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.
‘Mayor’ (2020)
Stream it on Film Movement Plus. Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Fandango at Home and Google Play.
Reviewing the documentarian David Osit’s “Predators” earlier this month, I was curious to rewatch “Mayor,” his feature from five years ago about Musa Hadid, who was then the mayor of Ramallah in the West Bank. Obviously, the film plays differently — and more sorrowfully — in light of the current war in Gaza. But part of what always distinguished “Mayor” from any number of other documentaries on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that Osit is as interested in the politics of running the city as he is in global affairs.
“Mayor” had its premiere the same year that Frederick Wiseman unveiled a documentary on Boston’s City Hall, and Hadid speaks of his job in similar terms. “How can I help you today?” he asks a resident who greets him. Among the tasks he has to deal with during the course of the movie are a tree lighting and the naming of a fountain. There is a discussion of whether the city’s logo should or should not have a space in it, so that “WeRamallah” scans as “we are Ramallah.” Traffic lights, sidewalks, street signs — he wants residents to realize that those essential civic services are the responsibility of the city.
The trouble is that Ramallah is not ultimately under his control. To even build a sewage treatment center requires permission from Israel, Hadid says in a speech we see him make in Oxford, England. Earlier in the movie, Hadid, speaking of how little outside help and income the city has, lays out a goal before a group of students: “If I’m able to create a situation where the municipality is sustainable for the next 100 years, I’ll have achieved something no one else has ever done.” It isn’t easy, and international relations are never far from Hadid’s purview. The director shows him during a politically sensitive meeting involving a German parliamentary delegation and discussing the complicated issues raised by a visit from Prince William. And Osit was filming when President Donald J. Trump, in his first term, announced a plan to move the United States Embassy to Jerusalem, a shift in policy that led to protests and unrest throughout the West Bank.
‘The Super 8 Years’ (2022)
Stream it on Kino Film Collection. Rent it on Amazon.
Not everyone’s home movies could serve as the basis for a compelling, prismatic essay film, but in “The Super 8 Years,” the novelist Annie Ernaux transforms a stash of footage from a transformative decade in her life into a meditation on family, history and self-discovery. Ernaux, who wrote and narrates this documentary (her son David Ernaux-Briot directed), won the Nobel Prize in Literature just months after the film’s premiere. Unsurprisingly, her voice-over is forthrightly literary.
The entire film consists of material shot with a Bell & Howell camera that Ernaux and her husband at the time, Philippe, bought in 1972. They used it on and off until they separated in the early 1980s. (Philippe took the camera with him.) The footage had no sound apart from “the crackle of the projector,” Ernaux says, and so she supplies her own voice, interweaving observations about her home life with reflections on the clan’s many travels throughout the period. The Ernaux family went to Chile before the coup that toppled Salvador Allende. (“The images we’d brought back were of a country that no longer existed,” she remarks.) During a trip to Albania under the rule of the Stalinist leader Enver Hoxha, their western group was kept in a bubble. “The real country was on another stage to which we had no access,” Ernaux explains.
The years also coincided with the publication of Ernaux’s first novel, the autobiographical “Cleaned Out” (1974), and she considers how her artistic evolution clashed with the “gender-based division of labor” that existed from the start of her life with Philippe. Typically, Philippe was the chief filmmaker, so we see much more of her than of him. (“The woman in the image always seems to wonder why she’s there,” Ernaux remarks of herself at one point.) Ernaux also considers how the camera captured important time markers for her family. Originally, it made a “record of beginnings,” Ernaux says. But by 1981, things look different: “The camera that summer no longer sought happy moments.”
‘The Remarkable Life of Ibelin’ (2024)
For all the talk of how technology deepens loneliness, here is a story that offers a different perspective. When Mats Steen, a Norwegian man who had Duchenne muscular dystrophy, died at 25 in 2014, his family members posted a note on his blog. Although they knew that Mats had spent, by his father’s estimate, tens of thousands of hours in the online gaming world over the last decade of his life, what they didn’t know was how deep the connections ran. He was part of a close-knit World of Warcraft group, role-playing for years as Ibelin, a strapping detective and nobleman.
Using chat logs, animation and actors’ voices, along with real-life interviews with Mats’s World of Warcraft friends, Benjamin Ree’s documentary re-creates sections of Ibelin’s journey to show the impact that he had on others and that they had on him. A mother in Denmark credits Mats with encouraging her to use gaming to connect with her autistic son. As Ibelin, Mats developed his first crush, on Rumour — a character who for a time heartbreakingly vanishes from the game without notice. (It turns out she was a high school student in the Netherlands whose parents had cut off her computer use.) When she returns, they become close again, although the friendship, Lisette, the real Rumour, notes in an interview, wasn’t precisely symmetrical: She confided a lot of her own problems in him, but Mats, who did not divulge his condition to the community for a long time, seemed not to have always had reciprocal trust in her.
Perhaps that’s what happens when identity-obscuring avatars are involved. But part of the point of “The Remarkable Life of Ibelin” is that, whatever was revealed or concealed, there was nothing virtual about these bonds, about the possibilities that gaming opened for Mats or about the grief his comrades experienced when he died.
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