One of the many areas in which the art of the documentary film excels is allowing previously untold stories to be framed in their strongest light. This month’s selection looks at hidden stories that force the viewer to reconsider, and often wholly reevaluate, what was understood as fact. From the familiar images of World War I, to a penetrating look beneath one of the icons of 1980s pop culture, to the massively influential work of a psychologist and the recalibration of a family after a devastating discovery, the month’s films showcase the pursuit of truth and the power of understanding anew.
Shock Room
Few social experiments have proven more influential or enduring as Stanley Milgram’s ‘Obedience to Authority’ experiment at Yale University in the early 1960s. Using archival film, interviews, dramatisations and an immersive re-staging, documentarian Kathryn Millard unearths the truth about Milgram’s experiments, forcing a total reappraisal.
Atari: Game Over
In today’s popular culture, few eras of the 20th century are exploited more readily than the 1980s. In an era whose aesthetics are used as narrative shorthand by blockbuster films and television series, few objects evoke a stronger sense of nostalgia than the Atari computer console. Looking at design, economics and urban archeology, Atari: Game Over follows the rise and fall of the one-time entertainment behemoth, Atari, by following the discovery of thousands of copies of the computer game adaptation of the film ET: The Extra Terrestrial buried in a desert in New Mexico.
The Snowman
In 1978, Australian Jimmy Graham was employed as a member of Operation Deepfreeze, a US military mission to Antarctica, where he was to teach survival skills to astronauts for NASA. After three months Graham returned home claiming that he had stumbled across a secret US nuclear base and was subsequently subject to a chemical lobotomy, administered by the CIA. Whatever the truth of his claims, Graham’s mental deterioration caused his family to flee. In The Snowman, his daughter, director Juliet Lamont, pieces together what happened to her father and how the family came to live with the aftermath of his visit to Antarctica.
Hidden Histories: WWI’s Forgotten Photographs
Nick Maddock’s documentary boasts unprecedented access to the work of photography on and off the battlefields during World War I. Both German and British soldiers were supplied with “vest pocket” cameras and a bracing optimism that they were embarking on high adventure. The reality that faced them, and the accompanying rapid loss of innocence, was captured in vivid detail that Maddock captures on film for the first time.
My Mother’s Lost Children
Melbourne filmmaker Danny Ben-Moshe, a member of a vibrant Jewish family prone to sharing what was on their mind, tells the story of one of Australia’s strangest family reunions. Ben-Moshe discovered that, over 40 years ago, his half-siblings aged two and three, were abducted by their father and taken to Iran where they were raised in isolation. The story, one which highlights differing cultural and social values, takes in five countries, five decades and wealth of visual material and interviews to tell a riveting, and moving, story of family and forgiveness.
