The release, in 2019, of two new documentaries by the Belgian-based, Cameroonian-born filmmaker Rosine Mbakam constituted one of the year’s major discoveries. Marie Losier’s documentary about the great wrestler in the Mexican lucha libre scene ( whom William Finnegan profiled in The New Yorker, in 2014), a gay man who resisted and overcame hostility in the sport and in his family, is also an intimate first-person account of the physical toll of his athletic and theatrical artistry and the emotional toll of his struggle for acceptance. It began filming even before the coup took place, and his reporting has a tragic, horrific immediacy. Patricio Guzmán’s heroic three-part documentary about the coup that forced Chile’s democratically elected president, Salvador Allende, out of power, in 1973, and replaced him with the sanguinary dictator Augusto Pinochet.
(The link on each title is to my review from The New Yorker.) Here are some highlights from each of them.
As for IFC Films Unlimited, it’s got a significant batch of independent and international films from the past twenty years.
IFC FILMS FREE
Crackle, featuring films from Sony along with those of its predecessor, Columbia Pictures (which Sony took over in 1989), feels like a throwback to basic cable, both in its offerings and its functioning: it’s free but features commercial interruptions, about ten of them per movie. Founded in 2019, is a consortium of eight of the most discerning distributors. A trio of less prominent but generously programmed sites-, Crackle, and the newly launched IFC Films Unlimited-helps to fill in the gaps. With time to dive into the offerings of major streaming services and come up with treasures, I’ve also noticed that there are some significant omissions-notably in the realms of independent films, recent international films, documentaries, and even modern Hollywood. Read Richard Brody’s lists of the best films on Hulu, Amazon Prime, and Netflix, and of twenty-three short films to stream.