I feel like I saw tons of documentaries in 2022 but there are definitely some that really stand out and will stay with me. So to kick things off with this blog, here is a round-up of my favourite documentaries of 2022!
In April 2019, journalist Lyra McKee was shot dead while reporting on rioting in the Creggan area of Derry in Northern Ireland. She was 29 years old. This documentary, directed by Lyra's friend, Alison Millar, is a moving tribute to Lyra's tenacity, bravery, and humour and it shows with painful clarity all that was lost when she was killed. My own PhD research was originally inspired in part by McKee's reporting on the suicide rates among Northern Ireland's young people and she seemed to be a symbol of the hopes of her generation. While this is a deeply personal film, infused with the love her partner, family, and friends had for her, it also challenges those in power, demanding they ensure that the Ceasefire Generation is granted the peace and prosperity that was promised. Without a shadow of a doubt, Lyra was the best documentary I saw in 2022. It will be screened on Channel 4 at some point this year and I urge everyone to keep an eye out for it and make sure to watch.
Descendant is a remarkable film. In 1860, decades after the international slave trade was outlawed in the United States, a shipload of people were trafficked from Africa to Alabama, where the domestic slave trade would continue until the Civil War five years later. The documentary charts the quest embarked upon by their descendants to find and raise the ship upon which they travelled. Through their folklore and family stories, the descendants have kept the experiences of their ancestors alive, and their desire to find the ship comes from a need to know a fuller history; as one descendant puts it, 'not just the shackles, but the cooking pot'.
Centring Black voices, the film is a light-touch meditation on what we mean by 'history' and it confronts directly the ambivalence many of the descendants feel about the fixation on the ship as a symbol. It also does a stellar job of weaving together two parallel and interlinked stories; that of the ship, the Clotilda,first, but also the experiences of the residents of Africatown, who live surrounded by health-endangering heavy industry, much of which is owned by the descendants of former slaveholders. This is an understated but powerful documentary that invites discussions on dark tourism and the meaning we attach to historical artefacts and sites, and how the echoes of history and injustice reverberate down the generations.
Jacoba Ballard was conceived through donor insemination at a clinic in Indianapolis. As an adult, she decided to take a DNA test with 23&Me, in hope of finding any biological siblings she may have had. Jacoba's mother had been informed by staff at the fertility clinic that each donor would only be used in a maximum of three inseminations, and so when Jacoba's results came back indicating that she had seven sibling matches she knew that something wasn't right. Along with her newfound siblings, she began to investigate, and eventually uncovered a horrifying truth; her biological father was actually the clinic doctor, Don Cline. Things did not end there, however, and she eventually uncovered almost a hundred children Dr Cline had conceived after secretly using his own sperm when inseminating his patients. Some of those patients had been told that the children they were carrying were their husbands' biological children.
Our Father features interviews not only with the now-adult donor-conceived children, but also with their mothers and even some retired clinic staff. This gives viewers a fuller picture of how the clinics operated and how fertility treatment was carried out in the 1970s and 1980s. The testimony of the mothers is particularly powerful, and the strength of their longing for a child is palpable, even through the screen and after so many years. So too is the depth of their betrayal; one mother reports that her first words upon finding out the truth were "I was raped fifteen times, and I didn't even know it".
This BBC mini-series broke my heart. It goes beyond the classic documentary format of talking heads and archive footage, including actors on screen to lip-sync the words of those who gave their testimony, some of whom subsequently died of AIDS. The recordings are from an incredible collection held at the British Library in London, so the voices are those of real people, which brings an immediacy to the documentary and makes it all the more haunting.
The first episode deals mainly with the initial confusion and ignorance that surrounded the outbreak of the first wave of HIV infections, while the second episode looks at the 'AIDS generation' and the final episode focuses on the emergence of 'miracle drugs' to treat the disease. This documentary series is a real education and its unusual approach is so impactful. All three episodes will be available on BBC iPlayer until June, and I really urge you to have a watch.
There were also three documentaries in particular that I wanted to see last year but somehow managed to miss. The first of these, The Janes, is an account of an underground movement providing access to abortion in the years before legalisation. Casa Susannatells the story of a haven for cross-dressing men and transgender women in upstate New York that flourished in the 1960s. Finally, To Kill a Tigercharts the fight of a farmer in Jharkhand, India to get justice for his thirteen-year-old daughter after she was gang raped.
I'll hopefully be able to catch up on these three at some point in 2023. Another interesting documentary from last year that I missed was All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, but I'll be putting that right next week when I go to see it at Bertha DocHouse in London.
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