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We've been waiting for a release of South Korean film Heart since 2019, and it'sfinally streaming in many countries on Mubi. Worldwide, you can catch Passing on Netflix for an essential Ruth Negga performance.

Plus, you can now catch up with more of the docs featured in our ebook Subjective Realities: The art of creative nonfiction film.

If you're in the US, don't miss a chance to stream Flee, one of the best films of the year. If you're in Canada or the US, you can now stream No Ordinary Man, also on our list of the best films of the year, on Kanopy with your library card, or rent it on VOD.

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Films from Subjective Realities

In the summer, we released the ebook Subjective realities: The art of creative nonfiction film which explores the spectrum between fiction and nonfiction in contemporary documentary. Several of the films that appear in the book had their world premieres in 2021 and have yet to be released in cinemas (or acquire North American/UK distribution!).

Fortunately, several of those films have just hit VOD/streaming services or will be at virtual film festivals in the coming weeks. We recommend catching them while you can!

Get your copy of Subjective realities

No Ordinary Man - Kanopy/VOD US and Canada

One of the best films of the year (and best documentaries of the year) is now available on VOD in Canada and the US, and on Kanopy in the US.

Here's an excerpt from the intro to Orla's interview with the directors:

The story No Ordinary Man tells is one of lost transgender history that’s finally being reclaimed. The film’s subject is Billy Tipton, an influential jazz musician who worked between the 1930s and 1970s. It wasn’t until 1989, when Tipton died in the arms of his son, Billy Jr., that Tipton’s family and the public discovered that he was assigned female at birth. After his death, Tipton’s story was twisted: Tipton was unequivocally a trans man, but the cis-dominated media presented him as a woman who dressed as a man in order to get a foot in the door in the music industry. Even the most cited text about Tipton’s life, Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton by Dianne Middlebrook, framed his story around this harmful narrative.

In Chin-Yee and Joynt’s hands, No Ordinary Man is no ordinary biographical documentary. They go way beyond the standard archival footage and talking head interview approach to tell Tipton’s story. Joynt explained that “understanding that there was no moving image footage of Tipton was both a restriction and an opportunity for us to immediately start thinking creatively beyond the bounds of reenactment and other ways that biopics tend to be created.” The film features photos and audio recordings of Tipton, as well as his music, and his life story is told through the words of talking-head experts, most of whom are trans. But another huge part of the film are “auditions” where the filmmakers invite a whole host of diverse transmasculine actors to act out and then dissect scripted scenes from Tipton’s life.

Read the full interview.

Flee - across US - until Nov 28 at DOCNYC

One of the very best films of 2021 full stop is the animated documentary Flee about Amin, who was forced to flee Afghanistan as a teenager and ended up in Denmark. The film follows Amin in present day as he recounts the story of his flight to Denmark (with documentary sound), and his memories are illuminated by animation.

We loved the film so much that we invited its director Jonas Poher Rasmussen on to the 2021 Creative Nonfiction Workshop (in conversation with Eliane Raheb!) and he is also interviewed in the book.

An animated frame of a man sitting in a hotel room in front of a cityscape in Flee.

Here's Orla on the film:

Flee, the Sundance World Documentary Grand Jury Prize winner, is told almost entirely through animation in order to preserve the anonymity of its subject. Amin is an Afghan refugee living in Denmark after migrating there from Moscow twenty-five years earlier. He’s also one of documentarian Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s best friends, and together (with Amin narrating and Jonas directing the animation), the pair tell Amin’s story for the first time. Animation isn’t just a necessity in Rasmussen’s film; it allows him to bring Amin’s memories to life in full colour and detail, and to fill in the blanks that Amin is too traumatised to state in words. But importantly, Fleeis just as much about exploring how Amin copes with and recovers from his trauma today as it is about recounting his horrific past experiences as an asylum seeker.

Click here for tickets.

Get your copy of Subjective realities

Now streaming

Heart - Mubi UK/Canada/US/Ireland/AU/NZ/Western Europe/Middle East/Latin America/Africa/India

We've been (im)patiently waiting for Heart to finally be available worldwide ever since Orla saw and fell in love with it at the London Film Festival (LFF) in 2019. Fortunately, now you can watch it on Mubi in many parts of the world!

Here's Orla's review from LFF 2019:

Ga-young Jeong’s Heart was labelled in the LFF programme as “the Korean Fleabag,” an overused and frustrating comparison that doesn’t accurately express what’s great about Jeong’s twisty, witty little film. But whatever gets eyes on deserving content, I suppose. Jeong also stars in the film as a young filmmaker entwined in various affairs and pining after various men.

The first half of the film is set almost entirely in one room, an art studio in which she smokes with, talks with, and has sex with her married lover — all while venting to him about how in love she is with another man. The second half of the film shifts completely, however, to a later timeline, in which Jeong is in pre-production of a film inspired by her affair. She meets with an actor she wants to work with, and he interrogates her about her script and her desire to make a film that’s so close to the truth and which implicates her ex-lover in infidelity.

It’s a true portrait of the artist: Jeong is constantly reflecting on her own creative process in increasingly meta-textual ways, bringing the film closer to Adaptation than it is to Fleabag. In that fascinating second half, the conversations between director and actor cause Jeong’s character to have multiple revelations about her own work. Jeong is constantly surprising us with the depth of self-awareness about her own work as her characters discuss and deconstruct the narrative that they exist within

Passing - Netflix worldwide

We had complicated feelings about Rebecca Hall's directorial debut when we saw it at Sundance. Ruth Negga is radiant (FYC Best Supporting Actress), and Hall's direction is particularly sophisticated in its blocking... but I thought Tessa Thompson felt a bit blank (Orla doesn't quite agree) and the film doesn't quite hit all the emotional notes it's aiming for. Still — worth seeing, and one of the better films to hit Netflix this year.

You can listen to us discussing at least some of our mixed feelings about the film on our Sundance podcast episodes (78 and 79), which are now members only episodes, so you'll find them in your personal Premium Seventh Row feed.

A black and white still of Rebecca Hall's Passing, featuring Ruth Negga, who gives one of the best performances of Sundance 2021.

Here's me on why Ruth Negga is so fantastic in Passing:

It’s with a mix of glamour and vulnerability that Ruth Negga’s Clare immediately draws in both the viewer and Irene (Tessa Thompson) as soon as we meet her in Passing. Negga plays Clare as someone who talks so fast you can’t say no to her, but whose eyes constantly plead with you to love her. The role is a tough one, playing both an ethereal object of desire for Irene and a real woman with pain and insecurities. The film is told largely from Irene’s perspective, but Negga lends real depth to Clare, giving us access to a whole world of feelings, and the sense of backstory that the film never explicitly states. Negga plays Clare as a woman who, mid-speech, will look off and to the side for a moment, sometimes wistfully, sometimes melancholically, sometimes both.

Negga makes us constantly aware of the rickety foundation that Clare, a Black woman passing as a white woman, has built her life on. She’s also completely seductive, not just sensually but altogether deliriously. She’s the life of the party, always good for a laugh, constantly pleasing. It’s also how Negga shows us a woman who never stops performing, whether that’s performing whiteness for her racist, Aryan husband, or the general good cheer that keeps her accepted wherever she goes, preventing anyone from looking too close. Occasionally, Negga shows us Clare dropping that mask, whether it’s in a leisurely conversation with Irene’s maid, or a candid, desperate moment with Irene where she longs for acceptance. It’s a movie-star performance that you can’t look away, but it’s also so full of depth and technical precision that you could dissect it for hours.

Happy watching!

Best,

Alex Heeney, Editor-in-Chief

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The Seventh Row newsletter is a free weekly newsletter featuring streaming recommendations, primarily for Canada, the US, UK, and Australia, but always features at least one worldwide streaming recommendation. We also offer occasional giveaways of free downloads of our favourite films and other benefits! Questions? Comments? Reply to this email, or find us on Twitter @SeventhRow. If you're reading this because someone forwarded this email to you, consider that helpful button to become a regular subscriber.

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Heart, Passing, Flee, and more to watch this weekend