The True Crime Documentaries You Need To See This Year At Sydney Film Festival
Get ready to get spooked.
True crime stories are taking over. Seemingly every other week a new one pops up on our streaming services, phones or kindles. And if that weren’t enough, we’re currently living through the sort of true crime story that will be fodder for storytellers for centuries to come (yes, I mean Donald Trump).
But while it’s all very easy to binge six episodes of Wild Wild Country while scrolling through Instagram or rewatch The Staircase from your sunken rut on the couch, there is something to be said about watching the evils, horrors and redemptions of these narratives unfold surrounded by a crowd of onlookers equally as aghast as you.
Luckily, the upcoming Sydney Film Festival has several titles for the morbidly-inclined to choose from. Here are five of the best.
‘Cold Blooded: The Clutter Family Murders’
Truman Capote’s 1966 non-fiction novel In Cold Blood is one of the most important books of the 20th century for its detailing of the Clutter family murderers, Richard Hickock and Perry Smith. It’s fitting, then, that none other than Joe Berlinger should come along to tell the other, extremely important side of the story.
Berlinger is one half of the directorial team that brought audiences the acclaimed Paradise Lost trilogy, one of the original 300-pound gorillas of the true crime genre. The 1996 documentary charted the investigation of a triple-murder, the trial of the “West Memphis Three” and their subsequent release from prison after being proven innocent — thanks in no small part to the films.
For nearly three hours, Cold Blooded examines the Clutter family — whose murders have inspired multiple books and movies, but whose lives have rarely been given the attention they deserve, in favour of a focus on the killers.
‘Bisbee ‘17’
Director Robert Greene blended true crime with hyper-stylised fictional elements in Kate Plays Christine, his somewhat controversial 2016 feature about an actress attempting to play a real life woman who shot herself on live television.
Greene returns with Bisbee ’17, another hybrid that reaches deep into the contemporary American psyche through the town of Bisbee, Arizona. Greene’s film shows the town — with its population of barely 6000 — confronting the legacy of a crime committed 100 years earlier, in which more than 1000 striking miners were illegally rounded up, kidnapped and abandoned in the New Mexico desert without food or water.
With secrets and deceits still percolating throughout Bisbee to this day, Greene’s innovative style highlights parts of the story we otherwise wouldn’t see.
‘A Mother Brings Her Son to Be Shot’
Produced by Joshua Oppenheimer — the man behind genocide masterpieces An Act of Killing and The Look of Silence — this Irish documentary uses a shocking real-life shooting as the basis for a story about a mother and her children living in a community still divided, despite an end to the Troubles over 20 years ago.
Infused with the lingering effects of Brexit, director Sinéad O’Shea uses this film to show how the government and police have abandoned the region, how society chooses to enforce its own justice and how little choice its people have.
‘A Murder In Mansfield’
Director Barbara Kopple is one of the very few female filmmakers to have won two Academy Awards. Her first two features, Harlan County, USA and American Dream, both won Oscars for Best Documentary (albeit 14 years apart) and after years of music-focused docs, Kopple returns to the American Midwest with this story.
A Murder In Mansfield follows a man seeking answers decades after testifying against his father in the case of his mother’s murder. Collier Boyle was only 12-years-old when he detailed his father’s anger and violence in scarily calm detail to a judge and jury. Now, as a grown man, he returns to his hometown of Mansfield, Ohio, to confront his traumatic childhood and finally get the confession from his father that he has longed for.
‘The Venerable W.’
Not the typical sort of film you would expect from the label “true crime”, I admit, but this examination of a monk community of Myanmar exposes a different kind of evil.
The unexpected Ashin Wirathu has been labelled by Time Magazine as “The Face of Buddhist Terror”, a man whose hateful teachings have amassed a dedicated following in the age of the internet. This is the latest move from director Barbet Schroeder, who has a long history making films about despicable human beings like Idi Amin and Jacques Verges, and uncovering the people who preach and support ethnic hatred.
‘Pope Francis: A Man of His Word’
I mean, if the shoe fits…
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Glenn Dunks is a freelance writer from Melbourne. He also works as an editor and a film festival programmer while tweeting too much at @glenndunks.
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Sydney Film Festival runs from June 6-17. See the full programme on their website.