This year’s documentary Oscar race, like pretty much everything else about the Oscars this year, showed a medium in transition between comfortable and more radical forms, and an industry split on where to side. The crowd-pleasers won out. Free Solo, a dazzling National Geographic spectacle, took the prize, with staid bio-doc RBG presumed to be close behind, while more experimental critical darlings Hale County This Morning, This Evening and the remarkable, forthcoming Minding the Gap were just happy to be nominated. It’s a start; perhaps in a few years the balance will shift.
But after surprising many pundits by cracking the lineup, the fifth nominee got lost in the shuffle, even though it is arguably the boldest film of the lot. Despite the Oscar nod, and a host of festival gongs including the top prize at Sundance, Syrian film-maker Talal Derki’s extraordinary, intrepid Of Fathers and Sons may have passed by even the most attentive UK filmgoers. It was briefly in cinemas last year via the heroic Bertha DocHouse, but didn’t get an official, nationally reviewed release, and it hasn’t been released on physical media. It is, however, now streaming through Curzon Home Cinema and the BFI Player, and got an iTunes release last week. It’s worth the hunt.
A former freelance cameraman for such outlets as Reuters and CNN, Derki is a film-maker with a journalist’s nose: he doesn’t do undercover work by half measures. His reckless, unrepeatable feat in Of Fathers and Sons is to insert himself into a jihadist family in the al-Nusra front, persuading patriarch Abu Osama that he is himself a sympathetic jihadist photojournalist. Needless to say, the ensuing study of radicalisation in action is not the glorifying portrait Osama has in mind. Drawing limited attention to his presence, Derki observes as Osama puts his posse of young sons through their al-Nusra paces, taking them out of school to educate them personally in sharia law, before sending the older boys to a military training camp of jaw-dropping intensity and cruelty. At home, where the kids’ idea of fun and games is playing chicken with landmines, things are hardly gentler.
This may not be revelatory documentary-making, but it’s aggressively startling all the same. We may know this kind of brainwashing and abuse is what keeps extremism running, but most of us won’t have seen quite such a candid depiction of how terrorists are made. Derki’s film-making itself is pretty measured and straightforward. He has no need of his own shock tactics when they’re all in front of the camera lens.
Derki took the same eyewitness approach to his first movie, Return to Homs, in 2013 – another widely acclaimed Sundance champion that got a modest UK release. It’s now streaming on Amazon Prime, and would make a strong companion piece to Of Fathers and Sons if you can stomach the double. That was a somewhat more rousing work, chronicling the Syrian people’s resistance to Bashar al-Assad’s regime from the frontlines, with footballer-turned-revolutionary Abdul Baset al-Sarout as its self-styled hero. Together, the films illustrate very different ends of militarised opposition to the government. Return to Homs wears its political ideologies a little more flagrantly on its sleeve; Of Fathers and Sons counts on its manifold onscreen horrors to show where it stands.
Not everybody has endorsed Derki’s latest film as enthusiastically as the Academy, and there are productive debates to be had here about the politics of complicity or otherwise in projects of this nature. It’s likely to remain a one-off, and certainly won’t be replicated by the director, now Berlin-based, who recently had his arm prominently tattooed to prevent him ever going undercover again. His film leaves its own kind of mark.
New to streaming and DVD this week
Creed II
(Warner, 12) As with the Rocky films, this spinoff franchise (below) declines steeply with the second instalment, relying on Michael B Jordan’s electricity to patch over a rote script.
Bergman: A Year in a Life
(BFI, 15) The Blu-ray release of Jane Magnusson’s intelligently concentrated Ingmar Bergman study includes a comprehensive four-hour TV cut.
The Girl in the Spider’s Web
(Sony, 15) Doesn’t Lisbeth Salander feel a bit played out in 2019? A hard-working but miscast Claire Foy can’t make her feel edgy again.
A Dandy in Aspic
(Powerhouse, 12) An arch cold war thriller that tried to outcool Bond in 1968, this restored curio now stands as a fascinating jellification of its period.
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