By Peter Keough

It seems every year the quality of feature films, especially those from mainstream studios, is getting worse, while that of documentaries is getting better. I already included three nonfiction films on my 10 best list (Every Little Thing, Porcelain War, and Queendom), but here are 10 more plus another six that are well worth your time.

Citizen Sleuth

Emily Nestor, the Gen Z investigator in Chris Kasick’s twisty film, had been inspired to become an amateur detective by Clarice Starling in Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs. Like the Jodie Foster character, she came from a poor West Virginia background but was determined to make a difference. Instead of attending Quantico, though, Nestor ventured into true crime podcasting with a program called “Mile Marker 181,” which was named after the highway post where a young local woman met with a bizarre — and according to Nestor, unsolved — demise. Initial success, including a shout-out from Nancy Grace, is followed by complications. Cracks develop in Nestor’s case and a need for income reduces her to hawking serial killer T-shirts, until she has to ask herself whether she is really a latter-day Starling seeking truth and justice or another hack profiting on misery.

Grasshopper Republic

Daniel McCabe’s dreamlike but itchily observational account of a biennial insect harvest in Uganda is an arresting and creepy parable of capitalism. The dense, winged masses of bugs — eerily lit like a floating aurora borealis — seem apocalyptic. But they are also quite lucrative to the entrepreneurs who sell them as delicacies. Not so much for the workers, though, who labor through downpours and mudslides and assaults from the nasty Nairobi flies as they set up the generators, lights, corrugated steel slides, and rusty drums that are the Rube Goldberg-device-like method of trapping their prey. Perhaps the bugs are indeed signs of the Apocalypse, and this plague-like harvest is a microcosm of a system that exploits the poor and despoils the environment in order to profit the few at the expense of us all.

Happy Campers

The residents of Inlet View, Virginia, the subjects of Amy Nicholson’s daft and endearing documentary, were quite willing to accept the locale’s sub-trailer-park standards (as one homeowner good-humoredly describes it, it is “the armpit of America”). After all, it also came with an ocean view, a low cost, and a party-hearty, mutually supportive community. It was a multigenerational working-class melting pot, where everybody watched out for everybody else, and, surprisingly in this era of partisan polarization, you don’t hear a single nasty political remark. But then came the developers who bought up lots, demolished homes, and sold it all off to wealthy investors. Nicholson picks up the story during the last summer for the folks at Inlet View, as they enjoy their final barbecues, beer bashes, and ribald repartee and then pack up the La-Z-Boys and other valuables and set the rest ablaze in defiant but melancholy bonfires. They reminisce about the friends that will be scattered across the country, who seek a similar place to live, though such isolated low-rent Edens may now be only a memory.

No Other Land

It’s hard to believe, but the hardship, trauma, and injustice witnessed in this harrowing account — a collective Palestinian-Israeli effort by Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, and Rachel Szor — all happened before the ongoing disaster of the Gaza War. Adra is one of several activists struggling to hold onto Masafer Yatta, one of the few settlements Palestinians still possess. Now the IDF has declared their property to be the site of a military base and, along with armed settlers, repeatedly raids the village, terrorizing inhabitants and razing their homes and other buildings. Drawing on first person and archival footage, the film suspensefully relates how Adra, his father, and the other villagers confront those trying to remove them from their land. It is a litany of dread, conflict and perseverance, leavened with occasional humor. But the conclusion is never in doubt. As the epilogue shows, the film ends just as the invasion of Gaza begins.

Recovery City

Local filmmaker Lisa Olivieri spent several years in Worcester following the progress of women recovering from addiction to drugs and alcohol. The result is this heartrending and uplifting account which intimately shares the subjects’ lives and engages you in their hardships, setbacks, and triumphs. Most had come from broken homes, with a history of abuse, domestic violence, and overdoses. Defying the odds, they have progressed in their recovery and have become valued contributors to their community. One in particular, Six (formerly Christine), is a model of rehabilitation, prevailing despite a system that seems to have been designed to make people like her fail. She is self-supporting and active in programs that assist others, but she has still been frustrated in her efforts to recover what is most precious to her — her children. The stigma of addiction — and her gender — seem impossible obstacles for the powers that be to overlook. Nonetheless, she perseveres. Others are not as lucky — the film ends with an epilogue dedicated to two who did not survive.

 

Secret Mall Apartment

Art students often serve as housing pioneers, breaking new ground for real estate developers. In Jeremy Workman’s wry and trenchant shaggy dog story a group of them took over an abandoned factory in the old, derelict mill section of Providence. Their efforts stirred the interest of investors who bought up the area, evicted the residents, razed the neighborhood, and built new properties for the wealthy. The usurped students shrugged this off, rehabilitated another benighted urban parcel, and once again the money men moved in, this time replacing their community with the vast Providence Mall.

Understandably, this consumerist colossus became for the artists a symbol of the system that had evicted them from their hard-won former dwelling places. So in 2003, after discovering a forgotten, unused niche in the depths of the labyrinthine mall structure, they transformed it into a covert living and working space. Here they were able to focus on projects that would benefit the community at large, including artwork for a children’s hospital and a memorial for the 10th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing. But the secret apartment also symbolized a Borgesian kind of subversiveness, a meta-mirror of the culture that the artists inhabited and subverted, summed up in the film’s delightfully dissonant coda.

Separated

Errol Morris was disappointed that MSNBC waited until after the November 5 election to broadcast this excoriating exposé of the Trump administration’s 2017 policy of separating refugee children from their parents. It’s doubtful that a screening would have made a difference in the final result, but now it can serve as a warning of what horrors may soon come. Among the villains are the inevitable Stephen Miller, who devised this policy of intentional cruelty, and who is now Trump’s proposed “Homeland Security Advisor,” and Thomas Homan, a “nasty” figure (Trump’s word) who was back then acting director of ICE and was chosen last month by the President-elect to serve as the new administration’s “border czar.” More inspiring is Commander Jonathan White, the former deputy director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, who stood by his oath, ideals, and decency to combat the worst of the abuses. Don’t expect to see many like him in the years to come.

S/He Is Still Her/e: The Official Genesis P-Orridge Documentary 

The life and art of the title subject of David Charles Rodrigues’s provocative and ingenious film is embodied in the opening scene: the ailing P-Orridge h/erself in 2019 posing for a portrait, baring h/er torso with its piercings, augmentations, and tattoos, and telling h/er story.

S/he was born Neil Andrew Megson in 1950 in Manchester, England, into a middle-class home, a sickly child with esoteric interests. In an out-of-body vision s/he saw cryptic symbols and the word “Cosmosis” and took from this experience the need to find h/er own “Cosmosis,” h/er soulmate.

Meanwhile, in 1969, s/he founded the transgressive art collective COUM Transmissions, which was succeeded in 1976 by Throbbing Gristle, whose cacophonous, incantatory sound would become “Industrial Music,” a genre taken up by Nine Inch Nails, Rammstein, and Marilyn Manson. Next up was Psychic TV, with whom s/he performed for most of the rest of h/er life.

When P-Orridge finally found h/er “Cosmosis,” Jacqueline Breyer, aka Lady Jaye, they collaborated on art and music projects and, like characters in a David Cronenberg film, underwent cosmetic surgery to resemble one another. They were “cutting up their identity to form a third being,” a new entity dubbed “Breyer P-Orridge,” in what they called the Pandrogyne Project. But Lady Jaye would die suddenly in 2007 at 38, leaving P-Orridge devastated.

“The body is like a cheap suitcase,” s/he says early in the film. P-Orridge shuffled off that luggage in 2020 at 70.

Smoke Sauna Sisterhood 

The cabin in the woods in Estonian filmmaker Anna Hints’s lyrical and affecting idyll is a refuge for the women of the title from the exigencies of the everyday, the trauma of the past, and the toll of history. In all seasons it is a place of pastoral beauty where the sisterhood practices “savvusanna kombõ,” a sauna ritual in which they bare their bodies and souls to the healing steam, smoke, and mutual support.

There is a lot of pain to sort through. At first there are good-humored recollections of parents and peers, anecdotes greeted by knowing laughter and commiseration. Then come the tales of violence, abuse, and injustice. Throughout, the focus is not on the speaker, but on the listeners — silent, nonjudgmental, empathetic.

Their confessional moments are punctuated by rhapsodic images of smoke, steam, fire, water, trees, the sky, and the forest. Backed by an uncanny soundtrack, the film is a reminder of the suffering women bear everywhere and a celebration of the power of healing and the resilience of the human spirit.

Space Cowboy

Joe Jennings, skydiver, cinematographer extraordinaire, and subject of Marah Strauch and Bryce Leavitt’s visually stunning and emotionally complex film, was, along with his skysurfing partner Rob Harris, on top of the world in the ’90s. They were winning extreme games competitions and shooting mind-boggling movie and TV commercial stunts. Then a tragic mishap sent Jennings into a crippling depression. Until he discovered a new outlet for his talents: dropping large objects from airplanes — a furnace, bicycles and riders, a living room set complete with an entertainment unit and a person lounging on a sofa — and filming their descent. His latest exploit seen in the film involves an automobile and four passengers in a kind of variation on the old “Let Hertz put you in the driver’s seat” ad. “I like to bring normal things we do into the air,” he says. “It’s totally ephemeral but that’s what makes it art.”

Here are a half dozen more documentaries that might well have been included among my top 10:

Blink

Children of Peace

Flipside

A New Kind of Wilderness

Rising up at Night

Sugarcane

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Peter Keough writes about film and other topics and has contributed to numerous publications. He had been the film editor of the Boston Phoenix from 1989 to its demise in 2013 and has edited three books on film, most recently For Kids of All Ages: The National Society of Film Critics on Children’s Movies (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).