Are Positive Docs A Passing Fad?
Happy early July 4th to American readers! Six months ago, Variety and Filmmaker Magazine named 2018 the year of “uplifting documentaries”, citing such box office hits as RBG, The Price of Free and Won’t You Be My Neighbor? But are so-called “positive documentaries” just a passing fad?
I’d argue that with the debut of “hopepunk”, the trend in hopeful docs shows no sign of fading.
What’s hopepunk?
Emerging from the literary scene, hopepunk is the latest storytelling template that centers around the “concept of hope itself, with all the implications of love, kindness, and faith in humanity it encompasses,” according to Vox Magazine.
Writer Alexandra Rowland, posting on Tumblr, says “The opposite of grimdark is hopepunk. Pass it on.” That was 2017.
So what is grimdark?
It’s a literary term used to describe a grim, cynical and pessimistic worldview. One could argue it applies to the bulk of social issue documentaries in the early 21st century. These well-intentioned films often left viewers feeling depressed rather than empowered.
So…when will we see hopepunk documentaries take off?
I believe the trend began years ago, but under different names: transformative documentaries, conscious cinema, positive documentaries.
Rather than paralyzing viewers, these expectant films feature solution-oriented protagonists combating wicked social issues—with success.
Director Joe Berliner (Crude, 2009) says investigative “take-down” docs will always be needed, but there’s been an imbalance, which his stirring 2016 film Tony Robbins: I Am Not Your Guru helps to correct.
Times are a changin’, even in the knock-down genre of political documentaries. For example, the uplifting verite hit Knock Down the House, featuring polarizing then-candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, received an astonishing approval rating of 100% on Rotten Tomatoes.
If that’s the case, we might ask, what are the editorial mechanisms at work in documentaries that don’t depend on bad things happening to grip an audience? While that’s a topic for another blog, I recommend studying award-winning films on which I’ve recently collaborated, such as Good Fortune, Tyrus, and Love Thy Nature. Note the drama implicit in the protagonists’ creative acts.
