Have you seen Virunga yet? It’s currently streaming on Netflix and it’s one of the best features in a documentary category full of great films. Of the five, I’d rank the current frontrunner last in terms of actual filmmaking. CitizenFour is history in the making, a noble effort to show Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing as it went down. But it is too one-sided for my taste – it really just bolsters Snowden and Glenn Greenwald, coming from a very specific point of view. How you feel about the subject will likely determine how you view the film. The other four are as engaging, if not more so. Rory Kennedy’s Last Days in Vietnam about our willingness to cut and run at the end of the Vietnam war, John Maloof and Charlie Siskel’s brilliant Finding Vivian Maier, Wim Wenders’ breathtaking Salt of the Earth, and finally, the heartbreaking, unforgettable Virunga, written and directed by Orlando von Einsiedel. Two films directed by women in the race are both worthy winners, though of the two Last Days in Vietnam is the better film, in my humble opinion.
Virunga is a film that rips your heart out. It’s about a group of brave soldiers who are risking their lives to keep alive a family of mountain gorillas amid civil war and the raping of the Congo for natural resources. It is such an important message about how humans really are the sixth extinction. We’re destroying all other life on earth at a rapid pace.
The doc category, like the shorts category, mostly blows away the feature film category in terms of storytelling. They are about our world, our past, and our potential future. Of the other four, probably only Virunga can beat CitizenFour but I doubt anything will.
