Perhaps because the last few years have been a golden age for the documentary, delivering an unprecedented wealth of titles that became box office hits, 2014 paled a bit in comparison. There were still some remarkable works, but this has been hardly a vintage year for the genre.
The year’s documentary harvest was far from scarce, though, and included such notable works as “The Overnighters’ with his resonating financial crisis story of a pastor in North Dakota who controversially turned his church into a refuge for homeless workers coming en masse in search of a job within the area’s oil industry; LFF winner “My Fathers, My Mother and Me” and its exploration of the way of life in a free sex, no family boundaries commune during the 60s by one of the children who grew up there; the career of Riot Girrl extraordinaire Kathleen Hanna given a deserved review in ‘The Punk Singer’; Frederick Wiseman researches on two prestigious institutions in “At Berkeley” and “National Gallery”; Mark Cousins interesting psychological observations of “A History of Children and Film”; the trial which put an end to California’s anti gay-marriage Proposition 8 was celebrated and well documented in “The Case Against 8’; or the Investigation of the causes and side-effects behind Africa’s post-colonial wars in ‘Concerning Violence’.
Despite such contenders, the six works which made our shortlist are