Most of THR’s roundtables are a round of back-patting, putting attention on films that either don’t need it any further or, here, aren’t being talked about in truly productive ways. An exception to that rule, then: the documentary roundtable, which brings to light certain titles and voices that go underrepresented, even when the Academy Awards honor titles in nominations and wins.
It’s nevertheless a mainstream-ish collection, at least when you consider that the only three filmmakers who overlap between this collection and our list of the year’s best — Liz Garbus (What Happened, Miss Simone?), Alex Gibney (Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief), and Kirby Dick (The Hunting Ground) — made titles that are easily available. (It’s worth noting that one was on HBO and the other is supported heavily by Netflix.) Michael Moore gets a platform for his nothing-sauce Where to Invade Next, but Joshua Oppenheimer and Frederick Wiseman are nowhere to be seen? It’s nevertheless possible that those two were invited and couldn’t or, especially in the case of the latter, decided not to appear, and it’s obvious that certain gateways need to be made so more people will give this a look. A discovery of something new, and the chance for a perpetually underexposed form of filmmaking to be discussed, is ultimately a positive.
Watch below: