The proliferation of documentaries on streaming services makes it difficult to choose what to watch. Each month, we select three nonfiction films — classics, overlooked recent docs and more — that will reward your time.
‘The Truffle Hunters’ (2021)
Stream it on Starz. Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Fandango at Home and Google Play.
If you’ve ever wondered what it feels like to be a dog bounding through the woods — leaves crunching under paw; tongue exposed to the elements; nose on the trail of a really good scent — there is a documentary that can oblige. For a couple of moments in “The Truffle Hunters,” the directors, Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw, used a mini camera harness to capture the world from a canine point of view. True, the dog camera constitutes only a small portion of the film. But when one of those dogs does a head shake, the movie practically dares you not to be charmed.
The film’s heroes aren’t just the dogs but their owners, who make their livings foraging for high-priced mushrooms in a time-honored, artisanal fashion. These men include Carlo, who enjoys searching for truffles at night (he likes the sound of the owl), despite protests from his wife, who worries that he’ll hurt himself, since he is now in his late 80s. Angelo, on the other hand, has decided that he’s had enough, and he decides to put his reasons for quitting on paper. “There are too many greedy people,” he explains, shortly before starting to tap on a typewriter. “They don’t do it for fun or to play with their dogs or to spend some time in nature.” What we see of Sergio, a shaggy-maned truffle hunter and sometime drummer who strives to protect his dogs from poisoned bait, illustrates Angelo’s point. Picking truffles has become a dirty business.
But the emotional core of the movie, shot in the Piedmont region of Italy, belongs to Aurelio and his dog, Birba, who share a relationship as close as any between humans. (Aurelio and Birba are even seen splitting their food.) We hear that Angelo may be the best truffle hunter of them all, but he has no wife and no children, and he refuses to divulge his secret spots. “We can go truffle hunting, but in your places or in a place that neither of us knows,” he tells a man trying to get him to spill the beans. He hopes to find what he calls a “wild woman” who can take care of Birba after he dies.
“The Truffle Hunters” draws a contrast between the hunters’ closeness to the earth and the pretense of the haute-cuisine world, where a truffle might be displayed on a plush red pillow or a gourmand might inhale the mushroom’s aroma as if sampling a fine wine. Part of Dweck and Kershaw’s implicit point is that the humble truffle is now anything but. Watch until the end of the credits for a bonbon: the sounds of Carlo; his dog, Titina; and the owl doing what they do best.
‘Lakota Nation vs. United States’ (2023)
Stream it on AMC+ and Hulu. Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Fandango at Home and Google Play.
Divided into three parts, this documentary from the directors Jesse Short Bull and Laura Tomaselli reframes American history from the perspective of the Oceti Sakowin — the Lakota, Nakota and Dakota people combined, the opening title cards explain. The emphasis differs greatly from that of a typical high school curriculum.
Did you know that the week before Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on Jan. 1, 1863, 38 Dakota men were executed, largely with his approval? It won’t surprise anyone to hear the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876 portrayed as just deserts for the overzealous Gen. George Armstrong Custer. But the historian and journalist Nick Estes suggests that Custer was, in fact, never much of a fighter; rather, his strategy was “to essentially attack noncombatants to force the surrender of enemy combatants”: to make targets of women and children. And Mount Rushmore is seen not just as a touristic curiosity but as a historic insult, given that it was carved into the Black Hills of South Dakota — an area that had ostensibly been guaranteed to the Sioux in the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868.
The efforts of the Oceti Sakowin to recover the Black Hills — not merely compensation and interest, which the Supreme Court determined in 1980 were warranted — are a thread that runs throughout “Lakota Nation vs. United States.” You don’t have to agree with all of the statements made in the movie to regard it as provocative, absorbing filmmaking, especially in its first and second sections, titled “Extermination” and “Assimilation.” The “Assimilation” chapter traces what the film characterizes as a concerted effort to induce dependency in the Indigenous population. If you prevent Native Americans from having horses, weapons, money or credit, how can they feed themselves? One way in which reservation land could be co-opted, the film argues, was by dividing it into plots and giving away the “surplus.”
In addition to the searing commentary from activists, an illuminating selection of cartoons and film clips helps the documentary make its case. The third section, “Reparations,” hews a bit more closely to the template of a standard advocacy doc. (Much of it involves the 2016-17 protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline.) But the movie nevertheless tackles history with unusual urgency and passion.
‘Intercepted’ (2024)
Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV and Grasshopper Film.
The words heard in “Intercepted,” an austere and eerie war portrait directed by the Ukrainian filmmaker Oksana Karpovych, come from phone conversations between Russian soldiers in Ukraine and their families back home. The Ukrainian special services were listening in, the opening titles say, and regularly posted clips online. The excerpts heard in the film, the text adds, were recorded between March and November 2022. Karpovych juxtaposes them with tableaus, shot in 2022 and 2023, that show life in Ukraine: abandoned homes, demolished buildings, freshly dug graves. The imagery sometimes has a surreal quality. A volleyball game carries on while sirens blare in the background. One shot observes street traffic — framed by a hole in a brick wall — from what was formerly the inside of a house.
As for the Russian soldiers, their remarks are a mix of jingoism and resignation. Some are matter-of-fact or even gleeful about their brutality. One suggests that there’s a strategy of killing “all the civilians who pass by,” lest those civilians give away Russian positions. Another describes a torture process that involves peeling off skin; at another point, he brags about breaking a man’s fingers. (“I love it so much,” he says of that act.) Many of the interlocutors in Russia sound like they’ve been steeped in Putin’s propaganda.
But plenty of other Russians in Ukraine sound disillusioned. “When will you take Kyiv?” a woman asks early on, in what sounds like a conversation between a mother and her son. He replies that “it’s going to last a very long time,” disabusing her of her expectation that the war will end quickly. Another soldier questions the purpose of the fighting: “Why the hell did we get involved with Ukraine? Even if we could capture it, so what?” Still another says it’s “obvious” that they are getting whupped, although he uses a cruder phrase. “They’re sending us to death,” a man says to a woman who is almost certainly his wife. “Don’t listen to the news.” Karpovych places this last conversation, near the end of the film, over incongruously placid shots of a destroyed river bridge. A rowboat gently passes by. In Ukraine, rubble and death are facts of life.
