Documentaries about an eccentric psychic, an alien-seeker, interspecies pals, and extraordinary athleticism wouldn’t appear to be cut from the same cloth. But Netflix’s Real to Reel documentary panel, featuring some of the platform’s new and notable features—hosted remotely December 11 by Vanity Fair’s chief critic Richard Lawson—threaded their commonality with ease.
Directors Kareem Tabsch (Mucho Mucho Amor), Pippa Ehrlich (My Octopus Teacher), Ian Bonhôte (Rising Phoenix), and Matt Killip (John Was Trying to Contact Aliens) gathered virtually from far-flung locales to offer candid recollections about approaching reclusive or outsize documentary subjects, and the challenges of observing them without intruding—of making films that were both sensitive and honest.
“We knew early on that this was going to be both a great opportunity, but also a great responsibility,” said Tabsch, who directed Mucho Mucho Amor—a spirited, deeply affectionate portrayal of Latin psychic Walter Mercado. Mercado was a larger-than-life, gender-bending figure who captivated audiences for decades with theatrical readings of horoscopes on daytime television.
“Walter was universally beloved in the Latinx community,” Tabsch continued. “So, you’re coming in with the responsibility of sharing the story of someone who is immensely popular and immensely famous to this audience.”
Tabsch noted that he and his codirector Cristina Costantini (who was not present at the panel) found themselves getting exceptionally close to Mercado and his family, Tabsch even acting as a pallbearer at his funeral. (Mercado died of kidney failure in 2019, just a few months before the January 2020 Netflix release.) But they had to manage more than their own starry-eyed affection for Mercado’s eccentric, magnanimous presence. As Tabsch said, they became “an extension of the family, and broke those documentary rules about not getting too close to our subjects.” (And they’re not the only ones: At one point in the doc, Lin-Manuel Miranda meets Mercado, and can barely contain tears of joy.)
My Octopus Teacher also portrays a documentarian getting close to their subject: nature photographer Craig Foster, who forms a sort of friendship with an eight-armed sea creature. Ehrlich’s job was to transform Foster’s archival material into a feature. And while Foster gained the octopus’s trust, Ehrlich had to gain Foster’s. She spent a year going on dives with Foster before he opened up to her about his interspecies friendship. “He told me the full story of the octopus, and he sent me the treatment,” she said. “And I remember sitting at my desk and I just started crying and crying and crying, and I just knew that it was a story I really wanted to make.”
Ehrlich then had to figure out how to navigate some of the footage’s most dramatic moments, such as when the octopus, now warmed up to Foster, loses an arm to a pyjama shark when she’s caught off guard.
“On land, when you’re dealing with animals, they’ve known people in their space for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. But marine creatures are not used to us, they don’t know us,” Ehrlich said. “They’re much more likely to be curious, and much more likely to let you get close. There’s a lot of responsibility that comes with that, and that was something we tried exploring. Did this octopus feel a little too safe with Craig around, and that’s why she didn’t notice the shark until it was too late? What should he do at that point? Should he intervene? Shouldn’t he intervene?”
In John Was Trying to Contact Aliens, Matt Killip experienced a different kind of tension. The film follows UFO hunter John Shepherd, a gentle eccentric who’d spent three decades beaming a diverse range of music into outer space in the hopes of pinging extraterrestrial life. Killip had only about five days with Shepherd; he then spent a year on and off editing his footage, along with Shepherd’s own photographs and other footage.
No one spends 30 years playing records into space without believing aliens are real. But Killip was more interested in the humanity of Shepherd’s story. “Part of what John was doing was trying to make contact with aliens, but I do think he was trying to make contact with human beings,” he said.
“There was a slight tension between us about that,” he said. “I think John envisaged a History Channel–type documentary—are aliens out there? Can I prove that they exist? The more we spent time together, I think, he did start to understand what I was doing.” The result is an immersive 16-minute tone poem about a space DJ that shows just how far we’re willing to go to find connections.
A similar humanity is what drew director Ian Bonhôte to the subject of the Paralympic Games for his visually stunning Rising Phoenix, which interweaves the story of nine athletes who’ve turned physical limitations into extraordinary accomplishments with the tale of German Jewish refugee Ludwig Guttmann, a neurosurgeon who discovered that frequent turning of soldiers with spinal cord injuries in their beds saved their lives by preventing infection. His prescription for sporting activity and competition as an excellent form of physical therapy led to the first Paralympic Games in 1948.
“What really struck us was the fact that the Paralympics movement is this amazing disability civil rights organization,” Bonhôte said. “Not like the Olympics, which is this celebration of perfection in a way—perfect bodies, perfect scores. The Paralympics movement is actually about changing perspective, getting an audience and getting people to see people they might not see every day.”
Rising Phoenix introduces athletes from fencing to track to archery, capturing physical prowess made all the more compelling when viewers discover how each athlete honed theirs. We see French runner Jean-Baptiste Alaize, a 2017 bronze winner, who survived a machete attack at three years old. The story of wheelchair racer Tatyana McFadden, nicknamed the Beast for her massive upper body strength, is even more poignant when we see footage of her in a Russian orphanage, where she learned to move using only the strength of her arms.
As the panel wrapped, Tabsch noted that he initially thought these four films were too disparate to be grouped in together. But in discussing each other’s work, their similarities became obvious.
“After thinking about it, I realized we’re all telling stories about outsiders,” he said. “People who are living for better or worse, almost in the fringes of society, but who are bravely living as themselves, and brazenly being who they are with a great deal of pride…. We’ve all made films that make people feel good. As someone who’s seen all these films and loved them, it meant a great deal to me to have a little bit of escape from the dumpster fire of 2020 with these wonderful films.”
This article is part of a partnership in which Vanity Fair highlights select movies on Netflix.
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