Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home.
Premiering August 17 on Hulu after a wildly successful festival run, Bing Liu's Minding the Gap began as a skateboarding video that he shot among his friends in his hometown of Rockford, Illinois. But over 12 years, the story deepens and darkens from a coming-of-age tale to a full-on reckoning with the daunting transition to adulthood. All three characters in the film, including Bing himself, reveal their troubled upbringings and their shaky struggles to find their grownup selves. Minding the Gap screened as part of IDA's work-in-progress series, DocuClub.
Premiering August 15 on A&E, the docuseries Raising Tourette's, produced by Half Yard Productions, follows five families with children ranging in ages from 11 to 17. Like all adolescents, each child has aspirations, friends, rivals and homework—but they also all have Tourette's Syndrome. While growing up is often challenging and unpredictable, these kids are resilient and thriving despite navigating an often-misunderstood disorder. From new schools and first dates to driving lessons and family vacations, the series showcases the often turbulent ups and downs these unique families face.
Coming August 14 on DVD and BluRay through Kino Lorber, Sophie Fiennes' Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami takes you on an electrifying journey through the public and private worlds of pop culture mega-icon Grace Jones, contrasting her dazzling performances with intimate personal footage, all the while brimming with Jones’ bold aesthetic.
Premiering August 13 on Mubi, Chris Kelly's A Cambodian Spring charts the chaotic and violent wave of change shaping modern-day Cambodia, and follows three activists over six years as they speak out against the injustices taking place all around them in the name of progress, development and democracy.
Streaming on Film Struck/The Criterion Channel is Chronicle of a Summer, the groundbreaking cinema vérité collaboration between filmmaker-anthropologist Jean Rouch and sociologist Edgar Morin. Through interviews with a selection of Parisians in the summer of 1960, the filmmakers begin with the provocative and eternal question “Are you happy?” and expand to political issues, including the ongoing Algerian War. The resulting film reveals the hopes and dreams of a wide array of people, from artists to factory workers, from an Italian émigré to an African student.