Documentaries are more than the melodramatic anti-drug videos you watch in health class or the sappy bioptics on PBS. They educate, inform, motivate, and teach viewers about myriad topics: our environment, famous singers, or crime in the United States. Documentaries are entirely nonfictional, capturing human lives in real time, without scripts. Some are created to discover the roots of an artist’s inspiration, others to establish justice for a lost cause, and others to introduce the world to an unfamiliar way of life. Here is a list of a few documentaries that tell stories, both beautiful and sad, that will hopefully open your mind to different ways of life.
Streetwise (1984)
This film by Mark Bell further explores the lives of the Seattle street kids documentary photographer Mary Ellen Mark documented in her 1983 project “Streetwise.” The film harrowingly, yet placidly, delivers the narratives of a group of young adults on Seattle’s streets. The majority homeless, others in severe poverty, Bell captures the kids as they struggle with adolescence and survival. They scavenge for money, support themselves as prostitutes, and dodge disease, all while trying to find a place in a society that renders them unworthy outcasts. The story is a melancholy tale plucked from the oddly melancholy 1980s, a time troubled by confusion and post-Reagan paranoia. Yet, through the eyes of children, Bell looks for hope.
This film can be found on YouTube.
Dear Zachary (2008)
This documentary is both a crime film and a familial love story. It is as heartbreaking as it is beautiful; but above all, this film captures life and love in dangerous times. Director Kurt Kuenne began making this film after his friend, Dr. Andrew Bagby, was murdered, at age 28. Kuenne wanted to create a visual account of Bagby’s full, yet short life, recording stories from the people he influenced so that Bagby’s unborn son, Zachary, could understand how wonderful a man his father was. What begins as a beautiful tribute, turns into a murder investigation, and an account of the fear, misery, and love Bagby’s family endures as they embark on the murder trial of Bagby’s ex-girlfriend and Zachary’s mother, during the years following his death. The events that escalate are astonishing and highlight the flaws in both the American and Canadian criminal justice systems and the treatment of mental illness in our society.
This film can be found on Netflix
The Wolfpack (2015)
If done well, documentaries can capture life in its most unique forms. Crystal Moselle’s narrative documentary is an account the unique childhood of the six Angulo brothers. Due to their father’s paranoid view on the world, the boys were locked in a tiny apartment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan for most of their lives, leaving a couple times a year at most. Homeschooled by their mother and supported by their father’s odd jobs and disability checks, the boys found their only connection to the outside world through film. Watching anything from Reservoir Dogs to The Dark Knight, the boys would then reenact the films, fit with homemade sets and intricate costumes. Moselle entered their life by chance to both tell their story and free them from their limited view of the world; yet, the power of film, as the brother remind, goes beyond any walls.
This film can be found on Netflix.
13th (2016)
Ava Duvernay’s documentary 13th is a letter to the current administration, a manifesto for the worried American, and a wake-up call for those unaware of the racial inequality and political and economic exploitation seen in the US criminal justice system. The film denotes the evolution of the criminal justice in our country from the 18th century until present day. Duvernay threads a discussion among specialists, professors, activists, and ex-convicts to explain how racism has caused the prison population in the US to climb so drastically in the 20th and 21st centuries. The film is confident and unafraid, sharing stories, allocating facts and affirming that with too many innocent and wrongly convicted people in jail, the US must remove racism and unfair criminalization from our criminal justice system.
This film can be found on Netflix.
The Punk Singer (2013)
This high-power documentary encapsulates Riot Grrrl, the post-punk feminist movement that began in the 1990s, through the guise of Riot Grrrl and singer, Kathleen Hanna. Hanna began the incendiary movement at Evergreen State College in the depths of Olympia, Washington. With her outspoken nature and political awareness, Hanna projected her thoughts and feelings into her first band, Bikini Kill, which served as the spark of the movement. With the weight of young American women, queer, POC, abused, oppressed, or silenced, on her shoulders Hanna’s fiery energy struggled to sustain its fervor through the 90s and into the 00s. Yet, she powered through it all, from death threats, to lyme disease, to give women from all over the world hope and energy. Riot Grrrl permeates through the underground and mainstream feminist culture till this day, seen in the way women protest, speak, write, and create in a society that still perceives them as lesser beings.
This film can be found at Cleveland Public Libraries.
Genevieve Wagner ’17
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