1. Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich (2020)
Director: Lisa Bryant Netflix
It’s a must-watch because… An ongoing scandal of unchecked power and abuse is explored with emotional urgency.
This four-hour inquiry from Netflix, currently lapping its competitors in the non-fiction miniseries department, is surely not the last documentary we’ll see on the late American financier and his horrific history of underage sexual abuse. After all, it’s a story that is still unfolding, with his ex-girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell recently taken into custody. But there’s power in being the first, and Lisa Bryant’s project – which entered production, securely under wraps, while Epstein was still alive – valuably amplifies the voices of victims who were unheard for too long.
After 25 years as a showrunner and producer, Lisa Bryant’s first documentary series as a director was Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich, which premiered on Netflix in May. Originally based on James Patterson’s 2016 book of the same name, the four-parter developed the story of Epstein’s life, his court cases, and his death.
Why did you decide to make Filthy Rich?
To show how our justice system was broken, expose Epstein’s abuse of wealth and power, and most importantly, to give the survivors a platform to get their voices heard.
When did you start working on it?
Long before Epstein was arrested and dead, when he was still powerful, wealthy and intimidating, in November 2018.
What problems did you have getting it made?
We had to get a private room locked in our production offices for interviews, and encrypted communications to make sure no one hacked in. We had to protect everything we had, then the story started changing overnight.
And it’s still changing. How did you react to Ghislaine Maxwell’s arrest?
I hope our documentary played some part in putting pressure on the FBI to act quickly. Ghislaine will be the first of many arrests.
Do you think Prince Andrew will speak?
It’s interesting that the US is saying “We’re asking him for answers”, and he’s saying “I’m offering them up, but no one wants them”. I hope for the women’s sakes he does offer answers. I don’t know if he’ll ever fully come clean, but I think the survivors would still respect him if he spoke to the FBI.
What can’t you live without while you’re working?
Good co-workers, and two cups of coffee before 10am, or else I get a headache!
How would you sell documentary films to someone who says they’re not into factual films?
I’d tell them documentaries use lots of techniques from other films, so are more intriguing and entertaining than one would think.
What has stayed with you since you finished Filthy Rich?
Survivors saying how being involved has changed their lives for the better. It’s especially gratifying when it’s people that hadn’t spoken before. One woman started a Facebook group for Epstein survivors.
What do you think about the current state of the documentary industry?
It’s a very good storytelling time. Documentaries now start worldwide conversations.
2. I Am Not Your Negro (2016)
Director: Raoul Peck Mubi
A must-watch because…
The Black Lives Matter movement has put James Baldwin on everyone’s reading list: this doc perfectly complements his writing.
It’s a couple of years since Haiti-born filmmaker Peck won a Bafta, and earned an Oscar nomination, for this fervid, fiery tribute to James Baldwin – but with the black American author’s work surging in popularity amid the BLM protests, it feels due another celebration. This isn’t a drably standard biographical documentary: instead, it engages imaginatively with Baldwin’s political ideas and convictions, emerging as a rousing work of activism in its own right.
3. The Last Dance (2020)
Director: Jason Hehir Netflix
A must-watch because…
A sports documentary that builds into a rousing celebration of a black icon.
Even people who aren’t especially into basketball – which, in Britain, is admittedly rather a lot of the population – got hooked on this “10-part documentary event” surveying the extraordinary sporting legacy of Michael Jordan. And yes, “event” is Netflix’s own wording: there’s little room for modesty in a series that nominally covers the ups and downs of Jordan’s career, but concentrates most exhilaratingly on the ups: it’s hard not to get caught up in the stakes of his final season with the Chicago Bulls.
4. Spaceship Earth (2020)
Director: Matt Wolf Multiple platforms
A must-watch because…
Its depiction of social tensions and restrictions under quarantine feel weirdly of the moment.
One for the “stranger than fiction” file: viewers who followed the news in the early 1990s might recall the hype around Biosphere 2, an elaborate environmental project constructed in Arizona, intended to be a fully self-sufficient ecosystem, all contained under glass. (Biosphere 1, if you’re wondering, is Earth itself.) Eight people volunteered to spend two years in its confines: Matt Wolf’s slick, absorbing documentary charts the fallout of a project that was equal parts worthy eco-hippie research, peculiar cult and Big Brother prototype.
5. On the Record (2020)
Directors: Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Multiple platforms
A must-watch because…
No documentary has so powerfully connected the causes of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter.
The #MeToo movement has yielded a number of documentaries, but a strikingly intersectional perspective makes this searing account of sexual abuse in the hip-hop industry – as articulated by the women who tell of being sexually abused by Def Jam Records chief Russell Simmons – a landmark. (Simmons has denied all accusations.) Dick and Ziering’s film is candid about the particular difficulties black women have faced in coming forward with their stories. Former executive producer Oprah Winfrey controversially withdrew her backing from the film days before its Sundance premiere, but that hasn’t dimmed its critical and audience acclaim.
6. Welcome to Chechnya (2020)
Director: David France BBC iPlayer
A must-watch because…
As far-right, anti-LGBTQ politics spread across Europe, here’s a terrifying glimpse of them in action.
His films How to Survive a Plague and The Death and Life of Marsha P Johnson established David France as the foremost docmaker in the field of LGBTQ history. His latest, however, is a gripping present-tense affair, documenting the state-sanctioned purge of gay people in the Chechen Republic. Using groundbreaking face-morphing technology to protect the identities of participating victims, France’s film tracks the efforts of a Russian activist group to extract vulnerable people from the country and shepherd them to safety: it’s an escape thriller with perilously high human stakes.
David France is an American investigative reporter, nonfiction author and director of the Oscar-nominated documentary How to Survive a Plague. His new film is Welcome to Chechnya.
Why did you make Welcome to Chechnya?
I had first learned about the atrocities in Chechnya in early 2017. Then the headlines vanished. There was this total political silence around the crimes of Ramzan Kadyrov [head of the Chechen Republic] that seemed so harrowing and unheard of in modern times. I felt an obligation to tell the story in a way that put pressure on politicians to do something, in some small way to contribute to bringing justice to the victims there.
How did you protect their identities?
I promised to disguise them. I began to research possible technologies were, but I found the [digital] tools other film-makers had used did not allow me to capture the kind of humanity that I witnessed. So we recruited people, mostly from New York, and mostly LGBTQ activists, to lend their faces as a human shield. We mapped them pixel by pixel over the faces of the people who were in the film. It restores a truth, and it does it in a way that empowers but also protects.
What can documentary film-making do that journalism can’t?
It can reflect not just fact but emotion, in a way that is really unmatched by any other kind of nonfiction storytelling.
Do you consider yourself first a journalist, film-maker or activist?
Journalist first. I don’t consider myself an activist. For years I have wanted to understand what motivates people to be activists. There’s something that makes them run toward a problem, where the rest of us might run away from it. It is their work that audiences react to. I am merely the person who carries their stories out to a larger universe.
What do you think is the greatest documentary ever made?
Honeyland. It’s a story about the natural world, the tragedy and chaos of modernity, and the survival of the heart. I’ve seen it a dozen times maybe.
What are you working on next?
A long-view documentary history of this [pandemic], which might last many years, to help to explain to future generations how we as a people responded to this extraordinary crisis.
7. The Unwanted: The Secret Windrush Files (2019)
Directors: Tim Kirby and James Ross BBC iPlayer
A must-watch because…
“The UK is not innocent” has been a popular rallying cry of recent Black Lives Matter protests: this doc tells us why.
As Britain continues to grapple with the national shame of the Windrush scandal – which recently saw thousands of legally settled, Caribbean-born UK residents threatened with deportation – this BBC documentary, written and presented by David Olusoga, delves into the roots of the institutional racism that caused it, exposing the “hostile environment” associated with Theresa May as a political objective preceding her by several generations. It’s suitably enraging stuff, but its emotional pull is enriched by a wealth of thorough, knotty historical detail.
8. Our Planet (2019)
Produced by Keith Scholey and Alastair Fothergill
A must-watch because…
Some climate-change docs can be on the dour side, but this offers a bright, accessible conversation starter on the subject.
For many of us, it feels as if David Attenborough has narrated our entire life in some capacity. That voice is a reassuring brand in itself, making us listen more attentively to the specifics of his nature documentaries than we might do otherwise, particularly with such reliably ravishing visuals to contend with. That’s of particular value in his high-gloss Netflix series made last year, given its particular focus on climate change as propagated by humans and experienced by all organisms.
9. 13th (2016)
Director: Ava DuVernay Netflix
A must-watch because…
A ferocious study of racial oppression in American prisons made waves in 2016, and is still vital in Trump’s America.
Another Bafta winner that just missed Oscar gold, Ava DuVernay’s first documentary feature after a trio of career-boosting narrative films is ostensibly about racial injustice in the prison system, but emerges as an expansive, furious view of the collective psychology that keeps archaic racial hierarchies in place across America. The title refers to the 13th amendment, which tweaked the abolition of slavery to permit involuntary servitude for convicted criminals: for many in America, DuVernay suggests, prison is slavery. Her argument is radical and persuasive.
10. Seahorse (2019)
Director: Jeanie Finlay Vimeo
A must-watch because…
Transgender rights are a sticking point even for many self-described liberals: this tender, straight-talking doc has the power to change perceptions.
“The Dad Who Gave Birth” is the subtitle often tacked onto Jeanie Finlay’s study of transgender pregnancy, striking a blunt, tabloid-y note that doesn’t square with the film’s own delicate, humane approach. But yes, that’s the story in a nutshell, as the film documents trans man and Guardian journalist Freddy McConnell’s struggle to conceive and deliver his own child. Finlay covers the social, emotional and medical complications of this process in candid but unsensationalised detail.
11. Tiger King (2020)
Directors: Rebecca Chaikin and Eric Goode Netflix
A must-watch because…
A wild ride any way you slice it, this is documentary-making for the post-truth era, inviting us to decide how we consume and believe its information.
Yes, this compulsive Netflix miniseries – a viral obsession in the early days of lockdown – is unabashed trash, to the extent that it’s being adapted into a narrative film starring Nicolas Cage. Viewers got hooked on the lurid tale of eccentric gay zookeeper and convicted felon Joe Exotic and his escalating feud with conservationist Carole Baskin; critics expressed increasing scepticism over the film’s pile-up of tall stories and allegations, presented in equal, credulous fashion for the internet to pore over.
12. For Sama (2019)
Directors: Waad al-Kateab and Edward Watts Amazon
A must-watch because…
A rare female perspective on the Syrian civil war, the worst humanitarian crisis of our age.
The Syrian conflict has inspired a steady stream of documentaries on its fighters and casualties – most of them can hardly fail to be moving, but it takes a unique point of view to cut through the numbing noise. The most-nominated documentary in Bafta history, this has that: taking the form of a video diary by co-director Al-Kateab as she weathers the conflict in Aleppo over six years, first as a student and eventually as a young mother, it’s an extraordinary ground-level chronicle.
13. Honeyland (2019)
Directors: Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov Multiple platforms
A must-watch because…
A poetic allegory for the war between traditional and modern agriculture that doesn’t hit you over the head.
Rightly showered with awards on the festival circuit last year, finally culminating in an Oscar nomination, this is environmental docmaking of a subtle, artful order, marrying ecological concerns with rich, close-up human character study. It follows Hatidze Muratova, an ageing, independent beekeeper living in the remote Macedonian mountains, as she finds her ecosystem threatened by a neighbouring Turkish family with brasher honey-gathering ambitions: warm, funny and exquisitely photographed, it invites us to consider what we give the land we take from.
14. Miss Americana (2020)
Director: Lana Wilson Netflix
A must-watch because…
Taylor Swift is among the most ubiquitous celebrities of this era: here’s an insight into what that means, for her and for us.
If you’re not a devotee of all-American pop goddess Taylor Swift, you might wonder what’s to be gained from a documentary covering her life and labours over the course of recording her last two albums. But Lana Wilson’s Sundance-premiered documentary isn’t mere fan service: it’s a fascinating glimpse into the construction and deconstruction of celebrity in the Instagram era, covering Swift’s transition from carefully managed blank slate to politically outspoken liberal. Oh, and the music is pretty good too.
15. Tell Me Who I Am (2019)
Director: Ed Perkins Netflix
A must-watch because…
Unusual as a story of male victimhood in the #MeToo reckoning, it prompts uncomfortable questions about trauma, and who gets to control it.
As storytelling, this harrowing British documentary is best viewed with as little advance knowledge as possible. Yet a trigger warning is in order for what emerges, through its tricky structure, as a tale of horrifying childhood abuse, shrouded in conflicting layers of memory and misinformation. At the centre of it are now middle-aged twin brothers Alex and Marcus Lewis, the former afflicted with amnesia following a teenage motorbike accident, the latter having taken charge of his brother’s memories in surprising ways.
16. Hail Satan? (2019)
Director: Penny Lane Multiple platforms
A must-watch because…
You won’t see a more pointed inquiry into religious freedom at the moment – or a funnier one.
The question mark in Penny Lane’s puckish, perceptive, sometimes riotous documentary about the Satanic Temple and its followers in the US may seem like a trollish affectation, but there’s a reason for it: by the time it’s finished, what these self-styled satanists stand for isn’t as clear-cut as you might think. Lane seeks the lighter, more humane side of a dark movement, but also a politically canny one: devil worship here emerges principally as a weapon in a culture war against the Christian right.
17. The Great Hack (2019)
Directors: Karim Amer and Jehane Noujaim Netflix
A must-watch because…
While we’re still living with the consequences of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, this is the clearest primer on how it all went down.
We’re still awaiting a definitive documentary on the whole national catastrophe of the Brexit referendum, but this engrossing Netflix effort offers essential insight into the adjacent matter of the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal. Centred on whistleblower Brittany Kaiser, academic David Carroll and Observer journalist Carole Cadwalladr, the film overlaps their observations and experiences to unpack the far-reaching influence of the data research company, from Brexit to the last US presidential election and beyond.
18. Midnight Traveler (2019)
Director: Hassan Fazili Multiple platforms
A must-watch because…
It gives human dimension to the cold statistics around the refugee crisis.
We’ve seen a lot of documentaries in recent years about the European refugee crisis, but few as personally invested as Afghan film-maker Hassan Fazili’s riveting first-hand account of his own family’s gruelling escape from Afghanistan. As they trek overland from one European country to the next in search of asylum, facing violence and exploitation along the way, Fazili shoots their epic journey on a series of smartphone cameras: in addition to its emotional power, the film demonstrates the medium’s rapidly expanding technical possibilities.
19. The Edge of Democracy (2019)
Director: Petra Costa Netflix
A must-watch because… A hard-hitting cautionary tale of the far-right takeover in Brazil – with international resonance.
A global wave of sympathy didn’t exactly greet the recent news that far-right Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro had tested positive for coronavirus; Petra Costa’s chilling, beautifully constructed account of his rise to power won’t warm your heart any. In one respect, it’s a dense, impassioned explanation of a political swing that’s been difficult to follow merely from headlines, but there’s universal resonance here too: the fractious public mood evoked here will be recognisable to residents of Trump’s America or Boris Johnson’s Britain.
Petra Costa is a Brazilian director whose films blur personal narratives and documentary. Her Oscar-nominated The Edge of Democracy traces the collapse of the political system in her home country, and reflects on her family on either side of the political divide. Costa is currently working on Dystopia, about the Covid-19 outbreak in Brazil.
When did you decide to make The Edge of Democracy?
Filming a protest in March 2016, calling for the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff [the leftwing president]. I’d been working in France for a few years, and when I came back, there was this mounting hatred towards the left, which I couldn’t understand. Here, I suddenly had the uncanny sensation of being in a fascist protest. A boy was harassed just because he was in red, the colour of the workers’ party. People were applauding police taking him to prison. Immediately I felt I had to dive into this cancer to understand where it was coming from, and where it was headed.
Was the film a story for Brazil, or for an international audience?
Reading British people’s accounts of their psychological state after Brexit – a few months after the protest I filmed – was when I finally understood what I was feeling. People of my generation feel groundless. The same happened after the election of Donald Trump. My film is about the relationship of an individual to his or her democracy, and the trauma of losing that.
The film ends with Jair Bolsonaro’s inauguration as president on 1 January 2019. How is it looking back at that now?
He’s fulfilling his promises. In 1999, he said once he got power he would deliver a coup, dissolve congress, and do what the military coup didn’t and kill 30,000. That is happening with Covid-19, except that 80,000 are dead. The countries hit most hard by the virus have leaders that have a lack of consideration for human life. That’s what fascism is. That’s why I’m making Dystopia.
How are you making it?
We’ve had people sending us footage from across Brazil, shot on their phones.
What was the best reaction to your film?
Young people saying they hadn’t spoken to their best friend for years, but after watching it, they could connect again. Plus people from Turkey, Ukraine, the UK, the US, Venezuela, who said, my God, this is our story too.
20. Knock Down the House (2019)
Director: Rachel Lears Netflix
A must-watch because…
If you’re despairing about the state of the United States, this portrait of a new political generation is a jolt of hopeful energy.
As we head into a US presidential election putting white male septuagenarians against each other, Rachel Lears’s sparky, motivating documentary is a helpful reminder that there is a younger, more diverse future for American politics. Lears tracks the primary campaigns of four female progressive Democrats, but the clear star of the show is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the irresistible young New Yorker who pulled off the biggest upset victory in the 2018 midterms. Her force of personality is well-captured here: one day we’ll watch this as a reminder of where she started.
Which recent documentaries most illuminate and explain the world today? Share your recommendations in the comments below
This article was amended on 26 & 27 July 2020: to correct the spelling of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and to add a credit for James Ross as a director of The Unwanted: The Secret Windrush Files.
