The proliferation of documentaries on streaming services makes it difficult to choose what to watch. Each month, we select three nonfiction films — classics, overlooked recent docs and more — that will reward your time.
‘Bring Your Own Brigade’ (2021)
At one point in “Bring Your Own Brigade,” an interviewee argues that areas in California where fire is inevitable should be public land; they’re better off as parks, he suggests, not homes. He says that you can “easily imagine a Laurel Canyon fire that ended up on Hollywood or Sunset Boulevard.” He was speaking well before the wildfires that devastated the Los Angeles region this past winter. But a major point of this documentary, directed by Lucy Walker, is that the cycle of burning and building keeps repeating, with few lessons learned.
Walker takes as her starting point two concurrent fires in November 2018: the Camp Fire that ravaged Paradise, Calif., and the Woolsey Fire that reached Malibu. To Walker, these fires are at once a study in contrasts — they ignited at opposite ends of the state and generally affected residents on opposite ends of the socioeconomic spectrum — and a reminder that the threat to everyone, rich or poor, Republican or Democrat, is the same.
The first third or so of the movie is a harrowing compilation of footage and recollections from both fires, skillfully edited together so that it sometimes takes a second to get your geographic bearings. On a call, we hear an operator insist that there is “no danger to Paradise.” A man remembers the heat arriving so quickly and intensely that he found himself running to the nearest pool. The footage is so visceral that later, when Walker cuts to a shot of someone grilling burgers at an evacuation center, even the sight of a flame prompts a visceral response.
But about 40 minutes in, Walker turns her attention to the causes of the fires. One is climate change, but she doesn’t stop there: The film lays out a history of how logging, building, a neglect of traditional land management methods and perhaps above all poor municipal planning have created fuel for the flames. In a film that contains footage of people trying to douse a burned animal with bottled water, the most stunning scene may actually be a post-fire town council meeting in Paradise, in which council members considering changes to the fire code ultimately vote them down.
‘Confessions of a Good Samaritan’ (2023)
Penny Lane, who has directed documentaries on the Church of Satan and a crackpot who promised a cure for impotence a century ago, is no stranger to oddball subject matter, but “Confessions of a Good Samaritan” is in some ways her most eccentric project yet. Her subject is, in fact, herself: The film documents Lane’s decision to donate a kidney. She opts for a non-directed donation, meaning she won’t know who the recipient is. This sort of organ donation — as opposed to giving to a loved one — is rare, and watching the process unfold makes for a paradoxical movie-watching experience. “Confessions of a Good Samaritan” is equal parts altruism and (in an interesting way) navel-gazing.
Lane acknowledges up front that viewers might think she’s doing it as a stunt for a film. She denies this, but adds that if even she were, so what? It’s still an extraordinary act. She even learns that she may be biologically predisposed to extravagantly helping others. One of her more fascinating interviewees is Dr. Abigail Marsh, a psychologist and neuroscientist who has sought to understand the relationship between altruism and the amygdala, a part of the brain involved in experiencing fear and sensing it in others. In essence, Lane may be the polar opposite of a psychopath.
The filmmaker also meets with donors, physicians, a colorful bioethicist and a psychiatrist author who has argued that the shortage of kidneys is so acute that financial compensation for donors should not be the taboo that it is. Lane’s crew is also at her side at the hospital as she is prepped for the procedure itself. Just before that, she has expressed disappointment — while acknowledging how bad it sounds to do so in this context — that the process up until then has been a “standard medical experience,” rather than what she expected: doctors welcoming her as a hero. She even learns that for some people, donating an organ can feel anticlimactic. But how could it, in her case? It culminated in a documentary.
‘Poto and Cabengo’ (1980)
Stream it on the Criterion Channel.
“Poto and Cabengo” takes its title from the nicknames that the identical twins Grace and Virginia Kennedy used for each other. But their shared idioms went well beyond names. Gracie and Ginny, as the children are called throughout Jean-Pierre Gorin’s documentary, became a news sensation in the late 1970s when scientists wondered if they were conversing in their own language. In video footage, we watch them interact seamlessly, even though no one, at least initially, can understand them, or discern whether their mode of communication has a true syntax.
We’re told that idioglossia, this form of made-up language, is a known phenomenon among twins, but that it is rare to see it in twins as old as Gracie and Ginny, who were around 7 at the time of filming. Gorin, who had collaborated with the wordplay-loving filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard during Godard’s abrasive late-1960s/early 1970s period, begins by simply wanting to know what the girls are saying. He also recognized, as he says in voice-over, that he only had a limited time to catch them before they “turned English majors.”
Hanging out with the girls and their family around their home near San Diego, Gorin finds a set of circumstances that no doubt contributed to the sisters’ peculiar dynamic. They grew up in a bilingual household. (Their mother’s native language was German, and their non-English-speaking grandmother lived with them.) Poverty was a persistent issue. (Gorin rides along with their father, who does not come across as an effective real estate salesman.) And as a speech therapist, Alexa Romain, explains, it sounds like the parents, having been warned that the girls might be mentally disabled, generally opted to keep them at home, isolated from other children. Accompanying them to the library, Gorin remarks that they see books as objects to feel and touch, not to read.
Without offering a single diagnosis of how Gracie and Ginny became Poto and Cabengo, the film reaches fascinating scientific, linguistic and sociological conclusions.
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