What is Documentary all about?

What makes a documentary “important”? What

makes it worth referencing, or remembering, or even
watching in the first place? Why, in this time of
seemingly perpetual sociopolitical strife, would we
veer away from the vaunted, glorious escapism of
big feature films and go see something small and
rooted in the real, instead?
Documentaries can be a hard sell, but it’s one that’s
getting easier all the time. Once viewed as
something stiff and obligatory, documentary
film has, in recent years, risen to the top of the heap
thanks in no small part to some of the earth-shaking,
needle-pushing, and ultimately world-changing films
that are listed here, which find their focus in war,
love, sex, death, and everything in between. And as
for this list its only qualifier is that these are the
critically acclaimed, historically important, and pivotal
films that a person who cares about film (and in
doing so, often cares about humanity, in general)
should really get to know.
 The ACT of KILLING (2012)

 Joshua Oppenheimer’s quixotic, vaguely

psychedelic film is markedly unlike any other
documentary you’re ever likely to see about a
genocide. Oppenheimer explores the mid-1960s
massacre of communists and ethnic Chinese
people in Indonesia (in which nearly half a
million people died) by inviting some of the
surviving (and proud) executioners to make their
own movie about the events, and to tell the story
through their own dramatic re-enactments.
(They portray not only themselves, but also
people they interrogated, tortured, and killed.)
“The gusto with which [the documentary’s
central figure Anwar] Congo and his compatriots
take to the project is jarring; this is grisly history
as told by the victors,” Jonah
Weiner wrote in The New Yorker.