Critic Reviews

Hall and Tiexiera create something incredibly special with Subject. The subject matter (pun totally intended) yields a documentary that isn’t against the documentary world, but wants audiences to simply question what they’re watching

The question of who gets to tell stories is discussed (spoiler: mostly white men, until recently), and for a 97-minute film, Subject squeezes in a lot of ethical biggies.

Subject acknowledges sensitivities are shifting but also pointedly makes clear, for the damaged souls here, they didn’t change quick enough.

It’s thought-provoking stuff, which also explores our own role, as audience members, in the voracious demand for other people’s stories.

A documentary dork’s delight, Jennifer Tiexiera and Camilla Hall’s Subject is one of those films about which my biggest lament is that it could have been five times as long — with the caveat that while I would be down for a 10-part series on documentary ethics, this 96-minute intro will be a thoroughly effective conversation starter.

Subject includes harrowing stories while leading voices in the documentary sphere offer their insights. It’s not a film out for blood, which becomes a blessing and a curse for its filmmakers.

When its pet topics enter into conversation with one another, revealing a throughline underscoring the basic rights of everyone working on a film project, Subject cruises along. In the film’s most propulsive sections, passion is as paramount as self-awareness, with vigorously cut documentary snippets affectionately emphasizing its self-critical points.

It’s easy to form an opinion about the subject of a great many docs, but unsettling to realize how little we know about how they were treated.

Subject is at its clearest when interrogating the material conditions of documentary filmmaking, as during a segment about whether the subjects of nonfiction films have the right to be paid for their participation; it feels slipperier when glossing issues of diversity and representation.