Between Shades of Gray

Kirsten Johnson has shot documentaries across Bosnia, Rwanda, Afghanistan, Liberia and the United States, and here she cuts together the footage that never made it into the finished films. There's a birth, a wedding, a dying mother, a sniper's view. It is a memoir in outtakes, and it asks what the person holding the camera owes to the person in front of it.

Why it’s here: The film turns the camera around on the person behind it, and asks what it means to film other people's worst days. What's punk is that it refuses the authority of a neutral observer. What's pedagogical is that it's a direct lesson in media literacy, since it shows how footage becomes a story. It matches the film-craft shelf and pairs with Faces Places and Hale County This Morning, This Evening.

In Chile's Atacama Desert astronomers use the clearest skies on Earth to study the origins of the universe. In the same sand, women are still searching for the bones of relatives disposed of by Pinochet's dictatorship. Guzmán puts them in the same frame: people looking up at stars thirteen billion years old, and people on their knees looking for forty-year-old remains.

Why it’s here: The film makes the case that a country's past has to be dug up before it can be put to rest. What's punk is the women with their small shovels, who outlast the state's silence. What's pedagogical is the way it joins deep time and recent history and invites students to ask who gets to be an archaeologist of their own country. Sits beside Chile-adjacent books like The House of the Spirits. Note: availability data is about eleven weeks old, so re-check.