Land des Schweigens und der Dunkelheit (1971): An early Werner Herzog documentary, I was immediately taken aback and promptly shattered by the casual soul-crushing factualness of Fini Straubinger’s solitude. It’s a particularly striking experience, because Fini appears to all extents (and, I assume, also purposefully through framing) to be a perfectly common person, a determined woman, elegant and kind-spoken. Yet, she is in fact hearing and sight impaired, communicating through hand reading, detached from the immediate reality of her world. The movie is somewhat of its age, as we follow Fini in her advocacy and care for other similarly impaired people, sometimes with a didactical narration, other times just “observing” to the point of the mystically uncomfortable. It’s the moments of “informing” that tone down the powerful impact Herzog’s movie otherwise has, the kind of power that stems from standing dignified in the face of unjust adversity. 8
Poor Things (2023): The frontrunner for this year’s Oscars, if this year’s Oscars didn’t feature a certain Oppenheimer, Yorgos Lanthimos’s PT is a very effective mashup of many movies you have probably seen. It creates a fantastical world with a twang of Terry Gilliam and features a Frankensteinian lead – a woman who was to (re)learn the ways of the world. And, as we know, the world is an uncomfortable place for women, rife with weak, yet manipulative men and plenty of judgement. Bella, however, rises above these, in her own take-no-crap-common-sense kind of way, and PT comes together as a many-layered story, that’s both easy to enjoy and sustaining to ingest. 8
All of Us Strangers (2023): I was a big fan of Andrew Haigh’s 45 Years, so I was glad to hear the positive buzz around AoUS. This is, in many ways, a small movie, but its emotional reach is impressive – even if, at times, dramatic. With an excellent cast, it follows Adam’s (Andrew Scott) exploration of his childhood, his parents and his identity. After he meets his charismatic neigbhour Harry (Paul Mescal), Adam travels through time and space to make sense of the low point he finds himself at. Sure, it’s a movie about sexual identity and the implicit embedded nature of otherness, but that’s ultimately just a part of this powerful story that yearns to be heard, of the solitary character at its center that wishes to be held and understood. A feeling that takes on a tragic outline, in its inescapable lack of fulfillment. 8
One Life (2023): Very much a Hallmark movie with A-list actors, One Life proves annoyingly capable of pulling at heartstrings. In a bit of a Schindler’s List kind of situation, Nicky Winton, a well-to-do banker working as a young man in the 1930s, volunteers to travel to Czechoslovakia after the annexation of the Sudetenland, where he finds it a moral imperative to help transport endangered children to the UK, into foster families. There’s not much moral ambiguity to go with this, ultimately, incredible tale of…civic duty (?), but I found it still hits hard in a finale that will challenge your tear ducts. 7
Elijo creer (2023): Given how prolific these World Cup “documentaries” have been, FIFA must be selling the rights for a dime a dozen. After the vastly disappointing official movie that came out about a year ago, I also spent some time with Netflix’s Captains of the World – which started out as an over-edited, dumbed-down mess, only to gain focus and capture both winners and losers as the crowd was thinned down. Elijo creer (Soccer Soul – ugh) has a goal that’s at the same time more humble and more grandiose – to just follow Argentina’s path to glory. The narration waxes lyrically in cliches and hyperbole (Ricardo Darin’s rendition finds some poetry at times), but the documentary succeeds to avoid irrelevance by providing insights from its protagonists that, I felt, somewhat surpass the media catalogue of the higher profile Captains. Ultimately, I felt it achieved what it aimed to do, even if it fails to really fan the flames that have been fanned so heavily since Messi completed football. And for all my love of footballers, they don’t tend to make the best storytellers. 6
tributary stu 