The Best Documentaries Of 2017

10. “Machines”
Like an intricately composed Hieronymous Bosch painting of Hell, the contradiction at the heart of Rahul Jain‘s formally rigorous yet politically punchy film is that the dank, subterranean, steam–and-smoke choked caverns of this massive Indian fabric dyeing factory can be portrayed in camerawork of such striking beauty and sinuous grace. With no voiceover narration, and just a few sporadic interviews with unnamed employees punctuating the rhythmic clanking and roaring that fills the air in this nightmarish place of work, Jain makes all his points expressionistically: the gruelling physical toll that 12-hour shifts of hoiking 220kg barrels of dye across damp cement floors can take, is written in the strained sinews and impassive, etched faces of the workers. Sometimes you can anthropmorphize the machines, furnaces and engines; you see faces in their whirring cogs and a kind of mute comedy in their juddering repeititions. But more often the film works the other way around: Down here in this dystopia of abject poverty and inequity where worker solidarity is swiftly crushed by proudly inhumane bosses, the “Machines” of the title are people. — JK

9. “Rat Film”
This experimental documentary from first-time director Theo Anthony nearly won him the new Adam Yauch Hörnblowér Award at SXSW, a commendation set aside for filmmaking that shuns normality and breaks convention. “Rat Film,” a multimedia exploration of Baltimore’s race problem vis-a-vis rats, unquestionably does both [our review]. In the film, Anthony uses rudimentary video game footage, Google Maps screenshots, archival materials, and traditional on-the-ground camerawork to fully delineate Baltimore’s history of systemic racism. The result is an astoundingly original work that feels more like an immersive VR simulation than a straightforward historical documentary, problematizing the history it lays out by asking viewers to embody it. Deservedly precocious, this doc from 28-year-old director-cinematographer Anthony pushes the boundaries of sociological filmmaking and (new) media without veering into drollness. Whether following a wise exterminator or a hickish backyard rat shooter, Anthony is sure to imbue all of his subjects — even the semi-mythological rodents themselves — with apropos humanity. If great documentary teaches its viewers something new and renegotiates the limits of filmmaking, then “Rat Film” is absolutely one of the year’s best. — LW

8. “Strong Island”
“I’m not angry,” director Yance Ford says straight to camera, in one of the unfliching close-ups that make this documentary, investigating the aftereffects of the 1992 murder of his brother William, such an uncannily affecting experience. But though the statement is undoubtedly sincere, and feels, like much of the film dredged up from an intensely private and intensely personal place of pain, it is also not quite the whole truth: rather, that anger has metastisized into an almost soul-rending despair that causes Ford to question everything he was ever brought up to believe. At 24 years old, William was killed, in a stupid altercation over car repair, by a white guy who shot him in the chest, and as much as that event devastated the Ford family — many of whom are interviewed — it was the subsequent refusal to indict the killer, that was handed down by an all-white Grand Jury, that really ripped them open. A difficult film to watch [our review] but an even harder one to shake, here each subsequent revelation — sometimes just a line written in a diary, sometimes a memory unlocked — drops with the weight and explosive impact of psychological nitroglycerine. This is a portrait of a family carpet-bombed by grief, and is some of the rawest but also most movingly lyrical personal testimony of the year. — JK

7. “Faces Places”
An unassuming marvel of a movie, “Faces Places” [our review] is a testament to the power of unlikely collaborations. 89 year-old film legend Agnes Varda and the 34 year-old street artist JR criss-cross the French countryside together in a mobile photo booth, meeting new people, making large format images of them, and integrating those pictures into the local landscapes, for instance on dilapidated old miners’ houses or on the massive wall of shipping containers at a port. The result is a stirring piece of humanism dedicated to enlarging the spirits of small and unheralded places, giving residents a tangible link to their past, and the opportunity to see their everyday existence as larger than life and outside of time. Varda and JR are an irresistible duo, imbuing each interaction with good humor and gentle inquisitiveness whether they’re meeting goat farmers or waitresses. “Faces Places” reminds viewers that stories exist wherever we’re curious enough to search for them, that no special effect can surpass the expression on a human face, and that art is more than just aesthetics, it’s one of the most powerful tools we have for bringing people closer together. — Joe Blessing

6. “LA 92”
Even though America feels as though it’s slipping closer to outright chaos with each passing day of 2017, it has been a full quarter-century since the country’s last mass outbreak of public disorder. Of the documentaries released this year about the so-called Rodney King riots in Los Angeles in 1992—John Ridley’s superb “Let It Fall”—Dan Lindsay and TJ Martin’s “LA 92” [our review] is not just a tremendously impactful piece of nonfiction filmmaking, it is nearly essential to understanding the history of modern America. Woven together from contemporary news footage and radio dispatch audio without the aid of modern-day analysis, the documentary first shows how the legacy of racism and police brutality lit the match in the city’s minority community and then how the televised police assault on Rodney King dumped napalm on it. The result is a kind of found history in which the slow-then-fast build to looting, racial violence, and widescale arson sprawls uncontrollably across a city that, like municipalities from Detroit to Ferguson, should have seen it coming. Avoiding the fallback of armchair commentary, Lindsay and Martin provide no pat answers. Instead, they manage the tricky act of complicating matters—highlighting how what began as racial grievance by the black community against the white power structure turned into cross-racial sociopathy that left few heroes and many villains—without denying the basic truth of the oppression that resulted in days of destruction, 34 dead, and a country that still doesn’t understand what happened. — CB