The 15 Best Documentaries of 2015

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The 15 Best Documentaries of 2015

by Christopher Campbell on December 22, 2015

This was not a poor year for nonfiction cinema, though it may have seemed that way

because of what was most popular. Not everyone likes to see so many music documentaries

flooding the market, even if those films include some of the most exceptional and affecting

artist profiles we’ve ever seen. This was a more centralized year for docs in terms of

recognition, also, as evidenced by this website’s four primary critics (myself, Daniel

Walber, Dan Schindel and Landon Palmer) being more uniform in our individual best-of

lists than usual. Years where we’re more scattered on our favorites tend to imply there was

a broader range of great work.

But perhaps 2015 simply gave us more first-rate films we could agree on as being above

and beyond the rest. This year brought new releases by Frederick Wiseman, Joshua

Oppenheimer, Hubert Sauper, Wim Wenders, Asif Kapadia and even the late Les Blank, so

it wasn’t surprising that we’d be so coordinated in our picks. Plus, newcomers such as Chad

Gracia, Amanda Wilder and Debra Granik (new to nonfiction anyway) delivered such

extraordinary debuts that none of us could dismiss. At least half of the films listed below

were found on three out of the four critics’ own lists, while the rest represent two critics

each. None of them are too obscure.

That means you should be able to find them, and you really should seek them out.

15. Evaporating Borders

evaporating borders

Cyprus is in flux. Wedged between the nations of Greece and Turkey, the continents of

Africa, Asia and Europe, political extremes and international organizations, it is now much

more than simply a trouble spot. Iva Radivojevic, rather than targeting a single issue, has

instead made a poetic essay that captures the many moods of the island. Fascist

demonstrations in public squares, immigrants living in refugee camps, fed by money from



the European Union, flocks of flamingoes on the coast and the towering residences of

Russian millionaires all pass across the screen like the increasingly treacherous tides of the

Mediterranean. Insightful and frequently quite beautiful, Evaporating Borders is among the

strongest debut features of the year. – Daniel Walber

14. Best of Enemies

Best of Enemies

A few years ago, a documentary titled Evocateur positioned Morton Downey, Jr.’s

firebrand 1980s talk show as the paradigm for today’s pervasive industry o f media

demagoguery. The film’s thesis seemed tacked-on at best, a last-minute big-picture

justification overreaching its case for historical import. More readily answering a call for

putting our toxic media landscape into context, Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville’s

enthralling Best of Enemies chronicled what is essential to any diagnosis of political

polarization via television history: the transient but emotionally intoxicating joy of seeing

your ideological stand-in rhetorically pummel the opposition. This masterfully assembled

recounting of William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal’s ten oral sparring matches during the

1968 Republican and Democratic National Conventions and their surrounding events is

appropriately bittersweet: it both revels in the party and observes its consequential

hangover. – Landon Palmer

13. Finders Keepers

Shannon in Finders Keepers

One of the best things about Finders Keepers is how its filmmakers, directors J. Clay Tweel

and Bryan Carberry and producers Ed Cunningham and Seth Gordon, show improvement

with each new nonfiction work. This is the most directly evolved from their most well-

known (save for Carberry who wasn’t part of the team then), the Gordon-helmed The King

of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters. There are two men in a conflict, and there’s a lot of humor

due to the absurd premise of one guy finding another guy’s amputated leg in a grill he’d

bought at auction and the custody battle that ensued. However, this is a mature work of

documentary, not just some stranger-than-fiction lark where the crazy story and



unbelievable characters are depended on to drive the film. It’s as sad as it is funny, and it’s

respectful and considerate of the men as human beings, not sensational subjects, and their

lives as more than what’s easily mediated on screen, from reality shows to this very feature.

Ultimately, it is a deep and sensitive take on fame, fortune, class, capitalism, justice and

grief, rather than the yokel folk tale it appears to be. – Christopher Campbell

12. The Nightmare

The Nightmare

Rodney Ascher’s Room 237 divided audiences in its unencumbered investigation into the

myriad theories surrounding Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining from … well, “enthusiasts”

seems too tame a word. The director doubled down on his interest in faithfully re-creating

the subjective experiences of his subjects with The Nightmare, which brings the uncanny

experiences of those who suffer from sleep paralysis to terrifying life. There’s something

radical in Ascher’s commitment to following his subjects down the rabbit hole of individual

experience and the strange revelations that this journey often brings, eschewing an

authoritative tradition of documentary “expertise” in the process. But it’s even more

surprising that such a unique approach to nonfiction could be so entertaining. And fiction or

nonfiction, it’s the scariest movie of the year. – LP

11. In the Basement

in-the-basement-nazis

Ulrich Seidl edits with a vengeance. This documentary, which takes place in the many and

varied basements of Austria, is both a loving portrait and a brutal evisceration of the many

things people hide beneath their homes. Underground portals are a major visual motif, as

Seidl returns again and again to shots of his subjects closing their doors behind him before

cutting to the scene inside. As the film progresses from doll collectors and hunting

enthusiasts to BDSM and Nazi nostalgia, Seidl cuts ever more confrontationally between

increasingly disparate subjects, demanding that we re-examine our own taboos. – DW.

10. The Iron Ministry



Cinder Films

The latest project of the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab explores not a location but a

vehicle — a train, one of many traversing the rails of China. An opening sequence

consisting only of the sights and sounds of machinery in motion makes the train feel like aliving being. The various passengers we then meet over the course of the film thus seem

like lesser organisms temporarily thriving off a host. They’re juvenile remora attached to a

whale. The sense of time and place is subsuming, and the various vignettes of humanity

collectively feel like an effective microcosm of contemporary China. – Dan Schindel

9. Stray Dog

Stray Dog 2

Debra Granik set Jennifer Lawrence on the road to superstardom and earned massive

accolades with Winter’s Bone. If she were a man, she probably would have been handed

the reins of The Hunger Games or some other franchise after that. Instead, she continues to

explore rural America on a minuscule budget, this time in nonfiction form. Vietnam veteran

turned biker Ron Hall doesn’t seem on paper like one of the most compelling documentary

protagonists of the year. Hell, he might not even seem it while you’re watching the film.

But Granik’s casual disregard for convention and easy naturalism flesh out Hall’s many

nuances, making his pain wholly sympathetic and his little triumphs into tremendous

crowd-pleasers. – DS

8. Approaching the Elephant

approaching the elephant

As much as I like to champion innovative takes on nonfiction film, it’s also great to see

something so nearly unmistakable from the direct cinema of the 1960s and 1970s,

especially if it can still feel fresh as this. Amanda Wilder (who, full disclosure, has written

for this site) still pushes the envelope in her partly old-fashioned observational record of the

first year of a communal free school in New Jersey. She’s hands off as the experiment



(theirs not hers) plays out, and it’s a thrill to never know what she’ll show us next — even

if it often seems like a kid may become seriously hurt. There’s a level of chaos to the

content, controlled for us through careful storytelling, much of it achieved in the editing (by

Actress director Robert Greene, also a former Nonfics contributor). But all of it was first

collected by an entrusted, nonintrusive camera capturing unforgettable characters, young

and grown, in a time and place and situation that needed to be documented. The result is

like a love child of Frederick Wiseman and Werner Herzog, as impossible as that

conception may sound. Approaching the Elephant is the sort of documentary where you

leave thinking how tragic it would have been had all these images not been recorded. – CC

7. The Salt of the Earth

Salt of the Earth

Wim Wenders’s plunge into photographer Sebastião Salgado’s work is an arresting

experience, an intimate look into difficult histories of exploitation, tragedy and struggle told

through its subject’s documentation of global social life from labor in Brazilian gold mines

to the Rwandan genocide. But the power of Salgado’s photography alone is not what makes

The Salt of the Earth a great documentary. As with Wenders’s portrayal of dance in Pina,

his use of art to examine the work of artists merges the moving image and still photography

into something that neither could have achieved on their own. By juxtaposing black-and-

white close-ups of Salgado detailing an oral history of his work against the black-and-white

byproducts of said work, Wenders weaves these photographs through a fluid narrative that

constantly confronts the audience with the profound contexts of such beautiful, terrible

images. – LP

6. We Come as Friends

BBC Worldwide North America

Hubert Sauper has carved out an unlikely niche as an observer of the hell that exists on the

bad end of globalization. Here, he embarks on a nightmare travelogue of how political,

corporate and religious interests from more powerful entities have already sunk their claws

into the world’s newest country. The establishment of South Sudan was meant as a fresh



start for its people. But from missionaries swindling people out of their land to factories

poisoning nearby soil, it’s seems that renewal isn’t feasible under runaway capitalism. It’s a

sobering, almost helpless portrait. – DS

5. Amy

Amy

On the one hand, Asif Kapadia (Senna) has constructed a portrait of duality in the fame of

Amy Winehouse, who died of alcohol poisoning four years ago at the age of 27. It’s an

emotionally affecting work, accomplished visually in the compilation of preexisting

footage. On the other hand, the film is a product of duality in the documentary image, each

piece of that footage telling us two different things. Structured precisely so that Winehouse

is depicted as a more closed-off character as her story progresses and as her representation

on camera evolves and then devolves, Amy doesn’t just ask us to consider what and whom

we’re watching but how we’re watching it. Kapadia had to make an ethically complicated

choice in order to make such a brilliant film, but a great documentarian shouldn’t avoid

using dirty tools when they’re the only ones that can get the job done. – CC

4. In Jackson Heights

In-Jackson-Heights

In Jackson Heights is not a utopian film, but it occasionally brushes up against a

remarkably hopeful message. Frederick Wiseman’s portrait of Jackson Heights, Queens,

doesn’t hide the neighborhood’s biggest problems. Gentrification and the collapse of local

businesses, police brutality, discrimination and the struggles of the immigrant community

are at the forefront of this kaleidoscopic, epic work. Yet Wiseman approaches the spirit of

the American dream by profiling the activists and organizations confronting these issues,

with a particular eye for how all of these communities intersect. In Jackson Heights shows

the hard work of driving this country towards its boldly stated but never achieved goals of

equality and understanding, one conversation at a time. – DW

3. The Russian Woodpecker



The Russian Woodpecker

Some documentaries attempt to be everything, and almost always they fail in their

excessive scope. In his stunning debut, Chad Gracia has tried for a work of political and

artistic importance and triumphantly succeeds with a constantly surprising mix of history,humor, drama, character study, journalistic odyssey, global intrigue and terror and what

looks like a bit of sci-fi and fantasy but is all too real. The Russian Woodpecker follows an

investigation down a rabbit hole beginning with a preposterous yet plausible conspiracy

theory and winds up in the middle of the Ukrainian Revolution. This is a paranoid thriller

with levels of dread both intimate and wide-reaching. It’s quite possibly the best nonfiction

detective film since The Thin Blue Line and without a doubt the best spy film of the year. –

CC

2. A Poem is a Naked Person

A Poem Is a Naked Person

Les Blank was a hungry filmmaker. That comes across in his many lighter, shorter features

about both cooking and mouths, from Yum Yum Yum and Garlic Is As Good As Ten

Mothers to Gap Toothed Women. Yet this discourse of taste, hunger and occasionally

violent consumption had never been quite so viscerally articulated as it is in A Poem Is a

Naked Person, the posthumously released feature that Blank began in 1972. Ostensibly a

portrait of musician Leon Russell, the final product is much grander. Using Russell and his

music as more of a structural tool than a subject, Blank captured the soul of America and

found his masterpiece. – DW

1. The Look of Silence

It’s unfair to just label The Look of Silence as a sequel to or companion piece of The Act of

Killing, because then we treat it like something that couldn’t or doesn’t exist or succeed on

its own. Joshua Oppenheimer‘s latest film exposing and confronting the horrendous mass

killings in Indonesia in the mid 1960s is possibly even a stronger work. This time he

focuses on a brave and stoic main character, an optometrist who uses his profession as a

way into the homes and company of men responsible for murdering countless



“communists,” including his own brother, in order for him interrogate them. It’s a more

personal film, and yet the optometrist was born after the death of his sibling so there’s also

a kind of detachment there, which informs his and relates to our impossibility to totally

understand such intimate as well as such extensive tragedy. Oppenheimer, too, was born

after many of his own ancestors fell victim to the Holocaust — not that this fact provides

any context within the film, but knowing it provides some external insight into his interests

here, especially with the optometrist’s parents.

The astounding aspect of what Oppenheimer is showing through The Act of Killing and

now The Look of Silence is how the murderers in Indonesia remain on the winning side of

their history and therefore have never otherwise been held accountable, unlike those we

encounter in docs on the Nazi, Khmer Rouge, Sudanese and most other genocidal war

criminals of the past century. The most striking aspect of this film alone, though, is in the

specific reactions of the killers and their loved ones, since there’s a concentration on family

and the effects the killings have on those related to both victim and perpetrator. Because as

we see in the film, those closest to the events are starting to pass on, and it’s memories of

secondhand perspectives that carry forth. So it’s necessary to keep that next generation, let

alone any following generations, from wrongly remembering their nation’s past. The Look

of Silence is a record and a tool for changing the world. – CC

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The 15 Best Documentaries of 2015

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