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There is no better documentary showcase in the world than the Sundance Film Festival, which begins this Thursday. It’s no hyperbole: more Oscar nominated docs, more commercially successful docs, and more critically acclaimed docs emerge from Park City each year than from any other film event. Anywhere.
All five of this year’s Academy Award nominated docs, for instance, are Sundance participants: How to Survive a Plague, The Invisible War, 5 Broken Cameras and Searching for Sugar Man screened at the fest last year, while The Gatekeepers plays this year. The festival has long been a home to landmarks of America nonfiction, hosting the premieres of such preeminent docs as The Times of Harvey Milk, Sherman’s March, Paris is Burning, Hoop Dreams, and Crumb.
And in recent years, the festival has become the preeminent place to launch activist responses to current political events, whether it’s climate change (Chasing Ice, An Inconvenient Truth), the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (Restrepo, The Tillman Story, No End in Sight), or the global economic crisis (this year’s 99% – The Occupy Wall Street Collaborative Film, and I.O.U.S.A.).
For cinephiles, however, the most exciting aspect of Sundance’s nonfiction programming is the emergence of the head-scratchers, the outliers, the genre-busters—films that seemingly came from out of nowhere, about topics that are completely outside of the media-sphere and that manage to kick-start entirely new cultural conversations.
Formalism may not be the foremost concern for most documentary watchers, but at Sundance, many of the most memorable nonfiction movies are those that break with the conventions of the form and push the medium to unforeseen new places. They may not be the Oscar winners or box-office breakouts, but they are the films that an independent film event like Sundance should be cultivating, promoting and elevating. Here are five Sundance standouts that broke the mold.
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An Injury to One (2003)
Tucked away in Sundance’s avant-garde section, New Frontier, where so many groundbreakers have been banished, Travis Wilkerson’s stirring, compelling and formally innovative documentary chronicles the story of a famous union agitator named Frank Little, who was lynched in Butte, Montana nearly a century ago. Inspired by cine-essayists like Chris Marker and Santiago Alvarez, Wilkerson uses a complex narrative structure to tell Little’s story, moving back and forth from corporate corruption dating back to the 1800s to environmental devastation in contemporary Butte; from the life and writings of author Dashiell Hammett to the flight path of a flock of geese. Stylistically, the film is also marked by such distinctive choices as the use of printed words on screen in a large declarative font and beautifully composed contemporary landscapes, accompanied by old mining songs. Writing in the Village Voice at the time of the film’s release, Ed Halter aptly described Wilkerson’s strategy as “a deft, ambitious exercise in old-school socialist agitprop crafted with the precise multimedia flair of a corporate PowerPoint presentation.” And to think: a film called no less than “one of American independent cinema’s great achievements of the past decade” by Dennis Lim in the Los Angeles Times, wasn’t even seen by most festival attendees at the time.
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Tarnation (2004)
Like An Injury to One, Jonathan Caouette’s visionary brain-busting autobiographical collage, which also played in the New Frontier section, showed the creative promise of new digital filmmaking tools as they came of age. But if Wilkerson’s movie is austere and meditative, with lots of straight lines and sharp points, Caouette’s is a fuzzy, electrified roller-coaster ride—full of psychedelic imagery, with shock clips of horror movies, disturbing slices of home movie footage, and photographs replicating across the screen in infinite repetition. Before the festival in late 2003, I received a videotape from a publicist that included a few scenes from the film, one of which was this remarkable sequence, in which an 11 year-old Caouette credibly acts the part of an abused Southern-twanged mother. As J. Hoberman wrote in his Village Voice review at the time, “Jonathan Caouette’s precocious memoir-cum-psychodrama … is so raw that it bleeds.”
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Zoo (2007)
A rapturously beautiful movie about a terribly ugly incident, Robinson Devor’s lyrical nonfiction portrait explores the true story of a Seattle-area Boeing engineer who died in 2005 of a ruptured colon after being mounted by a Stallion. The “Enumclaw Horse Sex Incident,” as it was known, shocked residents and news commentators, and resulted in many a joke around the water cooler. But Devor steps back from the headlines to create a dreamy contemplation of man, nature and morality, without a hint of sensationalism. Combining gorgeous images of the Northwest landscapes with a mystical-sounding score, and voice-over interviews from those familiar with the incident (spoken mostly by actors), the film takes every assumption and preconception you might have about animal sex and twists it inside-out. By creating such a picturesque film in which stunning imagery of nature is contrasted against the cool environs of civilization (a scene in which a horse is castrated seems far more cruel to the animal than a one-night-stand), Devor makes a persuasive, provocative and deeply profound case for tolerance and understanding in the face of even the most incomprehensible of acts.
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Manda Bala (2007)
Though it won Sundance’s Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary and Best Cinematography, this stunning documentary has been tragically under-seen, earning less than $123,000 in ticket sales and is now apparently out of print on DVD. Thankfully, this impressively edited and photographed examination of Sao Paulo, Brazil remains available for digital download. Weaving together a disturbing web of disparate stories and images—from bulletproof car simulations, unrepentant cloaked kidnappers, severed (and reconstructed) ears and an overpopulated frog farm—filmmaker Jason Kohn makes a pulsating and provocative indictment of the metropolis’s endemic culture of corruption. As one kidnapper says, “You either steal with a gun or a pen.” While the film’s heady hodgepodge and Cinemascope majesty may be indebted to Fast, Cheap and Out of Control—indeed Kohn worked under and worships Errol Morris—Manda Bala remains a vivid, ambitious and utterly original chronicle of class warfare and capitalism run amok.
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Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010)
The most recognized and commercially successful of this eccentric bunch, Exit Through the Gift Shop nevertheless remains a wondrous mind-fuck. Overseen—and supposedly “directed”—by British street artist and provocateur Banksy, the film chronicles the rise of an unlikely French-born street artist named Thierry Guetta. But with layered concerns about its veracity—is Guetta a fabrication? Is Banksy himself? Is the whole movie another Banksy prank?—the film raises larger questions about the nature of authorship and value. What better way to skewer the crass commercialization of auteur-driven artforms—art documentaries, included—than make a film in which authorship and even subject remain in doubt?
Anthony Kaufman has written about films and the film industry for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Village Voice, and Slate. He is currently a regular contributor to Variety, The Wall Street Journal Online, Filmmaker Magazine, The Utne Reader, and writes the ReelPolitik blog for Indiewire.com.