But if you think I’m a nigger, it means you need it, and you got to find out why.

“The question you got to ask yourself, the white population of this country’s got to ask itself is: Why it was necessary to have a nigger in the first place?” Baldwin asks in one chilling bit of footage. It’s a remarkable tribute to a very remarkable subject, and an urgent reminder that Baldwin’s radical thinking about race in America is as relevant today as it was in his lifetime-and, barring massive structural change and deep national self-reflection, will remain so into the future. “How do I make sure that everybody goes back to his writing?” His film ought to do just that.

“The idea was, how do I come up with the ultimate Baldwin?” the director told Vogue’s Julia Felsenthal in 2016. Peck brings his subject back to life in archival footage and in readings of his work and correspondence by the actor Samuel L. The story of the disappearance and recovery of that footage provides a whodunit tension to the film, while the footage itself-super-saturated in color, influenced by the offbeat indie films of the late ’80s and early ’90s-offers evidence of the originality behind the whole venture. The film doesn’t devolve into the kind of icky tale you might suspect, however, instead becoming a complicated and entertaining meditation on originality, punctuated with footage from the film that the teenagers made. On a more basic level, the documentary tells the story of a teenage Sandi and her two friends, who set out to make “Singapore’s first indie film” in the early ’90s with an American film teacher, Georges, who would prove himself to be creepy for reasons beyond his eagerness to devote his free time to hanging around with a bunch of precocious and self-serious kids. Sandi Tan’s Shirkers is one of those films that defies categorization: a coming-of-age story, a mystery, possibly the pieced-together remnants of a lost work of art. And as for this list-its only qualifier is that these are the critically acclaimed, historically important, and pivotal films that a person who cares about film (and, in doing so, often cares about humanity in general) should really get to know. Once viewed as something stiff and obligatory, documentary film has, in recent years, risen to the top of the heap-thanks in no small part to some of the earth-shaking, needle-pushing, and ultimately world-changing films that are listed here, which find their focus in war, love, sex, death, art, and everything in between. What makes a documentary “important”? What makes it worth referencing, or remembering, or even watching in the first place? Why, at a moment when world events are often stranger than fiction, would we veer from the vaunted, glorious escapism of big feature films ( No Time to Die, anyone?) and opt for something small and rooted in the real, instead?ĭocumentaries can be a hard sell, but it’s one that’s getting easier all the time.

Movie collector 17.2