The Essentialist of…Documentaries on NETFLIX

With streaming services now offering huge catalogues of online content, deciding what to watch can be a bit of a lottery. So I’ll do it for you – here’s my selection of some of the great TV and film you may have missed.

For this #essentialist I am going to make a few suggestions of great documentaries that are currently available to watch on Netflix.

Chuck Norris vs. Communism (2015)

Directed by Ilinca Călugăreanu

This story documents how the influx of pirate VHS tapes in 1980s Romania may have helped topple Nicolae Ceausescu’s oppressive Communist regime. We follow the recruitment of a government translator, Irina Nistor from the state censorship bureau by a black market operator. He needed her to dub over the growing number of illegal, uncensored US movies and blockbusters that were being imported into the country. The business boomed and, with Nistor voicing every character and actor, hers became the (maybe second) most recognisable voice to a generation of Romanians who were cut off from the world, living under a hugely oppressive regime of censorship.

Chuck Norris Vs Communism shows how pirate movies offered a glimpse into the lavish, take-no-shit world of the US, albeit through the prism of a series of awful 80s action hits. However this is where the documentary comes alive, as interviewees tell of illegal apartment parties huddled around a VCR, enjoying in a state of awe the illicit pleasure of watching Chuck Norris chew a rat to death. Many of the preposterous films covered are beyond even calling so-bad-they’re-good, but the way the interviewees nostalgically recount their most iconic moments from these films, with their collective cinematic memory related by the omnipresent Nistor, is extremely poignant.

Whether pirate videos played any role in the regime’s eventual downfall or not for those interviewed, pirate movies and Nistor herself, were not just sources of much-needed escapism, they offered a rare glimpse of the West for an oppressed people trapped behind the Iron Curtain.

Reversing Roe (2018)

Directed by Ricki Stern and Anne Sundberg

The landmark Supreme Court ruling on the 1973 Roe vs Wade case legalised abortion in the United States but the battle for a woman’s right to choose has continued ever since, and is in imminent danger of being overturned. This documentary details the lead up to the original case and how it was passed, then takes us through the changing political factors that have defined the issue since.

Reversing Roe forensically accounts events such as how many prominent Republican figures supported the campaigns until the 1980s before the emergence of the religious right shifted their voter base. This ideological shift has led to forced, right-wing judicial appointments, the attacking of rights through restrictive regulatory changes and state-based restrictions on access to clinics.

There are some victories demonstrated and awareness campaigns ongoing, but for how long this historic ruling will stand is looking less and less positive, with the documentary as a whole feeling more and more like an ominous back story to The Handmaid’s Tale.

The Great Hack (2019)

The Great Hack (2019)

If you want to understand the complex issues,-and their impact on you, that surround Carole Cadwalladr’s recent expose on the Cambridge Analytica scandal, then you must watch this documentary. The Great Hack details the events that led to the illegal use of Facebook and other private data to malignly influence both the US Trump election and the UK Brexit referendum and explores the wider, societal implications of data-protection beyond election-tampering.

The Great Hack relates two stories; the unsuccessful legal attempts by David Caroll to find out exactly what data and information about him had been shared and the revelations of Brittany Kaiser, Cambridge Analytica’s former senior director turned, for self-preservation, ‘whistleblower’. As well as documenting some of the information and evidence provided by Kaiser, her lack of repentance over the role she played and her complicity in the scandal are portrayed fairly evenly, eventually placing the bulk of the blame where it belongs, on the system that encourages these ‘legal’ activities.

This was a momentous scandal which brought to light some of the data protection issues that have damaged, and will continue to threaten, our entire democratic system.

13th (2016)

Directed by Ava DuVernay

US prisons are big business, and this award-winning documentary demonstrates how the prison industrial complex has used political, violent and economic means, alongside campaigns of criminalisation, against African-Americans to replace slavery. Its title refers to the 13th Amendment, which makes involuntary servitude illegal “except as a punishment for crime”. It is the continuous exploitation of this loophole that is explored here, as 13th draws a clear line from the abolition of slavery to the current, racially-biased court and penal systems.

13th guides us on a rapid but detailed journey through the key historic moments that brought the US to its present situation, covering the political effects of the release of D.W. Griffiths’ Birth of a Nation, Jim Crow, Nixon’s ‘southern strategy’ and the civil rights movement, through to Raegan’s ‘war on drugs’, the calculated crack vs cocaine campaigns and the racial disparity of mandatory sentencing. 13th masterfully demonstrates the progression and adoption of the political and media strategies which have stategically normalised the criminalisation of African-Americans. It also details their connection to the monetised prison industrial complex as a calculated perpetuation of slave labour in the modern United States.

113th deconstructs how these systems and attitudes have become mainstream, weaponised and entrenched. Unflinching in its assessment and powerful in delivery, this is essential viewing if you want to understand the how the ‘new Jim Crow’ was established in the US.

Five Came Back (2017)

Directed by Laurent Bouzereau

Five Came Back tells the story of how, during WW2, five academy award winning Hollywood directors joined the PR fight against fascism. This is a three-part exploration of the actions and films made by five of the most famous film-makers of their time, as they took their cameras and talents with them to support the allied war effort. To counter the powerful propaganda films of the Third Reich, such as those by Leni Riefenstahl, Franklin D Roosevelt had asked the Five to produce propaganda for the allied cause.

Over the course of the war each would contribute greatly, bravely risking their lives on the front lines, and suffering for their exposure. Their actions are related, with enthusiasm and respect, by five directors of the modern era. Guillermo del Toro is our guide to Frank Capra, Steven Spielberg provides a commentary for William Wyler, Francis Ford Coppola for John Huston, Paul Greengrass on John Ford and Lawrence Kasdan for George Stevens. The use of these famous modern directors, relating with honest respect and admiration the actions and work of their classic counterparts, is striking. The tone of the documentary is patriotic but not overly triumphal, with each of the Five’s aspirations, frustrations and losses explored across the series.

Five Came Back is a highly interesting, impassioned and involving insight into the actions of these great directors across the period of the war, and the effective, iconic work they produced.