The Ukrainian film has been included in The Hollywood Reporter’s list of the 25 best documentary films

In The Hollywood Reporter’s list of the best documentary films, Dzyga Vertov’s ‘Man with a Movie Camera’ ranked 14th. In addition, the list includes films about World War II, athletes, and musicians, as well as movies ‘about people or places nobody had ever heard of before’

About ‘Man with a Movie Camera’

The 1929 documentary is a chronicle of a single day in the life of three major cities — Odesa, Kharkiv, and Kyiv — during the NEP era.

The film was shot without a clear script, lines, or intertitles with the aim of developing its own cinematic language, separated from the language of theater and literature.

‘This experimental work aims to create a truly international, universal language of cinema based on its complete separation from the language of theatre and literature’, Vertov wrote about the film.

The Dovzhenko Centre adds that, thanks to its cinematographic and editing techniques, ‘Man with a Movie Camera’ became a ‘methodological guide to filmmaking for the next generation of directors’.

About the other films on the list

In addition to Vertov’s film, the list includes documentaries about skateboarders from the American Rust Belt, high school basketball players from Chicago, New York drag queens, Kentucky coal miners, and an actor who wants to befriend a bear.

At the same time, according to The Hollywood Reporter, what makes the documentaries on the list outstanding is not who or what they are about, but how they were made.

Fifth on the list is the 1994 film ‘Hoop Dreams’. Directed by Steve James, the film follows two African-American high school students from Chicago — William Gates and Arthur Agee — who dream of becoming professional basketball players.

Through their story, the director raises questions of racial and class inequality in America at the time, which ‘still haven't begun to be resolved in sports even over 30 years after the film's release’.

Fourth on the list is the 2000 film ‘The Gleaners and I’ by French director Agnès Varda. She explores the culture of gleaning — collecting still-edible food, including grains left in fields after harvests and food that farmers and vendors would otherwise leave to spoil.

Later, the director expands the theme to include people who collect food from dumpsters, recyclers, squatters, and homeless people.

Third on the list is the 1985 film ‘Shoah’ by French director Claude Lanzmann. The film, which runs for more than nine hours, tells the story of the Holocaust through testimonies from Jewish survivors of concentration camps, as well as accounts from Nazis recorded with a hidden camera.

‘Beyond its unprecedented value as a testimony to atrocities, survival, and resistance, this film is also an outstanding artistic achievement. It uniquely tells the story of the past through the lens of the present, deliberately rejecting archival footage to focus on the living traces of industrialized death’, the description reads.

The second-best documentary on the list is the 1983 concert film ‘Stop Making Sense’ by the band Talking Heads. The film was added to the National Film Registry of the US Library of Congress in 2021 in recognition of its cultural and historical heritage.

The concert was filmed by Jonathan Demme (‘The Silence of the Lambs’, ‘Philadelphia’), who also worked on Justin Timberlake and the Tennessee Kids’ concert film and directed music videos for Neil Young, New Order, and Bruce Springsteen.

In 2023, A24 released a restored version of the film to mark its 40th anniversary. Read more about it here.

The best documentary film according to The Hollywood Reporter is the 1975 film ‘Grey Gardens’ by directors Albert and David Maysles. The ‘intimate documentary portrait’ tells the story of the lives of ‘high-society recluses’ — Edith ‘Big Edie’ Beale and her daughter, known as Little Edie — the aunt and first cousin of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

‘They live in poverty and squalor in a dilapidated estate in East Hampton, overrun with cats, raccoons, and fleas. Some critics initially branded the film as exploitative, accusing it of grotesquely portraying the chaotic and codependent relationship between mother and daughter’, the description reads.

You can read the full list of The Hollywood Reporter’s 25 best documentary films on the publication’s website