The proliferation of documentaries on streaming services makes it difficult to choose what to watch. Each month, we pick three non-fiction movies — classics, overlooked recents, and more — that will reward your time.
‘A lion in the house’ (2006)
Stream it on Netflix.
When documentary filmmaker Julia Reichert (“American Factory”) died earlier this month, her obituary in DailyExpertNews called “A Lion in the House” her most personal film. Directed with her husband and film-making partner, Steven Bognar, the documentary began when, according to Bognar’s opening story, they were invited by Cincinnati Children’s Hospital’s chief oncologist to make a documentary about what a family goes through as a child has cancer. In the voiceover, Reichert notes that their own daughter had just finished cancer treatment. After the movie ended, Reichert was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
The documentary, made over six years, revolves around 5A, the cancer ward of the children’s hospital. Over nearly four hours of screen time, the viewer is immersed in the lives of five patients diagnosed with cancer as children, their families and the many doctors, nurses and social workers charged with their care. While a film like Frederick Wiseman’s extraordinary ‘Near Death’ (1989) approached the subject of mortality with intimacy but a distinctive detachment, ‘A Lion in the House’ is a case where the filmmakers have a clear emotional investment in the material. Few documentaries look so fearlessly yet so compassionately at the brutality of brutal medical trials.
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The patients vary in their circumstances and prognosis. They include Tim, a teenager with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, who initially resists his doctors’ attempts to make him gain weight and whose illness has severely limited his social life and attendance at school. Alex, who has leukemia, is introduced when she is 7 and her cancer is in remission, but it returns, and Reichert and Bognar follow her and her sometimes disagreeing parents through a succession of difficult treatment decisions, where the answers about what is best for Alex and what might prolong her survival is not always clear. Justin, 19, has been battling leukemia for 10 years when the movie opens; over the course of the film, he reaches what appears to be the end, with at least one doctor pushing for a serious discussion of his death. But when Justin somehow survives after suffering for 24 hours from what another doctor calls “blood pressure incompatible with life,” the parents’ decision of whether or not to continue as their so-called fighter of a son becomes only more difficult.
Every moment in the movie is about life and death, and while “A Lion in the House” is almost always hard to watch, it’s also impossible to shake.
“Did you wonder who fired the gun?” (2018)
Stream it on Fandor, Kanopy, Ovid, Projectr and Topic. Rent it on Amazon and Apple TV.
The protests following George Zimmerman’s acquittal for the murder of Trayvon Martin led experimental filmmaker Travis Wilkerson to investigate a disturbing family story. He had been told that SE Branch, his great-grandfather, who ran a grocery store in Dothan, Ala. got away with it.
Wilkerson’s mother quickly sends him a newspaper article from 1946; it says there was a charge of first-degree murder against Branch in Spann’s murder. But that charge mysteriously vanished, as it usually did when white men committed violence against black people in the Deep South, and Branch lived on for decades. Wilkerson incorporates footage of him into eight-millimeter home videos, one of which is labeled with the month of the murder. He even has a picture of them together, the year Wilkerson was born and Branch died. As for Spann, few traces remain of him or his descendants. “Have you wondered who fired the gun?” is partly the filmmaker’s attempt to make up for that absence. To paraphrase his voiceover, this is the story of a murder victim buried in an unmarked grave – and of the killer’s great-grandson filming that grave. “That’s a pretty precise expression of racism, whichever way you look at it,” says Wilkerson.
The scope of this chilling essay film is much broader than Wilkerson’s family history and his detective work. Wilkerson meets Edward Vaughn, an area civil rights activist who remembers a boycott of Branch’s grocery store after the murder and the appalling conditions at the hospital Spann was taken to. Wilkerson interweaves an account of Recy Taylor’s rape—an assault that happened nearby in 1944—and the work Rosa Parks, about a decade before the Montgomery Bus Boycott, did to investigate it.
‘Flight’ (2021)
Stream it on Hulu.
“Flee,” from director Jonas Poher Rasmussen, received Oscar nominations for both animated and documentary – an unusual combination. But animation really is the ideal form for this non-fiction account of a refugee’s flight from Afghanistan in the early 1990s. One of the themes that emerges is that living clandestinely requires being able to constantly adapt one’s identity. In that way, the abstraction of animation – the distance from reality – reflects the material.
The central figure of “Flee” is named Amin in the film (at the beginning, the documentary notes that certain names and locations have been changed to protect the subjects). He knew Rasmussen from high school, but there’s a lot Rasmussen didn’t know about him. As Amin’s interlocutor throughout the feature film, the director makes him reveal things during an interview in Copenhagen that he has largely kept to himself, for understandable reasons. Amin reports on a journey from Afghanistan that was anything but easy: he tells of his arrival in Moscow the year after the fall of the Soviet Union and a laborious escape attempt that eventually led him to return to Russia for a while.
You might be tempted to see Amin’s resilience as inspiring, but in “Flee,” he also reflects on the lingering effects his experiences in flight have had on his personality. “When you flee as a child, it takes time to learn to trust people,” he says. “You are constantly on guard.” The sense given is that his defensiveness may have even caused friction in his current relationship. The film is also about Amin’s acceptance of being gay – he says there wasn’t even a word for it in Afghanistan – and his fear of his family’s reaction. But that outburst — more of an outburst — makes for one of the film’s most unexpected and heartwarming sequences.