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This week, one of the best films of the year hits Netflix worldwide this week, Robert Greene's Procession, which is just gearing up for its Oscar campaign. Plus, catch Denmark's Best International Film Oscar submission, Flee, digitally at DocNYC in the US — then get our ebook Subjective realities to read an in-depth interview with the director and see all kinds of behind-the-scenes artifacts. Finally, one of the best films of 2020 (featuring also best cinematography and one of the best performances) is screening Saturday only in the US/UK/Ireland.

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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

Procession - Netflix worldwide

The latest documentary from director editor Robert Greene just dropped on Netflix worldwide, and it's one of the best films of the year. It also features prominently in our ebook Subjective realities.

Here's an excerpt from the intro one of Orla's two interviews with Robert Greene in Subjective realities:

In Robert Greene’s documentary Procession, a group of middle-aged male survivors grapple with the abuse they faced as children, at the hands of Catholic priests. Earlier this year, Seventh Row published an ebook called Subjective realities: The art of creative nonfiction film, which featured a section titled ‘Does filmmaking have the power to heal?’. In that section, we discuss films such as Still Processing (Sophy Romvari, 2020) and Evelyn (Orlando von Einsiedel, 2018), which showcase the filmmaker attempting to process grief through the act of filmmaking. When I saw Procession, partway through putting together that section, I knew instantly that it was a revelatory addition to the conversation around cinema’s therapeutic powers.

“I don't use the word healing,” Greene clarified when I spoke to him about Procession. “Healing is possible, certainly, but especially with the guys that we worked with in Procession, they're not looking for healing. They're looking for meaning, and they're looking for help.” In the film, Greene works collaboratively with six survivors of childhood sexual assault, and enlists a drama therapist, Monica Phinney, to help ensure the process is helpful, rather than retraumatising. Phinney describes her work as “the intentional use of roleplay to achieve a therapeutic goal.” To that end, each man writes a short script centred around a real or imagined scene from their childhood, and sets about committing it to film. Sometimes, that even means returning to the precise location of their trauma. It’s an emotional experience, but one that helps them take steps to processing the pain in their pasts.

Read a longer excerpt here.

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

Films screening at virtual film festivals

Monkey Beach - Nov 20 - Canada, US, UK, Ireland at Native Spirit Film Festival; streaming on Crave+ in Canada

We named this one of the best films of 2020 (it came out in Canada last year),, but it's thus far been elusive to watch in the US/UK/Ireland...so don't miss your chance to see this visually stunning film (it made our list of the five best achievements in cinematography last year, too) which also features great performances, most notably from Adam Beach.

It's an Indigenous film made by Cree-Métis filmmaker Loretta Todd making her narrative debut after years in the industry working in docs and television. As Todd told me, "You can't survive colonialism and not be epic."

From my introduction to my interview with Loretta Todd:

Monkey Beach tells the story of Lisa (Grace Dove), a young Haisla woman who gets visions of loved ones dying before it happens. Ever since she was a child (her child counterpart is played by Zoey Snow), she’s been plagued by one vision, in particular, of her younger brother, Jimmy (Joel Oulette, and the younger Oliver Tru Sison), who is also a high level competitive swimmer, drowning. Having watched so many loved ones die and been powerless to do anything about it, she left home in, Kitimat, for Vancouver to drink and party and try to forget. When the film begins, Lisa returns home after two years away, to rekindle her relationships with her family and friends — and talk to dead loved ones, another gift. When Jimmy goes missing on a fishing trip, she becomes obsessed with saving him, but what that ends up meaning shifts as the film progresses, and as Lisa comes to terms with her gifts and her grief.

Todd is Cree-Métis, and her filmmaking practice takes inspiration from the oral tradition, tying stories and words to sensory experiences. That’s evident in the filmmaking of Monkey Beach which is a visually sumptuous film made on a low budget, that will make you want to buy a ticket to BC as soon as it’s safe to do so. The way Todd visualises’s images of Lisa’s visions and flashbacks are visceral, and inherently tied to how you remember and think about the film. Although it’s ostensibly one young woman’s story, Monkey Beach introduces us to the whole community around her, and makes her emotional journey feel epic. As Todd noted, “I mean, you can’t have survived colonialism and not be epic. I try to convey that even when it’s still in naturalism.”

Read the full interview.

Click here for tickets.

Happy watching!

Best,

Alex Heeney, Editor-in-Chief

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Procession, Monkey Beach, and more to watch this weekend