Serra’s unflinching, observational documentary plants its camera with sniper-like focus on the bloody ritual of bullfighting, as static long takes and dynamic close-ups capture a lonely matador risking his life, afternoon after afternoon, to end another.
Despite its lack of style and the textbook-esque approach to conventional documentary filmmaking, this is quite rightly one of the finest of its kind—a galvanising and sensitive work on the LGBTQ legacy of Harvey Milk and his tragic assassination.
Powerful, insightful, frightening and surprisingly amusing, this documentary gives us unprecedented access into the inner workings of the Taliban as they returned to power in Afghanistan in 2021.
A free-form experiment that sees the filmmaker putting together a feature out of decades of behind-the-scenes footage from around the world—its fragmented moments of joy, anger, trauma and empathy reveal a common humanity even as they refuse to mark time and its deconstruction.
At times amusing and heartfelt, this gentle and comforting Sundance documentary sees local government agents tasked with surveying the Bhutanese on their ‘Happiness Index’.
Some centuries-old Beninese treasures are returned by France, sparking debate over its neocolonial political posturing sublimating as cultural diplomacy as Diop’s quaint Berlinale Golden Bear-winning documentary highlights the dissonances inherent in this ‘homecoming’.
Ichikawa’s marvellous coverage of the 1964 Olympic Games is one of the all-time finest sports documentaries, at times poetic and abstract, and always interested in the bodies, faces and movements of athletes and spectators rather than who wins or loses.
Nondescript and mundane at times, this Oscar-nominated documentary about the black community in Alabama transforms somewhat into a more interesting, free-association piece though it isn’t quite the resoundingly meaningful work of observational, diaristic cinema it thinks it is.
One of the most iconic queer-themed documentaries of all time sees several trans women, drag queens and voguers reveal their passion and desire to be recognised like any other normal human being as they search for a queer utopia in New York’s Harlem.
As highly personal a documentary as it gets about seeking for truth and justice, featuring the derring-do of the journalist-director who was sexually assaulted by a powerful man many years ago as she painstakingly attempts to put the demon to the sword.
Eternality Tan 