If conflict and strife be the food of drama, then 2024’s global realities provided all-too-rich pickings for documentary reflection, as well as grounds for pessimism about human salvation, let alone betterment. Put simply, colonialism is alive and kicking; post-colonial justice is at best partial, piecemeal, a patch-up. The pattern was set in two films which broke out at the Berlinale in February, and now sit in the Sight and Sound year-end top ten. No Other Land, filmed by a quartet of West Bank villagers and Israeli peace activists, demonstrated the slow attrition of Palestinian lives under Israeli assault, and sparked absurd displays of antipathy among Germany’s agonised political class. Mati Diop’s Dahomey, which gave voice to cultural treasures from Benin, now returning from their long French exile as part of a slim restitution, won the festival’s top prize, the Golden Bear.
Johan Grimonprez’s dazzlingly constructed Soundtrack to a Coup d’État retraced the birth and immediate corruption of Congolese independence through the connivance of the Belgian filmmaker’s forefathers and their successor imperialists. Jazz animates the archive footage and evokes the experimental ferment of the era – the aspirations for liberation and union – while rich quotations and a tinge of René Magritte elucidate the perfidy of the West. Alessandra Celesia’s CPH:DOX festival winner The Flats, meanwhile, found some modest songs of hope, and restorative community, in Belfast’s Catholic New Lodge, to offset the scars of segregation and oppression. Likewise Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie’s Sugarcane, filmed among the Williams Lake First Nation in British Columbia, Canada, as it confronts the secrets of unmarked graves on the grounds of a Catholic-run residential school for Indigenous children. And Raoul Peck’s Ernest Cole: Lost & Found indexed the cruelties of Black South Africa under apartheid through Cole’s photography in the 1960s, as well as his subsequent exile and isolation in New York City.
Like Soundtrack to a Coup d’État, Ibrahim Nash’at’s Hollywoodgate showed that liberty does not necessarily follow imperial withdrawal and that would-be tyrants love a vacuum. Here it’s the re-enthroned Taliban in Afghanistan, inspecting the bounty left behind by the departed Americans and scarcely hiding their delight: if not at the fridges of liquor then certainly at the $7 billion of scattered war machinery. Remarkable for its access to the Taliban’s new air force high command (filmed semi-vérité: Nash’at makes clear he’s on a leash), it’s also an ‘Ozymandias’-like vision of US power in retreat, high-tech hardware abandoned to the sands. Which brings us to Architecton, Victor Kossakovsky’s latest elemental geo-symphony, a cinematically spectacular meditation on our transformations of the rock we stand on. Soaring across visions of construction and destruction, from sundered Ukrainian cities and earthquake-ground Turkish apartment blocks to Lebanon’s ancient Baalbek megaliths, it’s a tone poem about architecture considered in archaeological deep time.
And it wasn’t the only roving earth essay – Sofie Benoot’s Apple Cider Vinegar also visited the rocks of Palestine, as well as Cape Verde, Cornwall, Yorkshire and the San Andreas fault in California, to reflect on mysteries from the composition of kidney stones to humanity’s meteor-like impact on the planet. Siân Phillips’s playful voiceover as an erstwhile nature-doc narrator, peering at our fellow wildlife through a webcam, sets this among the year’s zoological studies too. Max Kestner’s Life and Other Problems was a similarly garrulous jaunt, jumping off from the furore around Copenhagen Zoo’s culling of a young giraffe, Marius, to interrogate our assumptions of natural dominion. Jessica Sarah Rinland’s Collective Monologue also explored our animal husbandry, and porous species boundaries, through more concentrated study of interactions in zoos and animal shelters across Buenos Aires. Anirban Dutta and Anupama Srinivasan’s entrancing Nocturnes, meanwhile, made gorgeously immersive, seemingly escapist study of patient moth-counting in the forests of north-east India, before widening its frame to consider the pressing effect of human-driven climate change.
Snowbound Slavic hermits (and their horses) were the off-grid subjects of two exquisitely poised, painterly feature debuts awarded the top prizes at UK festivals: a bearded Bosnian mountain villager in Maja Novakovic’s Sheffield DocFest winner At the Door of the House Who Will Come Knocking, and a penitential Belarusian nun in Cécile Embleton and Alys Tomlinson’s Mother Vera, which won the BFI London Film Festival’s Grierson Award. But there was communion in unexpected digital quarters. Benjamin Ree’s The Remarkable Life of Ibelin memorialised a young Norwegian man who suffered from Duchenne muscular dystrophy, and while physically isolated in his bedroom was intertwined with friends worldwide through playing World of Warcraft. And Sam Crane and Pinny Grylls’s Grand Theft Hamlet made glorious first-person machinima, hot-wiring Shakespeare and Grand Theft Auto during lockdown and offering ingenious succour to the frustrated players of both. At least in our simulated worlds, we can still build bridges and connect.
