The Time for Documentaries Is Now

From Elon Musk to Elizabeth Holmes, must-see movies abound this fall.
By Dorothy Woodend.
After a rather doldrum-ish period through the early 2000s, when theatrical runs for non-fiction films fell off a cliff, documentary film is enjoying a monumental resurgence this fall. With good reason.
The state of the world is so extreme at the moment, that it seems only natural for audiences to be looking for explanation, but also an artistic lens through which to help see and understand the chaos more clearly.
This fall, three standout documentaries about Elizabeth Holmes, Elon Musk and Israel's military operations in Gaza have been making waves for their impactful exploration of power, politics and the value of human life.
You Can See Everything, Vancouver-born Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim's portrait of disgraced techno-liar Holmes, premiered at the Telluride Film Festival on Labour Day weekend, causing so much early buzz that critics are already proclaiming it a masterpiece.
The film rolls into theatres on Oct. 16.
Meanwhile at the Venice Film Festival last month, the Israeli military exposé NAZA closed its premiere with a 25-minute standing ovation, the longest ovation in the history of the festival.
The documentary features anonymous interviews with Israeli intelligence officers and soldiers about their operations in Gaza. It takes its title from a Hebrew acronym for nezek agavi, meaning "collateral damage."
The Venice Film Festival awarded its special jury prize to filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor.
Reaction to the film has been so great that Benjamin Netanyahu threatened to revoke Abraham and Szor's Israeli citizenship and reserve members of the Israel Defence Force made a rebuttal work.
The original NAZA is currently on the festival circuit and the Vancouver International Film Festival recently added the film to its program for Oct. 10, the second-last night of the festival. The Guardian will stream it globally from its website in November.
Musk, Alex Gibney's three-hour-and-52-minute-long investigative portrait of the American tech leader and trillionaire Elon Musk, hits select U.S. theatres today, with a wider rollout Oct. 23.
The timing of its release before the U.S. midterm elections is interesting. Efforts to squelch the film have resulted in Meta refusing to run paid advertisements for it on its social media platforms Facebook and Instagram.
Meanwhile, the subject of the film is busily sabre-rattling against the filmmaker.
Documentary does what other media can't
It's been a while since documentary had such sizable impact. In light of the big releases this fall, it's useful to look back at past precedent.
When the climate-change documentary An Inconvenient Truth, about former American vice-president Al Gore, hit theatres in 2006, the impact felt like a shockwave.
Then in 2009, The Shock Doctrine, the film inspired by Naomi Klein's book of the same title about the rise of what she called "disaster capitalism," took audiences by storm.
After a screening of the film, I remember watching a man throwing his bottle of Coca-Cola in the trash in apparent disgust over the corporate maleficence.
Having worked in documentary programming for a good chunk of my professional life, it is curious to see how nonfiction cinema has tackled the current moment. But thus was it always. While mainstream media kowtows and plays handmaiden to fascist impulses, documentary filmmakers take to the streets.
The passing of filmmaker Patricio Guzmán in September resurfaced documentary's role in not only capturing history, but giving it context, analysis and understanding, all dosed with a heaping helping of art.
The extraordinary courage of Guzmán's work began with 1975's The Battle of Chile, a full-frontal assault on the evils perpetrated in his home country by Augusto Pinochet's regime. This courage and ferocious dedication to truth, however painful, continued with his masterwork Nostalgia for the Light.
Throughout the course of his ext...