Sep 21, 2026 · 22 min
Five documentaries turn personal obsessions into cultural history
Great documentaries you don’t want to miss
The films discussed connect intimate lives, comedy, mortality, infrastructure, and colonial history while showing how much distinctive documentary work escapes broad attention.
- 1Ross McElwee’s Remake turns marital collapse and family crisis into a searching meditation on autobiographical filmmaking.
- 2The History of Concrete and Black Zombie use comedy, infrastructure, and zombie lore to examine cultural anxieties and exploitation.
- 3The Oldest Person in the World and You Had to Be There find mortality, memory, and warmth in encounters with the past.
Don't miss
The discussion of You Had to Be There finds a vivid portrait of Toronto comedy in a 1972 Godspell production, even without surviving footage.
The brief
Glen and Aisha survey five documentaries that risk being overlooked, favoring films whose unusual subjects open onto larger questions about memory, mortality, comedy, and history.
Ross McElwee’s Remake follows an attempt to make fiction while a marriage dissolves and a son struggles with addiction, turning self-reflexive filmmaking into an intimate test of what documentary can contain.
The History of Concrete treats infrastructure as a comic path through digressive encounters, while Black Zombie traces zombie culture through Haiti’s history of slavery, colonialism, exploitation, and racial anxiety.
Sam Green’s The Oldest Person in the World follows a filmmaker seeking the world’s oldest living person, using that pursuit to reflect on parenthood, mortality, and time’s passage.
Nick Davis’s You Had to Be There reconstructs a 1972 Toronto production of Godspell through its comedy community, finding warmth and historical texture despite the absence of surviving video.