Five of Screen’s expert critics select their favourite documentaries from 2021.
Fionnuala Halligan
Screen’s chief film critic and reviews editor. Read her top ten films of the year here.
Summer Of Soul (… Or, When The Revolution Could Not Be Televised) / The Velvet Underground / The Beatles: Get Back
Wait years for a decent music documentary, then, like buses, they all arrive at once. Ahmir ‘Questlove’ Thompson’s documentary Summer Of Soul premiered at Sundance, Todd Haynes’ The Velvet Underground was at Cannes, and The Beatles: Get Back was rumoured for every festival but became a three-part TV series directed by Peter Jackson after he originally conceived it as a film. All arrived mere months after Spike Lee treated us to David Byrne’s American Utopia. Rock on, 2021 — you’ve been disappointing in so many other ways, but your musical generosity knows no bounds.
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The Rescue
Dirs. Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, Jimmy Chin
The titular rescue in 2018 of the Thai schoolboys trapped in a flooded cave was remarkable, and the filmmakers build it up into a story of everyday heroism of a miraculous kind. It is no surprise Ron Howard will adapt it, but, really, nothing can beat the truth — and it has a happy ending. Something 2021 has been short of.
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Tim Grierson - senior US critic
Screen’s senior US critic, based in Los Angeles, has written for the publication since 2005. Read his top ten films of the year here.
Summer Of Soul
Dir. Ahmir ‘Questlove’ Thompson
Both a celebration and a cultural history, this look at the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival — nicknamed the Black Woodstock — doesn’t just unearth some never-before-seen performances from music titans including Stevie Wonder and Nina Simone, but also analyses the impact of these shows on the Black community during the civil rights movement. This is a concert film that’s as thoughtful as it is emotional, combining first-person testimonials with electrifying sets.
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All Light, Everywhere
Dir. Theo Anthony
This fascinating examination of the very concept of seeing — and our belief that what we perceive is “the truth” — grapples with racial bias, police corruption and our inability to overcome our personal blind spots. As with his previous documentary, Rat Film, director Anthony experiments with the form while challenging the viewer to question how we take in the world around us.
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Faya Dayi
Dir. Jessica Beshir
The year’s most gorgeously photographed film uses Ethiopia’s lucrative khat crop as the inspiration for a tapestry of individual portraits. The images in Beshir’s film are a hazy dream mitigated by tales of despair and resilience.
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Allan Hunter
Hunter has worked for Screen since 1990. He is based in Edinburgh and is co-director of Glasgow Film Festival. Read his top ten films of the year here.
Flee
Dir. Jonas Poher Rasmussen
The story of the trauma suffered by an Afghan man forced to flee his homeland in the 1990s is deeply moving in its own right. But it is the imaginative approach, the inspired use of animation and the sensitivity of director Rasmussen that makes Flee so memorable. An audacious feat of storytelling that impresses on both a technical and an emotional level.
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Mr Bachmann And His Class
Dir. Maria Speth
An inspirational portrait of a school teacher that uses its three-hour-plus running time to immerse us in the classroom and show the difference one individual can make. A warm hug of a film in which the running time feels fully justified.
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Returning To Reims
Dir. Jean-Gabriel Périot
One family history vividly evokes the shifting currents in working-class French life over the past 70 years. The mosaic of archive footage and memory is densely packed and deeply felt in a film that laments the failures of the past but cheers the resurgence of people power.
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Wendy Ide
Ide joined Screen in 2015 as a UK-based critic, and also writes for The Observer and Sight & Sound. Read her top ten films of the year here.
The Velvet Underground
Dir. Todd Haynes
Haynes’ masterful music documentary combines not just a history of one of the most influential bands of the 20th century, but also the social, political and artistic amniotic fluid that birthed them. Highlights include John Cale’s mellifluous tones and Moe Tucker’s scathing dismissal of flower power.
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Flee
Dir. Jonas Poher Rasmussen
On the brink of marriage, Amin, an Afghan refugee who has made a life in Denmark, shares the story of his past in this handsomely animated documentary.
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Summer Of Soul
Dir. Ahmir ‘Questlove’ Thompson
A wealth of hitherto neglected footage of the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival is deftly assembled into a celebration of Black talent, in this exhilarating debut from Questlove.
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Jonathan Romney
A longtime contributor to Screen, Romney also writes for Film Comment, Sight & Sound and The Observer, and teaches at the UK’s National Film and Television School. Read his top ten films of the year here.
The Velvet Underground
Dir. Todd Haynes
Whether or not it was the definitive Velvet Underground documentary that hardcore fans wanted, this vivid, erudite piece brought the band’s achievement alive in the context of New York’s 1960s crucible of experimentation — musical, painterly, artistic and sexual. Contributions from band members John Cale and Moe Tucker and Factory insiders including Mary Woronov bring the joys of Manhattan art radicalism into celebratory focus. Split-screen effects haven’t been as snazzily deployed since their 1960s prime.
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Babi Yar. Context
Dir. Sergei Loznitsa
Using archive footage from multiple sources, this is a sobering reconstruction of one of the great atrocities of the Second World War — and, the film argues, the real starting point for the Holocaust.
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Mr Bachmann And His Class
Dir. Maria Speth
Three-and-a-half hours with a laid-back veteran schoolteacher and his students, but not a moment is wasted in this German film; a rousing, tender advert for enlightened education.
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