In a world where gritty foreign cinema is vogue after the massive success of Scandinavian thrillers (most recently the shockingly violent Headhunters) it feels strange that the opportunity to provide something different to the conveyor belt of Hollywood clones was ignored. Thanks to feel good films like Amélie, the increased awareness of foreign (particularly Japanese) horror and true masterpieces such as Pans Labyrinth, foreign cinema is no longer viewed as the hard to enjoy sibling to English speaking cinema, enjoyed solely by stuffy joyless types. It may be tenuous to say so, but we've now even had a foreign Best Picture winner in the form of the (very French) The Artist. However, that may just be the problem; thanks to the massive popular success of the like of the Millennium Trilogy and TVs The Killing, foreign language cinema is no longer a niche people can pride themselves in enjoying. Now the public is over the stigma of foreign releases, a new minority has risen to take the praise. This summer, the real sleeper hits were documentaries. The summer season was bookended by two of the best documentaries in recent years. In April we got the sublime Marley from The Last King of Scotlands Kevin Macdonald. It reaped a good box office gross and unanimously good reviews, but it was outside the cinemas it had the biggest influence. Marley was the first film to be streamed on Facebook on the same day as the theatrical release, paving the way for future small releases; it may not be feasible to have a nationwide release, but through the Internet a film can find its audience easily. This is a tactic Nazi sci-fi Iron Sky and recent hit Berbarian Sound Studio have both used (albeit not through the social networking giant) and is likely to continue as the hunger for indie films grows.
And then this month just gone there was The Imposter. This absolutely brilliant thriller gained one of the best critical reactions of the year pushing it into the top 10 in the UK box office. The story it tells, in short a French man in Spain pretends to be a missing sixteen year old boy from Texas, is more bizarre than any original thriller could create and the way it was told, almost creating a traditional filmic narrative made for an incredibly gripping watch. Its success will have an incredible impact on how creative (and almost anarchic) documentaries are and how wide releases they get. It used to be the case that a popular documentary was rare, left for the likes of superstars Morgan Spurlock and Michael Moore, with the odd high profile breakout (Man on Wire, Touching the Void). But following the massive success of Senna last year (cruelly excluded from the Oscar long list by its dearth of new footage; ironically its strongest element) which was a surprise hit following premium coverage in many publications, it looks like studios are gaining more faith in documentaries and a built-in audience is slowly building. Theres a sense of one-upmanship in high class film taste; liking foreign language cinema used to be a sign of culture, but with everyone now eating it up its too common to enjoy. The current high quality of documentaries makes them the perfect substitute and their obviously informative nature provides some easy but intelligent post screening discussion.
Ive touched on this in a critical aspect before, but this affects the general public a lot more. Its not necessarily a bad thing; by and large documentaries have been an ignored medium so its great to see their popularity rise. However it comes with a cost when films like Yuma are never given a chance to prove themselves.