Documentaries tend to be about — and are sometimes made by — people who refuse to do as they’re told. But even by those standards, this year’s Oscar nominees for best documentary feature are subversive and brave. Taken individually, each is a story about standing up to something that seems too big to confront: an authoritarian government, an abusive system, dehumanizing societal norms. Together, they show the power of nonfiction filmmaking, both amateur and professional, in those acts of resistance.
On their faces, the five nominees are quite different. Challenging authority is the subject of “Cutting Through Rocks” (in theaters), which follows Sara Shahverdi, the first woman elected to the council of her village in a remote part of northwestern Iran. She’s a divorced former midwife who lives alone — almost unthinkable in her community — and the directors Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni show how she single-mindedly works to protect and guide the women of her village in opposition to the patriarchal norms supported by the legal system.
“Mr. Nobody Against Putin” (in theaters), directed by David Borenstein and Pavel Talankin, is also about thumbing your nose at an authoritarian regime. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Talankin, a Russian schoolteacher, was required by the government to teach pro-war messages in his classroom. He and his colleagues were instructed to prove this by filming their lessons. Talankin decides to resist by using his footage to make a documentary on the sly about propaganda in the classroom. He connects with Borenstein — and the result is now an Oscar-nominated film.
Footage shot in unconventional ways figures heavily into two other nominees as well. “The Alabama Solution” (HBO Max), directed by Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman, was largely shot by incarcerated men inside Alabama prisons over more than 10 years, using phones smuggled in against rules. They capture appalling living conditions — blood and feces smeared across floors, images of brutalized bodies — and argue that falsehoods and willful ignorance are enabling human rights abuses on a grand scale. Without secretly captured images, the film would never work.
Meanwhile, “The Perfect Neighbor” (Netflix) directed by Geeta Gandbhir, depicts the 2023 killing of 35-year-old Ajike Owens in Florida to make a case against the state’s “stand your ground” laws. The film uses substantial footage in its first half that can only exist in a surveillance state: body camera material from sheriff’s deputies and home-security camera recordings. Later, the film draws from cameras located in a police station to show an interrogation. Repurposing this video for a documentary changes its nature, wielding it as a convincing, unforgettable weapon against the law itself.
The final nominee, Ryan White’s “Come See Me in the Good Light” (Apple TV), chronicles a different kind of defiance. It’s an intimate portrait of the poet Andrea Gibson and their wife, Megan Falley, in Gibson’s final year of life following a terminal cancer diagnosis. The film fills in the couple’s back stories, showing some of the struggles they had to overcome to find one another — Gibson’s journey to accept their gender and sexuality, Falley’s path toward body acceptance and love.
But what might be most remarkable, especially for anyone who’s walked through a terminal diagnosis with a loved one, is how radically joyful the film is in the face of certain mortality. “My story is about happiness being easier to find once we realize we do not have forever to find it,” Gibson says early on, reading from one of their poems. The world is full of strife and turmoil and death, all of which can make us feel scared and angry and alone. Insisting on jubilation and laughter in the midst of those realities might be the most insubordinate act of them all.
Alissa Wilkinson is a Times movie critic. She’s been writing about movies since 2005.
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