little story about when you get to see films that make you glad film exists
when i was first dating my wife over a decade ago, i was teaching and used a lot of documentary films in my classes. students had to learn how to observe and interpret people in a safe space.
it was getting late in the year, and i was running out of footage. so my wife and i would stay up until 2am some nights, trying to find enough footage that i could screen the next morning. she'd dig through my old film studies textbook ("A History of Narrative Film"), websites and old forums and imdb, calling out names, and i'd dig them out and watch a minute or two to see if they'd be good candidates.
most of the newer docs were plain bad - more shiny editorials than anything else. people acting instead of being. totally useless for students whose job was to interpret real human behaviour. so i tried to rely on older, more cinéma vérité -style docs.
it was hard to find old docs though - not only because many weren't digitized, but also because young people weren't aware of them, which meant that the web wasn't yet aware of them. imdb might have an entry for it, but only a few thousand people in the world might know the name of the movie.
my wife's secret weapon was a site called jinni. it had some truly solid algorithmic fundamentals that produced high quality recommendations based on what you watched. these weren't the google/amazon garbage recommends you have now: these were based on film qualities, and could produce pretty novel results.
one night it was beyond late, and i was shooting down every movie she recommended. she was getting pissed, and i was getting even more neurotic about finding the right one. she started randomly clicking around jinni in frustration, and came up with a black and white doc from the late 90s with a graffiti title. it looked bad, but i pulled up a low res mpeg someone had stashed on IA
we watched about 3 minutes together and forgot about finding anything else. we watched the entire thing that night, neither of us went to sleep, and i couldn't think about anything else before i taught a few hours later.
it was a movie called Dark Days, about the people living underground in the tunnels beneath NYC: https://vimeo.com/66989517
a decade later jinni's gone, we're married, and no one makes documentaries like this anymore.
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