Dilip Barman
By Dilip Barman
The 27th annual Full Frame Documentary Film Festival was another excellent fest that took place April 3 – 6, 2025. It’s one of the most important documentary film festivals, and we’re lucky to have it here in Durham, NC. It’s an opportunity to see impactful films often not accessible otherwise and to meet and ask filmmakers questions.
This year there were forty-nine films from thirty countries. Twenty feature-length and fifteen short films competed for new documentary awards and fourteen films were part of an invited program including several films by Jean Tsien, such as episodes from the 2020 five-part television documentary Asian Americans (pbs.org/weta/asian-americans).
One of my favorite films was Mr. Nobody Against Putin (David Borenstein, Pavel Talankin, 2025). Pavel “Pasha” Talankin, the co-director, works at a K-12 school in a small town of 10,000 in the Ural Mountains of Russia.
He helps organize events and videos throughout the school. Students enjoy working with him and often use his office for playing music, doing video editing, and just relaxing.
Once the war against Ukraine begins, his school (and, presumably, many others) is directed by Moscow to take time out of lessons to spread state perspectives on the war.
Pasha makes staged videos of the children listening and reacting to propaganda. Things get even worse when students are militarized by parading in army uniforms and even having grenade-throwing competitions. Eventually Pasha has to escape from Russia and armed with the detailed footage, has gone into hiding while sharing the disturbing reality of the war on school children.
When Asian Americans was broadcast on PBS, I loved watching its detailed story of Asian immigration and integration and assimilation into the United States. Several episodes were shown at Full Frame this year which was exciting not just for the big screen experience, but to be able to talk to Jean Tsien and several of the filmmakers.
In the elementary and middle school years of homeschooling, my daughter and I read the poetry and history of the “Harlem Renaissance.” We also saw its rise when we saw Ken Burns’ 2001 Jazz and the importance of the Apollo Theater. It was very nice to see with my daughter the (free) opening film by Jean Tsien, her 2019 The Apollo about this landmark theatre. While I would have enjoyed seeing more of its history as was shown in Jazz, for example, it was hard to beat the joy of archival footage of performers like Aretha Franklin, The Four Tops, Smokey Robinson, Gladys Knight, and many more. There was one scene when Barack Obama visited and spoke about the importance of the theater.
I knew a little bit about Dame Jacinda Kate Laurell Ardern, the former (2017-2023) Prime Minister of New Zealand, but learned much more from the opening night film, Prime Minister (Michelle Walshe, Lindsay Utz, 2025). The film has high production quality that is enhanced by the unprecedented access afforded by significant footage by Jacinda Ardern’s husband Clarke Gayford. The story portrays a strong woman motivated not by power but by kindness.
The Librarians (Kim A. Snyder, 2025, thelibrariansfilm.com) brings attention to increasing calls for book banning across the United States. Featuring librarians from both communities and schools, it narrates heated censorship efforts sometimes causing librarians to lose their jobs in trying to keep bookshelves open. During the Q&A after the film, one of the librarians in the film, Suzette Baker of Texas, described how she lost her job but how she is now rallying folks to resist book banning.
Legendary filmmaker Stanley Nelson brought his fabulous about-to-be-released (just a few days later on public television) film, We Want the Funk! (pbs.org/independentlens/documentaries/we-want-the-funk) to Full Frame. Many may know funk by its originator, the “Godfather of Funk” James Brown.
Indeed, Brown is featured in the film but only as the starting point. “Black music” in the 1960s and early 1970s (including some of my favorite songs) often was offered in forms that would appeal to the majority and avoided social justice and civil rights themes.
When James Brown gave voice to “I’m Black and I’m proud”, it became an instant empowering anthem. One of the theses of the film is that many forms that came after, including international ones like Afrobeat spearheaded by Fela Kuti, owe their musical roots to funk.
The White House Effect (Pedro Kos, Jon Shenk, Bonni Cohen, 2024, thewhitehouseeffect.com), I found during the Q&A with producer Josh Penn afterwards, has amassed 14,000 archival sources in what they say is the largest such environmental collection. Tracing today’s climate crisis to the George H.W. Bush era, it describes how a non-controversial scientific understanding of the worsening environment got conflated with politics. When President Bush ran for office, he argued for forceful action to stop global warming. Once in office his chief of staff John Sununu largely blunted and even reversed the targeted changes. The film leads the viewer to wonder how things might be different today if other decisions were made in the decades previously.
The (free) closing night film Sally (Cristina Costantini, 2025) was in intimate biopic of the first American woman astronaut to go into space, Sally Ride. She was a very private woman and, seeing the career-ending examples of people like Billy Jean King in 1981 coming out as lesbian, kept her own sexuality a secret. Only in her obituary with her permission before she passed away, was it shared that she had a 27-year relationship with Tam O’Shaughnessy. The film was inspiring to see what a strong astronaut Sally Ride was and how she persisted in a world that was very male dominated.
These are only a few of the films that I saw. I encourage others to do as my family has done for years and that is to reserve the Thursday-Sunday next year when Full Frame is back (April 16 – 19, 2026) with time off work or school, and plan to be educated, be entertained, and be happy to be at this fabulous festival of a myriad stories and master storytellers.
For more details, visit fullframefest.org.
Photographs courtesy of filmmakers. We Want the Funk! image courtesy of Firelight Films of musician and lead of Parliament-Funkadelic, George Clinton.
Dilip Barman is a lover of culture and teacher of math and vegan food/nutrition teacher. Check out his monthly show somanycooks.com. Contact: [email protected]
