I recently posted my Top Five favorite movies from the virtual edition of the 2021 South by Southwest multimedia festival — but here are five additional Honorable Mentions that are well worth seeking out.
Kid Candidate
Similar in style and content to previous documentaries like Running with Beto and Knock Down the House, Kid Candidate follows a likable young person grappling with the best and worst of American democracy as they take on the status quo by seeking elected office. But what’s especially charming about director Jasmine Stodel’s entry in the inspirational subgenre is the fact that her protagonist’s campaign starts as a series of Harmony Korine-style prank videos then morphs into a sincere attempt to improve conditions for the citizens of Amarillo, TX other than the city’s wealthy ruling class elite.
Luchadoras
Directors Paola Calvo and Patrick Jasim belong to the Frederick Wiseman school of documentary filmmaking where the camera embeds itself within a particular community and observes without voiceover or talking head commentary. As a result, Luchadoras feels more like a hypnotic, sometimes meandering mood piece than a propulsive narrative. Yet it’s hard not to root (and fear) for the masked and maskless wrestlers Baby Star, Little Star, Lady Candy, and the scene-stealing Mini Serenita as they pursue lives less ordinary in Ciudad Juárez, a city with a grim history of intimate and systemic sexual femicide.
Poly Styrene: I Am A Cliché
The milestones may seem familiar: the scrappy early gigs, the sudden fame, the sex, the drugs, the rock, the roll, and the talent cut short way too soon. Yet Marianne Joan Elliott-Said (a.k.a. X-Ray Spex frontwoman and punk icon Poly Styrene) was nobody’s cliché, and it’s a credit to her daughter Celeste Bell, co-directing with Paul Sng, that their film comes across as more of a gentle character sketch than a cranked-to-11 standard-issue rockumentary. Naturally, there’s amazing footage of caterwauling performances at CBGB and voiceover tributes from contemporaries and fans like Vivienne Westwood, Thurston Moore, and Neneh Cherry. But the best parts are simply the moments when the sweet, tough, charismatic, troubled Brit sings, chants Hare Krishna (who knew?), and speaks, either directly to camera or via her poems and letters (effectively voiced by Ruth Negga).
The Spine of Night
Arguably, the world doesn’t need a feature-length 21st century throwback to the weirdly humorless, rotoscoped style of grandiose ’80s fantasy bummers like the “Taarna” section of the R-rated 1981 animated adaptation of the underground stoner comic Heavy Metal or Ralph Bakshi’s orcs attacking Helm’s Deep in the 1978 version of Lord of the Rings. But if you ever wanted to hear Patton Oswalt voicing a sadistic king with a horrifically mutilated face or see badass warriors in bird masks commandeering a flying machine full of molten fire and countless skulls cleaved in twain by fearsome ladies in a society where pants are very much optional and genitals flap forever free in the endless twilight gloaming, boy howdy have co-directors Philip Gelatt and Morgan Galen King got a treat in store for you!
WeWork: or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn
As with the other Honorable Mentions on this list, director Jed Rothstein may not have reinvented the wheel, since start-up flame-out documentaries are pretty much their own subgenre by this point. But even though we’ve all seen the billion dollar tech bubble burst again and again, the high style and fast pace of the familiar story is a perfect match for the messianic hustler charisma of Adam Neumann, the latest scam artist to promise his cult-like followers a visionary dream of better ways to work, live, and learn (while getting rich the old-fashioned way by screwing everyone he could out of as much money as possible).
