Not a bad day to spend a rainy day, and while I was initially considering tapping out after three, it doesn't take a whole lot of convincing to get me to stick around for Apollo 11 on the big screen when it's right there.
Taken all together, these movies are a fascinating examination of documentary filmmaking as storytelling. Honeyland and Apollo 11 are examples of it at its most pure - almost all captured footage, no narration, just watching a story play out in real time - but it's the way the other two work that's kind of fascinating. As I mention in the review, Aquarela looks abstract, but when you step back it's showing you a cycle of how climate change is affecting the world, one thing leading to another. The Great Hack, meanwhile, is chained down by its focus on narrative; by focusing on the personal stories of the people involved, the filmmakers miss the chance to examine the hack itself more closely, and can't finish strong when their stories start petering out.
I wish I'd been able to claw out more time to catch some of the other ten films that I haven't seen elsewhere, although I suspect most are pretty easy to find on the various streaming services, though several are probably hidden in various walled gardens (you need Netflix to see The Great Hack or Amazon Prime for One Child Nation). With the insanely short period between nominations being announced and awards being given this year, there won't necessarily be a lot of time to see the nominees, and this is a nice head start.
Honeyland
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 4 January 2020 in AMC Boston Common #11 (Oscar Documentary Shortlist, DCP)
Honeyland is a terrific little documentary that works as both great fly-on-the-wall filmmaking and an easily digested parable about sustainable farming. It almost makes one marvel at the filmmakers' good fortune, because it seems like they started with an idea for a good short and had an even better feature appear, and they shaped it to near-perfection.
The short would have been just following Hatidze Muratova, a fifty-something woman who lives in a Macedonian village that seems to be just her and her bedridden mother. She's a beekeeper who uses traditional methods, and does well enough to get by, getting ten to twenty euros per kilo for her artisanal honey in nearby Skopje. The solitude is broken when the nomadic Sam family arrives next door, with dozens of cattle and six noisy children, but she seems to enjoy the company, and when father Hussein decides to start keeping bees himself, she's helpful. Soon, he has committed himself to selling a lot of honey, and it starts to affect Hatidze's work as well.
If the Sams family had never shown up, Honeyland might have been a different but still fascinating movie, one about a dying way of life and how family commitments can tie a person to a place beyond what seems otherwise reasonable. One can see the outline of that movie here, in the opening shots of Hatidze walking across an otherwise empty landscape to check on a hidden hive, the candle-lit scenes of her bickering with mother Nazife in a very small house, and how a camera having to find her in a city scene doesn't seem to dent Hatidze's self-confidence. Directors Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov show Hatidze going about her business in such a way that they don't often need her voice to explain beekeeping to the audience. Her village is presented in a specific, meaningful way - old enough to be made of stone and showing some wear, but nevertheless tidy, in a way. The air is clear, the bees have space enough to work. It is not a lecture about some pastoral ideal, but it presents Hatidze's life in such a way as to get one thinking along those lines, despite the solitude.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Aquarela
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 4 January 2020 in AMC Boston Common #11 (Oscar Documentary Shortlist, DCP)
Aquarela serves as your semi-regular reminder that water is metal as heck and will mess you up if you think you can take it for granted. It occasionally seems to have been built as a sort of subversive parody of white noise/relaxation videos, resembling them at first glance but offering up raw power, a caution about what we may unleash.
Director Viktor Kossakovskiy breaks the film into four clear acts: In the first, we see a team examining the ice on a frozen river near St. Petersberg that has started to thaw with spring, locating and retrieving a car that has fallen through. Eventually the camera moves to what I believe to be Greenland, a sailing ship in the foreground giving scale to the glaciers as pieces cleave off and fall into the sea. The camera follows that ship to sea, where a pod of dolphins soon gives way to choppy waters with massive swells. Eventually the camera sinks under the water and emerges in a flooded city.
Kosakovskiy gives the audience characters at the start, but mostly pushes people to the side thereafter to focus more on the raw power at work, and at first glance this reads as man's meagerness in the face of nature. Look closer, though, and Kossakovskiy establishes how the film is talking about climate change with one darkly funny but potentially tragic exchange ("Why are you driving here?" / "Usually, the ice melts three weeks later!"), and then tracks it. The first segment not only features cars, but general combustion, as a building burns in the background despite the apparent indifference of those on the ice, which is followed by glaciers melting, an unpredictable sea, and finally coastal cities becoming uninhabitable. For an extra bit of apocalyptic emphasis, the audience gets to see survivors huddling in caves before the film ends on a more conventionally beautiful bit of nature photography. Humanity may destroy itself by not recognizing how much raw power nature has bottled up, but the world itself will keep turning.
Full review on EFilmCritic
The Great Hack
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 4 January 2020 in AMC Boston Common #11 (Oscar Documentary Shortlist, DCP)
The Great Hack is one of the more glaring recent cases of "important topic that deserves a better documentary", a not-quite-so-long-as-it-seems slog that gives the audience very few details of how the process described by the title works but a great deal of sitting through testimony and talking with the same few people many times over to establish the same information. Maybe, as a Netflix production/acquisition, it's designed to be watched with a finger on the fast-forward button, but that doesn't seem like a great idea when the home-screen button is just millimeters away.
The hack in question is how Cambridge Analytica, a UK-based data-mining company whose clients have increasingly included political campaigns (favoring right-of-center candidates), used data scraped from Facebook to model the entire United States electorate in the 2016 election, allowing the Trump campaign to precisely target "persuadable" voters with large amounts of personalized advertising. Hearing this, an associate professor of digital media in New York, David Carroll, files suit in a British court to find out what personal information of his are on the company's servers. Meanwhile, a more official investigation is launched when former CA employee Christopher Wylie comes across as a whistleblower and points the investigating Parliamentary committee toward Brittany Kaiser, a former Obama campaign intern who would become a key employee at the company and knows where all the bodies are buried.
For as much as issues of digital privacy and personal information can often seem like they have become background noise because it's so pervasive and hard to practically restrict, The Great Hack is probably at its most interesting when filmmakers Karim Amer and Jehane Noujaim track down and illustrate the details, whether that's the simple but effective visualization of data generated with each online interaction or laying out how an innocuous-seeming personality test provided the company with useful data. Case studies like how the company leveraged youth apathy during an earlier election in Trinidad and Tobago are insightful and horrifying, and while some of the reporting on how this works could probably come across as dry and mathematical, it's useful, even if harder to obtain.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Apollo 11
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 4 January 2020 in AMC Boston Common #11 (Oscar Documentary Shortlist, DCP)
I kind of said everything I needed to about this one back when it first played theaters back in March - it's a pretty terrific assembly of footage from the Apollo mission that puts the audience right into that time and place, both for how it attends little everyday details and presents them as high-quality film rather than the blurry TV on which most people experienced it at the time. It's never not going to be thrilling.
Full review on EFilmCritic
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