Year in Review: The 10 Best Documentaries of 2020

It starts with a crime. The Czech artist Barbora Kysilkova is exhibiting her work in an Oslo gallery when two paintings are stolen. She later confronts one of the thieves, Karl Bertil-Nordland, who says he stole them “because they were beautiful.” Naturally, Kysilkova asks if she can paint him, and the two soon find themselves unexpectedly enmeshed in each other’s lives. A look at the art of healing and the healing power of art, Benjamin Ree’s documentary on a most curious friendship ends up delving into the past of both subjects, and excavating lifetimes of pain, trauma, good and bad decisions. You can be successfully creative or you can end taking a much more crooked path, the film suggests — but either way, your life is worthy or compassion and consideration.

Some of them have been doing this well into the 80s; other have logged in a little less then 10 years. But all of these Italian men — and their dogs; they’re always with their trusted canine friends — have dedicated their lives to going deep into the woods, in search of the rarest of rare white Alba truffles. Once they’ve found their prizes, they sell these rare delicacies to high-bidding food brokers and restaurateurs. (Warning: Don’t see it on an empty stomach.) “Delightful” is an overused word, but it’s the best way to sum up Gregory Kershaw and Michael Dweck’s look at the sometimes competitive, sometimes contentious, always cantankerous world of hunters and gatherers. The fact that we saw it at a film festival — it received a brief qualifying run in early December, and will get a wider release in the spring of 2021 — only sweetened the deal: Where better to see something that doubles as a look at a symbiotic ecosphere regarding those who dig for hidden treasures, those that distribute and profit from such findings, and those that critique and consume them?

Here, piggy, piggy! Russian filmmaker Victor Kossakovsky, he of the speed-metal soundtracked water documentary Aquarela (2019), trains his cameras on a massive porker named Gunda, who lives on a farm in Norway. She goes about her business of tending to her piglets and wallowing around the mud. Occasionally, she and her brood commune with the other animals, notable a one-legged chicken who’s gives you the most memorable portrait of resourceful screen poultry this side of Werner Herzog’s Stroszek. Sow far, sow good (sorry) — and then what appears to be an unassuming, black-and-white nature doc of sorts subtly switches gears, and this seemingly free-form portrait reveals itself to be something far more poetic and moving. The last five minutes have lingered with us in ways we still can’t begin to fathom.

Of course an entry from our greatest living documentarian, still turning out marathon-length masterpieces at a consistent rate, would be present and accounted for here. “I don’t think we do a good enough job of telling that story [of] what we actually do in the city … of tying it all together,” says Boston’s mayor Marty Walsh. So Wiseman rectifies this connect-the-dots oversight over a four-and-a-half hour chronicle that covers roughly a year in the bureaucratic life of a major metropolis’ headquarters. Like virtually all of the 90 year-old filmmaker’s work, it’s a long, hard look at the inner life of an institution, as well as the city it serves: the war veterans, the well-off, the socially disenfranchised, the bluebloods, the blue-collar workers, the townies, the Ivory-Tower college professors, the stoic policemen and the screaming “Red Sooooxxxxxx” paradegoers. It’s an epic of civics and, more often than not, civil discourse — a mural of everyday life that is so rich in detail and insight that even its extended running time feels too short.

Bill and Turner Ross’s look at the last 24 hours of a Vegas dive bar appears to be simple, fly-on-the-Schlitz-soaked-wall verité; the truth about what’s happening in front of the camera is much more interesting and complicated. (Their Sin City tavern is in New Orleans, for starters; the whole story behind the film’s construction can be found here.) If you can get past the fiction v. nonfiction argument, however, what you will find is a sort of petri dish experiment in which sad sacks and sodden philosophers are given room to bounce off each other. It’s less a long goodbye to a drinking establishment then an exploration of the community that calls such places home and their fellow barflies family — and what happens when you take away that collective space after the very last call. Closing time, indeed.

For decades, the American Legion has run a program called “Boys State,” in which promising young men are selected to form a mock government in one week, complete with stump speeches and elections. (Its alumnus include Cory Booker and Dick Cheney.) Filmmakers Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine (The Overnighters) embed themselves with a host of Texas teens as they get a firsthand look at how the sausage of modern politics is made — and observe how tomorrow’s Obamas, Trumps and Karl Roves replicate the agonies and ecstasies of our currently broken two-party system down to the last smear campaign. An absolutely compelling and often alarming tag-along doc that also helped introduce a few young politicos we imagine we’ll be hearing from in the next few years.

Or rather, Dick Johnson is slowly succumbing to dementia and dying. So Kirsten Johnson (Cameraperson) does what any good daughter would do: She makes a movie about him, filled with staged scenes of him shuffling off this mortal coil via falling air conditioners, hit-and-run accidents and fatal cardiac arrests. This may be the most lighthearted, uplifting movie about death ever concocted, as well as an act of catharsis for both those behind the camera and in the audience. The more Johnson inoculates herself against future grief one grisly mock-killing at a time, the more you sense the love and affection behind this conspiratorial project and celebration of a life. Come for the sight of an old man getting “stabbed” in the jugular vein; stay for the Pierre et Gilles-like heavenly scenarios involving tap dancers, confetti and an exasperated Christ.