Something to watch tonight: Friday 28 February
Five Oscar-nominated documentaries: Soundtrack to a Coup d'État, No Other Land, Black Box Diaries and Porcelain War (DocPlay) and Sugarcane (Disney+)
It’s been a hard week here at F&S Central and I don’t recommend watching all five of the 2025 Oscar-nominated features over three nights. It’s too rough. You need a Pixar-style palate cleanser between each one.
There’s no light entertainment alternative in the list of nominees this year. As someone commented online, there’s no 50 Feet from Stardom or Summer of Soul. The frothy biography of Christopher Reeve, Super/Man, must have come close but the documentary branch of the Academy have taken the temperature of the times and chosen the most important, the most urgent, from what’s on offer.
All five of these films are about good people staring down or staving off the reality of pure evil – there’s no other way to put it. The Ukrainian artists who have been forced to take up arms to defend their homeland against an imperialist dictator. A journalist urging Japan to reckon with their all-too relaxed attitude to sexual violence against women at huge cost to her own mental and physical health. Indigenous North Americans discovering the truth about the scale of the abuse heaped upon them for generations. Black American artists forced to reconcile their support for cultural outreach in the 60s with the colonial wickedness perpetrated in their name. And Palestinian West Bank residents trying in vain to save their communities as Israel demolishes their homes and their schools.
Like I said, evil.
At the end of World War II, the Belgian Congo became globally strategic when their deposits of Uranium became the key ingredient in the new atomic arms race. Fifteen years later, in 1960, a former beer salesman named Patrice Lumumba led the Congo to peaceful independence from Belgium but within five days of his government taking office, the Belgians (with the assistance of other colonial powers, global corporate interests and – most scandalously – the United Nations) provoked the mineral rich Katanga province of the Congo to declare its own independence prompting a civil war that is still defining the region today.
Soundtrack to a Coup d’État (Johan Grimonperez) tells an enraging story of colonialism and contextualises it with the United States’ own struggles with civil rights occurring at the same time. The music of jazz musicians like Nina Simone, Max Roach and Dizzy Gillespie was being used by Voice of America radio to attract audiences for their capitalist propaganda. They were often sent on tours to far off places by the State Department as cultural ambassadors. When Louis Armstrong realised his concerts in the Congo (while Lumumba was under house arrest) were just a smokescreen for CIA support of the rebellion, he threatened to renounce his US citizenship and become a citizen of Ghana.
I’m sure that Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy is aware of the Congolese history and will know all too well what can happen to the people who live on top of the precious materials that are desired by the so-called ‘great powers’.
No Other Land (co-written and directed by Yuval Abraham, Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal and Rachel Szor) has famously not found any commercial distribution despite universal acclaim and awards recognition, but that has to be understandable. After all, who would willingly pay money to watch the Israeli Defence Force demolish a school for no reason other than they want to make room for another illegal settlement.
I’m being sarcastic. Everyone should pay money for this. Everyone should go out of their way to see what crimes are being committed with our governments’ tacit approval. It is impossible not to be enraged by the sight of this brazen exercise of colonial power. How do the Israelis sleep at night after they have bulldozed yet more ancient dwellings in the name of ‘security’?
Israel is now bombing Damascus and other targets in newly liberated Syria, as well as continuing to occupy parts of Lebanon. The Syrians have barely had time to form a government before their neighbours have started attacking them. I read a quote from an Israeli politician earlier this week, defending the practice, saying that “Israel has no borders.” Read into that what you will.
Less globally impactful, perhaps – more domestic, more personal – but no less evil, is the perpetrator of the 2015 sex crime against journalist Shiori Itō. Noriyuki Yamaguchi was the Washington D.C. bureau chief for Tokyo Broadcasting System when he drugged Ito at a party, took her in a taxi to his hotel and raped her. While the film centres on Itō’s attempts to get justice, the shocking context that she reveals is about Japanese attitudes to sex crimes and the unwillingness of witnesses to come forward in order to protect their, and their employer’s, reputations.
Yamaguchi was well connected and protected at very high levels and Itō’s struggle takes a shocking toll.
As global superpowers start negotiating Ukraine’s future and dividing up the country’s bounty, it pays to remember those who have been doing the defending on the ground over the last three years, the overwhelming number being former civilians.
Slava and his partner Anya are artists. Slava makes delicate porcelain models – of dragons and other fanciful creatures – and Anya decorates them beautifully. Slava is also an expert rifle shot and trains new recruits as well as fighting Russians on the contested front line around Bakhmut (“only ten minutes drive”, says Anya, from their apartment in badly damaged Kharkiv).
Slava’s special forces squad are called “Saigon” and consist of an IT business analyst, a graphic designer and a building contractor among others. They fly drones to help target Russian tanks, fire mortars of their own, risk their own lives to help infantry retreat when the heat is too much. Which it often is.
Meanwhile, Anya decorates their drones to make them laugh.
Everyone should see this film so that we know who our lords and masters are selling out when they decide that resisting fascism is too hard or too expensive. Slava and Anya (and their painter friend Andrey who drove his family to the Polish border in a car with with no brakes so they could be safe) maintain that art, beauty and love are why they keep going. I was reminded of a quote from (I think) Winston Churchill when asked why spend money on the arts during wartime said something like, “Dear boy, without art, what are we fighting for?”
Sugarcane (Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie) is about the discovery and further investigation of decades of abuse in Catholic residential schools across North America and I reviewed it here a couple of months ago:
Astonishingly, many of these victims have kept their Catholic faith. Gilbert joins a group that travels to Rome for an audience with Pope Francis, an abused person’s hope that they may yet bask in the love of their abuser. He has a meeting with the current head of the order that ran St. Joseph’s who, while clearly moved and troubled by what had been done in his name, tries to tell us that ‘we had a bad 100 years or so there, but we are trying to do better’.
The conclusion I came to is that the Catholic Church has given up any right to a social license and should simply be dissolved and all its riches shared among its adherents – the poorest first.
Equally heartbreaking is that the burden of healing the multiple generations affected falls on their own community. “We don’t normally do this,” says the Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer as he opens up file after file of unsolved – often uninvestigated – heinous crimes so that the tribal investigators can start putting the pieces together, decades later.
I have no idea which of these five will get to celebrate at the Oscars on Monday afternoon NZT. What I do know is that each of them shows us something desperately sad about human society and human nature. Whichever one wins, it feels like we’ve all lost.
Where to watch Soundtrack to a Coup d'État
Aotearoa & Australia: Streaming on DocPlay
Canada, India : Not currently available online
USA: Streaming on KinoFilm
UK: Digital rental
Where to watch No Other Land
Aotearoa & Australia: Streaming on DocPlay
Canada, India, USA: Not currently available online
UK: Digital rental
Where to watch Black Box Diaries
Aotearoa & Australia: Streaming on DocPlay
Canada: Streaming on HollywoodSuite
India : Not currently available online
USA: Streaming on Paramount+ or Fubo
UK: Digital purchase
Where to watch Porcelain War
Aotearoa & Australia: Streaming on DocPlay
Canada, India, USA, UK : Not currently available online
Where to watch Sugarcane
Aotearoa, Australia, Canada, UK: Streaming on DocPlay
India: Streaming on Hotstar
USA: Streaming on Disney+ or Hulu