2023: the year in documentary film

In 2022, a mini doc-world culture war erupted around Meg Smaker’s Jihad Rehab and perennial questions of representation and objectification. Accusations of appropriation and exploitation of the film’s former Guantánamo inmates were countered by cries of ‘cancel culture’, while the film’s selection at Sundance fuelled criticisms of the industry’s failures of diversity and inclusion from those who felt such showcases were not offered equally.

If there was a bright point in documentary this year, it was the sense of the industry stepping into this debate and making some redress. Jennifer Tiexiera and Camilla Hall’s Subject, a doc about docs and their ethical obligations to the people they frame, which had a timely premiere shortly after Jihad Rehab in 2022, gained more traction this year with releases in countries including the UK, though in its native US the business was keener to talk about it than distribute it.

Most encouraging were the films that walked the walk for diversity and inclusion – and even strutted and danced. Ella Glendining’s first-person doc about bodily difference Is There Anybody out There? opened my eyes to prejudice and double standards in our construction of the world. Jeanie Finlay’s Your Fat Friend (out in the UK in February) expressed and inspired awe for its blogger hero Aubrey Gordon’s tireless fightback against our society’s body-shaming ignorance and punishment. D. Smith’s Kokomo City and Agniia Galdonova’s Queendom showed us trans expression and repression US- and Russian-style, respectively, with collaborative intimacy and empathy. Most formally intriguing, Alison O’Daniel’s The Tuba Thieves, an experimental docudrama wending among deaf and hard-of-hearing Los Angeleno musicians, found a medley of creative audiovisual ways to challenge and expand understanding of deaf culture.

Nicolas Philibert landed us amid a mix of psychiatric patients and carers on a floating Parisian refuge in the vérité portrait On the Adamant, which won the Berlinale Golden Bear. It joined several studies of health and care in a rich year: Claire Simon’s Our Body, filmed in a Parisian gynaecology ward; Luke Lorentzen’s A Still Small Voice, following a trainee New York hospital chaplain in the early months of Covid; Maite Alberdi’s The Eternal Memory, in which life partnership arrives at end-of-life care. Anna Hints’s Smoke Sauna Sisterhood found restorative nurture in Estonian communal heritage.

A plethora of grim sociopolitical stories emerged from around the world – 20 Days in Mariupol, from Ukraine; Bobi Wine: The People’s President, on repression in Uganda; Total Trust, on China’s surveillance state; Beyond Utopia, on escaping North Korea; et al. To set against that were some cultural gems: Errol Morris dived into John le Carré’s looking-glass fiction-spinning in The Pigeon Tunnel; Lizzie Gottlieb probed Robert Caro’s nonfictional duty of care with his editor, her father Robert, in Turn Every Page. Wim Wenders sculpted Anselm Kiefer’s towering take on art and German history in the 3D Anselm; Paul Sng revived late Tyneside photographer Tish Murtha’s lost documentary art in Tish. Lea Glob’s dedicated documentation of her peripatetic friend and budding artist Apolonia Sokol over 13 years became the marvellous, novelistic Apolonia, Apolonia. And Fred Wiseman hung out in a Michelin three-starred restaurant in Menu-Plaisirs: Les Troisgros.

The main documentary draw in 2023, though, was easy to identify: fame. Eponymous portraits of Michael J Fox, Little Richard, Brooke Shields, Judy Blume and more personalities set the tone at Sundance in January and seemed to be the only titles the retrenching corporate streamers were buying. Across the year, films and series on Harry and Meghan, David Beckham, 1980s supermodels and Taylor Swift sucked up further oxygen. Access and insight were typically on a need-to-­publicise basis, with celebrities usually co-producing their nonfiction image-making. If there’s a mood for inclusion in documentary, the big names want in. Which is fine, of course, but we need a way to provide the surprise films we also love. This year saw companies behind some of last year’s best award titles – HBO (All That Breathes), CNN (Navalny) – pull back their investment.

For those further down the documentary pyramid, the picture looked grim. In the UK in June a new cooperative Documentary Film Council launched to organise and advocate for the sector. Behind the camera, as the council wrote in an open letter to the screen sector, production funding for independent docs is chronically low, and development, distribution and exhibition support worse. “Sustaining careers in these conditions is all but impossible aside for a relatively privileged few, which has direct implications for filmmaker wellbeing and the docs sector’s devastating lack of diversity.” As if to underscore the point, the council itself struggled to find funding beyond seed money and its new members’ fees, with broadcasters and streamers so far contributing only warm words.

In another setback, Jess Search, consecutive founder of the Shooting People collective, the BritDoc festival and the Doc Society, and producer and cheerleader extraordinaire for the UK documentary sector, died in July, aged just 54. Her work and energy will be missed, but her legacy and inspiration will endure.