friend Lena heads off to school, it also locates how the path toward adulthood can be a rocky one paved with confusion, fear, sexual anxieties, social uncertainties, and ecstatic joy.

Rat Film

Baltimore has long had a serious problem with rats. Despite its title, however, Rat Film is not merely an up-close-and-personal examination of those rodents; rather, it's an inquiry into their thorny relationship with their environment. Comprised of archival photos and documents, news clippings and maps, 3D video game sequences, shots from rats' POVs, scenes involving amateur urban rat killers, and panoramic vistas of Maryland's most famous city, director Theo Anthony's film employs a thoroughly idiosyncratic style in order to link Baltimore's long-running rat infestation with its geographic and socio-cultural development—a process that routinely involved segregating its black and white populations. Scored to an eclectic electronica soundtrack, and narrated by Maureen Jones in an eerily dispassionate voice, Anthony's non-fiction essay refuses to hold its viewers' hands, instead content to use shrewd juxtapositions of varied materials to present a damning indictment of how systems institutionalise oppression of the "undesirable."

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

Icarus

Everyone but Donald Trump seems to know that Vladimir Putin doesn't play by the rules, and additional confirmation of that obvious fact comes courtesy of Icarus, a Netflix-exclusive documentary rife with eye-opening revelations about Russia's athletic nefariousness. Director Bryan Fogel's initial aim was to make a Super Size Me-style movie that detailed his own rigorous steroid use, all as a means of illustrating that cheating remains rampant in professional cycling. Things took a turn for the truly controversial, however, after Fogel hooked up with Grigory Rodchenkov, head of Russia's Anti-Doping Centre lab, who during their collaboration found himself in the middle of a scandal involving his home country's Olympic doping program. Icarus thus mutates into an in-the-thick-of-it account of systematic duplicity, laying bare the lengths to which some countries will go to achieve their ends, and the ways our governing bodies fail to hold those cheats and liars accountable for their actions.

Spettacolo

In Italy's tiny Tuscany region lies Monticchiello, whose residents have a most unusual annual ritual: they stage a play about their own lives, starring themselves. Directors Jeff Malmberg and Chris Shellen's Spettacolo (its title translated as "performance") is a mesmerising account of that yearly project, tracing not only the logistical toil entailed by that endeavour (writing scripts, building sets, casting and rehearsing), but also the tenuousness of the tradition itself, thanks to a younger generation less interested than their elders in maintaining it. Born from WWII trauma, and functioning as a way to analyze and voice their contemporary concerns and grievances, the play operates as an inimitable form of "auto-drama." That the current show's focus on economic anxieties is paralleled with a local-bank benefactor's scandalous collapse only further underlines the intricate links here between fiction and non-fiction

Trophy

Using the 2015 killing of Cecil the lion as its starting point, directors Shaul Schwarz and Christina Clusiau investigate the topic of big-game hunting from a variety of angles with Trophy. From a recreational hunter intent on shooting Africa's "big five," to a Las Vegas convention where consumers can pre-purchase the in-the-wild creatures they want to dispatch, to South African conservationist John Hume—who breeds rhinos on a farm in order to humanely cut off and sell their horns, thus protecting them from illegal slaughter—the film reveals the many messy ways in which individual behaviour, corporate profiteering, and compassionate conservationism intersect. Eventually coming to the depressingly ironic conclusion that saving these animals may require sanctioning their for-sport murder, Schwarz and Clusiau provide no definitive pronouncements here; they merely raise a host of questions whose answers are as up in the air as the fates of the endangered animals in the hunting industry's crosshairs.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman's Portrait Photography

In The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman's Portrait Photography, Errol Morris trains his empathetic and inquisitive gaze on Elsa Dorfman, a Massachusetts shutterbug whose claim to fame was her use of a now-discontinued 20x24 Polaroid camera for large-canvas portraits of everyday and famous subjects—including her close friend, poet Allen Ginsberg. Still, Morris is primarily interested in just listening to her talk in her studio about her long career and intriguing process, which involved taking two pictures of everyone that hired her and keeping the image they discarded (i.e. "the b-side"). As she holds some of those amazing photographs up to Morris' lens, The B-Side captures a touching sense of Dorfman's own presence in her work. Meanwhile, in her charming conversations with the director, she expresses her belief that there's no authoritative "truth" in photography—although to be sure, there are plenty of insights into life, and art, provided by Morris' latest non-fiction gem.

The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson

Dubbed "the Rosa Parks of the LGBT movement," trans icon Marsha P. Johnson was a New York City fixture whose life was cut tragically short in 1992 when her body was discovered in the Hudson River. Though police deemed her death a suicide, director David France's (How to Survive a Plague) outstanding documentary argues otherwise, following Anti-Violence Project activist Victoria Cruz as she reopens Johnson's cold case. More than just another true-crime thriller, France's non-fiction film uses Johnson's unjust fate to highlight the historic persecution and marginalisation of transgender men and women, including a detour into a modern headline-making trial that underlines how such discrimination continues to exist today. Enhanced by a wealth of old photos and film clips, not to mention interviews with Johnson and some of her closest friends and comrades, it's a stirring snapshot of the arduous path traversed by many in the trans community—and, also, a hopeful plea for a better tomorrow.

City of Ghosts

For his last documentary, 2015's Cartel Land, Matthew Heineman visited the perilous Mexican-American border to provide an intimate look at the battle against the region's drug kingpins. He again puts himself directly in harms way with City of Ghosts, an equally riveting study of courage under immense fire, which concentrates on Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently (RBSS), a group of "citizen journalists" committed to documenting ISIS' reign of terror in their Syrian hometown of Raqqa. Now forced into exile, these brave individuals use embedded sources to obtain damning evidence of ISIS' crimes, and then disseminate them online—a plan of attack that's resulted in persistent death threats and the murder of some of their compatriots. Replete with ghastly footage of ISIS atrocities, such as the execution of one RBSS member's father (shot with Hollywood-grade productions), Heineman's doc is a tribute to these dissidents' valour, as well as an insightful portrait of modern media's role in our ongoing war on terror. 

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

I Called Him Morgan

In a year of great documentaries, the most unshakeable one is I Called Him Morgan, a haunting account of the life, and untimely demise, of promising jazz superstar Lee Morgan. With a fluid style that's in tune with its subject's music, director Kasper Collin's masterwork serves as not only the life story of Lee but also of his wife Helen, a fiercely independent older woman who travelled her own rocky road before meeting the trumpeter. Their up-and-down relationship came to involve heroin addiction, adultery, and a fatal gunshot fired by Helen on February 18, 1972, a saga that Collin recounts through concurrent twin narratives (bolstered by a tape recording made by Helen a mere month before her death) and a syncopated editorial style that's as sharp as it is evocative. An air of fatalistic doom hangs over these proceedings, but what's so amazing about Collin's film is that such inevitability is married to a bracing sense of life's inherent, inescapable disarray.

From: Esquire US
Watch Next
 
preview for Esquire UK - Featured Videos
Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

Film

dune 2021 timothee chalamet suit

‘Dune: Part 3’: Release Date, Cast and Spoilers

hollywood, california march 10 john cena speaks onstage during the 96th annual academy awards at dolby theatre on march 10, 2024 in hollywood, california photo by kevin wintergetty images

Why Was John Cena Naked At The Oscars?

galliano

'High & Low — John Galliano' Review

dune two

How the Road Runner Left a Big Mark on 'Dune: Part

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below
Advertisement - Continue Reading Below