Intercepted. Image credit: Christopher Nunn. Courtesy of Grasshopper Films
Intercepted
While recent Ukrainian documentarians predominantly focus on Ukrainian resistance, Oksana Karpovych’s Intercepted takes the opposite approach. Her film is based on intercepted conversations of Russian soldiers who call home to share stories of war crimes and their doubts about the rationale for Russia’s invasion. The visuals consist exclusively of static long shots of Ukraine, with its tranquil nature and alienated civilians, on which this cacophony of voices has left a deep wound.
Beneath the seemingly simple idea of the film lies a complex structure, wherein each element has its own internal narrative. The film exposes the core repetitive patterns of Russian propaganda and separately depicts the geographical trajectory of Ukraine’s deoccupied territories. The acousmatic approach stimulates the imagination and enlivens the desolate footage with a haunting presence. Karpovych places the victim and the aggressor in a shared audiovisual dimension in which the latter’s theses are challenged by the former. Intercepted manages to cinematically convey a strong cause-and-effect relationship that produces a genuinely surreal effect—as absurd as the rhetoric of the aggressor.
The Last Republican
After the 2024 U.S. presidential election, the entertaining banter between self-described “far-left comedy-director” Steve Pink (Hot Tub Time Machine) and the titular Adam Kinzinger may work for those in want of a palliative. Pink’s The Last Republican covers Kinzinger’s last term, when he chose to join the January 6 Committee investigating the riots on Capitol Hill. One long sit-down interview anchors the film, delving into Kinzinger’s early political influences and some maneuvering of the January 6 hearings. An on-screen countdown marks the time Kinzinger has left in office, gesturing at the former congressman’s desire to take a political stand.
Pink’s doc is the first feature of the new Media Courthouse Documentary Collective (the Hands on a Hardbody team of Kevin Morris, Robb Bindler, Chapin Wilson, plus Pink, Jason Kohn [Nothing Lasts Forever], and former Netflix exec Sarafina DiFelice). In the hands of this team, The Last Republican is stylish, deploying handy split screens of news coverage between talking-head explanations from Kinzinger and other staff. But its protagonist is just as bewildered at the perceived political changes he faced in 2022 as many of us face in 2024, and Pink’s direction whizzes his protagonist along, replicating the flaws of our media ecosystem by being more interested in the mechanics of media narratives than issuing political analysis or illuminating a path forward.
Night Is Not Eternal
Nanfu Wang has built a career genuinely connecting with characters, whose life circumstances are often far from her own. Striking examples include Hooligan Sparrow (2016), starring sex worker activist Ye Haiyan, and I Am Another You (2017), which saw the director traveling with a young drifter named Dylan. With Night Is Not Eternal, Wang draws a different conclusion. She spends seven years following Rosa Maria Paya, the daughter of Nobel Peace Prize–nominated activist Oswaldo Paya, as she continues her late father’s fight for freedom in Cuba. As Rosa develops into a celebrity force, eventually gaining a place on the international stage, Wang sees only the overwhelming parallels between her own experiences in China and as an exile abroad. That is, until a POV-upending moment on a political platform forces the filmmaker to bravely reassess both her own assumptions and the passionate idealist she thought she knew so well.
Nocturnes
Near the India/Bhutan border, ecologist Mansi and her Indigenous Bugun collaborator Bicki monitor Himalayan moth populations. They set up backlit, grid-marked sheets to attract the creatures and count, measure, and observe them. Anirban Dutta and Anupama Srinivasan’s Nocturnes studies the moths, these humans, and their wider ecosystem. The film constructs a rhythm of alternation between two modes. At night it adopts a micro view, getting pleasingly detailed close-ups of the moths flittering about. During the day it pulls back, framing its two leads against expansive mountain vistas. The moths seem big, and the humans seem small.
The cinematography also inverts the expected color palettes; the backlighting that draws the moths under the camera makes the blues and blacks of the darkness feel hot, while the frequently overcast skies and muted grading make the light seem cool. The film’s most impressive technical feat, though, is its sound work. It’s a veritable symphony of susurrations and pointed extended silences. The silences are so pleasurable, in fact, that the film’s more dialogue-laden sequences often feel unnecessary. Such scenes make explicit the concerns about what the moth studies reveal about climate change, but the subtext present was already more than sufficient. Nocturnes excels at watching and listening but falters when talking.
This piece was first published in Documentary’s Winter 2024/2025 issue.