Documentary Round-Up (May 2025)

The poster for Taiwanese filmkaer Vicky Du’s Light of the Setting Sun sets a curious tone. A sliver of highway caught from above between a dense surrounding of trees as it just as quickly descends into a mountain-cut tunnel. It would be easy to miss the moment where this appears in the film proper, which at just 73 minutes does feel somewhat like a real fleet of a thing. But thinking about it now, and Du’s (for her) rare opportunity to gain but a few inches in understanding of her family, it does make sense. Her family’s journey has been a long one, but so little of it will ever actually be known. Even less will be captured for prosperity by Du’s camera (Daniel Chein and Jih E-Peng’s work is unadorned and simple, but I don’t mean that as a pejorative). Really, besides it being a rather lovely image, it does make a lot of sense as a symbol of the film around it.

With just an additional short to her name—the seemingly quite popular (according to the Letterboxd user sample) Gaysians—Light of the Setting Sun is Du's debut. Watching this Setting Sun and it becomes obvious very quickly that Du has a passion to tell the story of her family. It's a common subject around first-time filmmakers for obvious reason. Hers is a family of immigrants—first from China to Taiwan, and then from Taiwan to the United States. Slowly peeling back generations worth of quiet suffering including (in perhaps the film’s best scene) the realisation of the traumatic violence that was inflicted upon them and on through to the mental anguish suffered by them today, in particular Du’s brother.

This is a small film with much gone unspoken. By virtue of its intimacy and the very restrained response she gets from many lines of questioning of her own family, Light of the Setting Sun somewhat struggles to really take flight as a great film. I found that the emotional catharsis that is eminent from Du’s film didn’t reach me in the sort of profound way that I thought the filmmaker was going for. Softly directed—I was reminded a bit of Yance Ford’s Strong Island; not a bad thing at all—I am nonetheless curious about what Du could do with a larger canvas and her own inclusion pulled back to squarely behind the camera and she is, perhaps, set free of the no doubt fear one must have of deciding to interrogate one’s own family on camera. I admire its message and suspect many will find healing where I was left ever so wanting.

In some ways, Light of the Setting Sun is a bit of a strange mirror to Greg Tillman’s Oklahoma City Bombing: American Terror. But whereas I found myself wanting a bit more dramatic oomph to Du’s film, Tillman could have withstood taking a step back and reassessing what he wanted to say with this Netflix-streaming doc about a well-worn subject matter. A film that only seems to have really been produced because of the 30th anniversary of the event at its centre instead of having anything particularly new or interesting to say. I’ve seen other films that tackled the Oklahoma tragedy in similar ways yet were able to get to the heart of its issues better (I’m thinking of Barak Goodman’s Oklahoma City from 2017). I struggled to see much of anything here worth bothering with. It’s kind of bad documentary filmmaking, sadly. Missing the point and ignoring the realities of 30 years of American political upheaval is real big fumble. So much so it proves hard to really engage with the movie. If the filmmaker isn't going to then why should the viewer?

Beautifully restored is the 1985 Academy Award winner, Artie Shaw: Time is All You’ve Got. A lovely film, if not a particularly innovative one, Brigitte Berman’s work is fairly typical of the sort of documentary biographic documentary that got broad appealing attention at the time. If I am far less harsh on this than I would be on contemporary musical bio-docs that pander to their subject—even if Shaw lacks neither the formal thrills or dramatic highs of even other documentaries of 1985 (including Lee Grant’s Down and Out in America, with which it tied for the documentary feature Oscar), to say nothing of the medium’s best examples across a hundred years of existence by that point—it’s because I suppose I was nonetheless charmed by it to a degree that I found satisfying. And much of that has to do with Shaw himself.

Time is All You've Got is hagiography in conception, sure, but Shaw as an interview subject is honest and open. He speaks truthfully about his time in the American military during WWII and even more so when discussing how he became disillusioned with the audiences who began to stuff music halls to hear him perform. It's a refreshing change of pace.

Elsewhere amid the rather standard filmmaking style on display, Berman's instincts do sometimes find moments that really sing (if you can say that about a clarinettist). One scene in particular left me especially moved with the camera still and lingering on Shaw as he hears a recording of himself playing Gershwin’s “Summertime” from Porgy and Bess. It’s the sort of music-forward moment that I find all too lacking in these sorts of films (amazingly so!). Did I need the anecdote from Shaw’s wife about the toilet paper as essentially one of the climactic moments of his narrative? No. But I’ll endure it if it means getting to listen to some beautiful music played over divine images of New York City in its jazz heyday.