The Golden Bin Awards: Best Documentary Feature

March 22, 2021 0 By Jeff Bulmer

Two pieces of journalism, one wholesome, one shocking

In this series based on the Oscars Deathrace series of articles I wrote for The Phoenix News over the last few years, I spotlight my personal picks for this year’s Oscars, as well as some notable snubs.

Winner: The Mole Agent

An octogenarian hired to investigate a retirement home for signs of elder abuse becomes the life of the party in this wonderful Chilean documentary.
In The Mole Agent, Sergio Chamy is tasked with spying on the residents and employees and checking on his client’s aging mother.

During his three-month stay, Sergio’s magnetic personality and overflowing charisma makes him immensely popular among the women of San Francisco Nursing Home on the outskirts of Santiago.

Early into his stay he’s crowned “King of the Nursing Home” at a party celebrating the anniversary of the home. While Sergio’s popularity helps him get close to informative or suspicious people, he rarely manages to uncover anything even moderately sinister.
His daily reports often entertainingly sound more like diary entries than a case file.

Through Sergio’s eyes, the film profiles several of the home’s residents, who, despite their age, are unique characters who are young at heart and full of life.
Mrs. Petronila is an aging poet whose work Sergio admires, but whose things have started to go missing. Another resident, Berta, quickly falls for Sergio, giving the film a cute, but ultimately unrequited romantic subplot.
Mrs. Rubira gets lonely but entertains Sergio with countless stories about her grandchildren. In contrast, no one comes to visit Marta, who struggles with memory loss. Instead, the caretakers regularly cheer her up by calling her while pretending to be her mother.

Sergio is a hard-working protagonist who takes his job as a spy seriously. But instead of revealing a grand conspiracy or evidence of elder abuse, the wholesome old-timer meets a menagerie of superb seniors. In a year with plenty of potential for dark documentaries, Mole Agent is simply delightful.

Runner-Up: Welcome to Chechnya

Filmed primarily between 2016 and 2018, the documentary mostly follows David Isteev and Olga Baranova, two activists working to help gay and lesbian refugees escape Chechnya. As Isteev and Baranova explain, the recent anti-gay purges in the republic began following a series of seemingly random arrests in 2017.

Before long, secret abductions, torture, and extrajudicial killings of LGBT people became commonplace. Though the film presents no proof that the Chechnyan government directly carries out these crimes, governmental leaders are nonetheless complicit. Instead of investigating or even denouncing the violence against LGBT people, both the Chechnyan and Russian governments vehemently deny it.

Isteev and Baranova’s work in helping Chechnyan refugees is illustrated through the stories of refugees they’ve helped, all of whom are digitally disguised using voice modulation and “deepfake” facial replacement. The most important of these stories for the movie are those of Grisha and Anya.

Grisha, a Russian events promoter, was only in Chechnya briefly for work when he was suddenly detained and tortured. Though he was eventually let go, his captors changed their minds and began threatening him and his family, leading Grisha to seek help escaping Russia for his whole family. In the span of a month, he’s forced to leave his entire life behind and move to Canada. All due to the government of a country he didn’t even live in.

Near the end of the film, Grisha decides to take his story to the Russian Committee Against Torture, and as he goes public, his identity is revealed to be Maxim Lapunov.

With Anya, Chechnya tells the story of someone from the republic. Anya is the lesbian daughter of a government official. When her uncle discovers her sexual orientation and threatens to blackmail her, Anya is left with limited time to leave the country. Here, Chechnya approaches action-movie pacing, as Isteev and Baranova set up an elaborate operation to bring Anya to the airport while deflecting any attention they may draw.

Ultimately, Isteev and Baranova give several refugees a fighting chance, but the film ends without a definitive statement on the status of any other than Lapunov. Though other nations have widely condemned the purges in Chechnya, the Russian government still denies that they are even happening. In 2021, the situation in Chechnya is still developing under the iron grip of Putin ally Ramzan Kadyrov, and this film only scratches the surface.

Though many of the documentaries nominated for this year’s Academy Awards were deserving, it’s distressing to see the likes of Welcome to Chechnya, All In: The Fight For Democracy, and 76 Days snubbed. These are important documentaries tackling difficult topics and doing real journalism. Even a nomination for an Oscar could have shone a much-deserved light on these stories and ensured they are seen by more people.