What follows is a previously unpublished list of my ten favourite non-fiction films released between 2010-19 that I was asked to submit to Realscreen.
1. Karamay (Xu Xin, China, 2010)
A devastating masterpiece about suppressed, aching grief and the profound disregard for humanity bred in governmental and bureaucratic structures. A rare act of justice and a brave act of subversion and restoration from Xu Xin.
2. The Dreamed Ones (Ruth Beckermann, Austria, 2016)
Partly because of its seeming simplicity, this is as instructive a film made this decade about cinema as well as the palpable power contained in lived pasts and how to resurrect them before our eyes and ears.
3. Three Sisters (Wang Bing, France/Hong Kong, 2012)
Along with Frederick Wiseman, Wang Bing was the decade's most prolific and accomplished documentarian, sharing the immense pressures and struggles of marginalized everyday lives, often looking at his subjects with discomforting intimacy. Several of his films could make the list, but this is perhaps the most moving and poetic.
4. Austerlitz (Sergei Loznitsa, Germany, 2016)
Alternating between fiction and non-fiction, Loznitsa often draws on archival material for his documentaries but here it’s the power of pointed, incisive observation, resulting in a scathing juxtaposition of contemporary society with commodified horrors—and a great study of t-shirts.
5. In Jackson Heights (Frederick Wiseman, USA, 2016)
The master of sequencing and the great chronicler of American institutions, any of his seven films from the past ten years could be here, but In Jackson Heights brings us closest to the people his country tries to tuck away.
6. No Home Movie (Chantal Akerman, Belgium/France, 2015)
The loss of Chantal Akerman weighs as heavily now as it did at the time of the release of her final film, another naked work that finds in her relationship to her mother and the confines of domestic space, the traumas, emotions, and existential scars of generations, of a century, of a life.
7. Infinite Football (Corneliu Porumboiu, Romania, 2018)
The best testament yet to Porumboiu’s genius, as he moulds seemingly artless parts into an unexpectedly rich whole, shifting power from the filmmaker to the subject as creator in a humanistic tribute to armchair inventors and thinkers.
8. The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu (Andrei Ujica, Romania/Germany, 2010)
Among the most inventive and expressive assemblies of archival material I’ve ever seen, a varied and lively “bio-pic” that weaves together existing footage to create something impressively novelistic.
9. What You Gonna Do When the World’s On Fire (Roberto Minervini, Italy/France/USA, 2018)
An encapsulation of oppression, rage, resistance and heroism in present day Mississippi and Louisiana, Minervini’s signature docu-drama invisibility gives way to the sheer magnitude and urgency and resilience of his subjects. If you want to look at America and rethink notions of supposed progress, here you go.
10. This is Not a Film (Jafar Panahi, Iran, 2011)
One of the decade’s most powerful gestures was Jafar Panahi’s determination to continue making films after his government banned him from doing so. Stuck in his apartment, he picks up a digital camera and teaches us what a film is or could be and what it means to be free.
Honourable Mention: Balikbayan#1 Memories of Overdevelopment Redux III (Kidlat Tahimik, Philippines, 2015)