What Happened, Miss Simone?
My dad used to blast Nina Simone in the house when I was a kid. I didn’t know who she was back then, but I really loved her songs and her voice. Netflix released this documentary this year and I thought It would be interesting to see who she was.
What Happened Miss Simone? is a great documentary, showing every facet of this tremendous legend. What I liked most was the testimony of her daughter. You know, not only her friends but also her family paints a portrait of her, flattering or not.
I found her story quite heart-breaking really. She wanted to be the first black woman classical pianist to make it to Carnegie Hall, that was her dream. She did make it to Carnegie Hall and had an amazing career, but she ended up alone and sick. If you love her music, I highly recommend that documentary!
Paris is Burning
Filmed in the late 80s, Paris is Burning recounts the Ball culture of African American and Latino, gay and transgender, in New York City. I absolutely love it, It’s so interesting!
The Balls were basically fashion battles. There was a theme and at the end a vote to pick a winner. They were fabulous people all around, expressing themselves the way the wanted to! They would go by Houses, which was basically their take on street gangs, and they would compete against here other in the Balls.
Paris is Burning is an incredible insight on this community at that time, and on the hopes and dreams of its people. It’s a little slice of history and I highly recommend it as well!
The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975
The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 is a really well-constructed documentary about the Civil Right Movement, the Black Panthers and other issues of the era during the period of 1967 to 1975. Like I’ve mentioned earlier, it’s an important part of history (that is repeating itself nowadays), and it’s equally important to know more about the main actors of this movement.
This documentary really made me want to, first know more about the movement, and secondly to know more about people like Angela Davis. A powerful documentary by Swedish director Göran Olsson, you will not regret watching it!
The Thin Blue Line
The Thin Blue Line is the perfect example of the power a documentary can have. Errol Morris, the director, got really interested in a murder case, where Randall Dale Adams claimed he had been framed and wrongly convicted of a crime he didn’t commit.
Through his documentary, he proved that Randall is innocent, that the real murderer is David Harris, and that several witnesses involved in the case gave false testimony. A year after the release of the documentary, the case was reviewed again, and Adams was released and cleared of the crime. Powerful!
Hitler’s Children
I’m really interested by a lot of things, and WWII is one of them. I try to be as aware as I can about what happened. It touched my country in the most horrible way, and even my grandparents still remember that time very well as they were young adults back then.
Hitler’s Children brought me another aspect of the consequences of this war that I hadn’t thought about before. What about the descendants of Nazi generals?
What interested me the most Hitler’s Children was the difference between the direct children and the more enlarged relatives point of view.
Monika Goeth’s interview stunned me. The level of denial and ignorance those children were facing is quite daunting. She truly discovered how much of a monster her father was while watching Schindler’s List.
It’s insane the burden those people have to live with. It’s a very interesting documentary!
WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE DOCUMENTARY ON NETFLIX?
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