The proliferation of documentaries on streaming services makes it difficult to choose what to watch. Each month, we select three nonfiction films — classics, overlooked recent docs and more — that will reward your time.
‘Sweetgrass’ (2010)
Stream it on Mubi. Rent it on Amazon.
The cowboys in “Sweetgrass” have access to walkie-talkies, radio and phone, but for the most part, watching this documentary from Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor is as close as you can get to unplugging from the 21st century during a contemporary movie. Shot from 2001 to 2003, “Sweetgrass” follows a group of men as they prepare sheep and then guide them over a 150-mile summer journey through a mountainous region of Montana. The film eschews contextual information in favor of simply watching events unfold, but the closing title cards explain that ranchers and hired hands have shepherded animals across this land since the late 1800s. The filmmakers (who don’t credit themselves as “directors” here) aim to capture a vanishing way of life.
At Harvard, Castaing-Taylor — who would go on to make “Leviathan” (2013) and “De Humani Corporis Fabrica” (2023) with Véréna Paravel — directs the Sensory Ethnography Lab, which brings together artists and writers from different backgrounds with the hope that their collaborations will reinvent the discipline of ethnography. But humans are only part of the story in “Sweetgrass,” which makes at least equal stars of the sheep. Stream it somewhere with good sound so that you can attune yourself to their ceaseless bleats, and even more so, to the whoosh of the pervasive wind. Shot on digital video before the high-definition variety became standard, “Sweetgrass” makes a virtue of the old format’s ruggedness, and there’s an uncommon poetry to the way it captures morning sunlight and mist.
Not that the journey is peaceful, exactly. A shot of the animals running down a town street (past a Radio Shack) is one of the last signs of civilization as the lambs head toward the wilderness. The landscape, which the sheep aren’t always inclined to traverse, isn’t the only challenge. Drama arrives when it becomes clear that a predator — a wolverine? A bear? — is out there, too, eager for a meal. The sheep in some ways seem more suited to the trudge. The men live like real-life Anthony Mann characters, pitching their tents with branches. Late in the film, one is shown on a mountaintop phone call with his mother — and almost crying. “I’m running my guts out,” he says. “My dog’s so sore-footed he can’t walk. My knee’s all screwed up.” How many movie cowboys would admit that?
‘Shirkers’ (2018)
In 1992, on summer break from living in Britain, the Singapore-born filmmaker Sandi Tan and her friends shot a road movie that she wrote and acted in, starring as a 16-year-old killer named “S.” The film was called “Shirkers,” and in this documentary of the same title, Tan describes it as “a time capsule of a Singapore that was both real and imaginary.” It was a rare independent film shot in a country so censorious that Tan had to resort to complicated workarounds to satisfy her viewing habits.
But while we see plenty of footage from that “Shirkers” (which looks amazing), it was never completed. The strange story of what happened to it — and how Tan and her friends Jasmine and Sophie look back on it — forms the spine of this inventive and disarming memoir, which is simultaneously a reminiscence of a rebellious youth, a chronicle of a seat-of-the-pants D.I.Y. film production and a mystery.
The mystery mainly concerns the director of the original “Shirkers,” Georges Cardona, whom Tan and her friends first encountered when he was teaching them filmmaking at an arts center. Cardona was “a man of unplaceable age and origin,” Tan says. Multiple interviewees testify to his charisma. Whether he knew what he was doing as a filmmaker, and whether he was committed to the project, is a different matter, and it’s probably best to leave the twists of this documentary unspoiled.
But the outcome left Tan “doing things backwards,” as she puts it: She shot her debut movie, then became a film critic (for The Straits Times in Singapore), then went to film school in the United States, in that order. (She is also — disclosure — married to the critic John Powers, with whom I’m on friendly terms.) For most of the story, she is haunted by what “Shirkers” might have been; she recalls watching “Rushmore” (1998) and “Ghost World” (2001) and seeing affinities with the film she never got to finish. But as much as it’s heartbreaking not to be able to know how the original “Shirkers” might have contributed to that lineage, the tale in this “Shirkers” is pretty crazy too.
‘Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat’ (2024)
Stream it on Kino Film Collection. Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Fandango at Home and Google Play.
Exploring the cultural and political currents of the 1950s and early ’60s without ever stating an overt thesis, the recent Oscar nominee “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat” subtly draws a line that connects American jazz, Cold War skulduggery and the revolutionary fervor in Africa. Built entirely from archival sources — news clips; performance excerpts; quotations detailed and even footnoted onscreen — this documentary, directed by Johan Grimonprez, is filled with unlikely parallels, while the music, from Nina Simone, Miriam Makeba, Duke Ellington and many others, gives it a catchy, driving beat.
The film suggests that art is a function of politics and that politics is often a function of theater. The movie shows Khrushchev pounding his fists at the United Nations as if he were improvising a percussive riff. It recalls the time Dizzy Gillespie ran something like a campaign for president (“pledging to change the White House into the Blues House,” per the text in the film). And according to the movie, the C.I.A. used a Louis Armstrong concert in Africa as a cover for its own operations. The film builds to the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the independent Congo’s first prime minister, in January 1961.
Can sights and sounds be trusted? At one point, Grimonprez cuts from an interview in which René Magritte explains his famous assertion “ceci n’est pas une pipe” (“this is not a pipe”) to footage of a pipe-smoking Allen Dulles, then the head of the C.I.A., projecting questionable seriousness. “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat” is densely packed and, in some respects, more intuitive than rhetorical in its approach. But it offers a tremendous amount to tune into.
