Three great documentaries to stream

“I Didn’t See You There” (2022)

By Ben Kenigsberg

The proliferation of documentaries on streaming services makes it difficult to choose what to watch. Here are three nonfiction films that will reward your time.

‘I Didn’t See You There’ (2022)

Before making “Life After” — a haunting documentary, currently in theaters, that takes a critical view of how society approaches the concept of medically assisted suicide for people with disabilities — director Reid Davenport looked squarely at his own life in this deeply personal feature debut.

Until “I Didn’t See You There,” Davenport, who has cerebral palsy, explains in the opening voice-over, he had never been able to shoot his movies himself. This time, he worked with a new camera that he could handle personally. “It allowed me to be more spontaneous and look for shapes and patterns without worrying about meanings and words,” he says.

Some of the material indeed verges on abstraction. The camera gazes skyward as we overhear the voices of unseen passersby. Percussive music plays as the lens looks downward at different street textures and grates while Davenport, in a wheelchair, races over them. He begins the movie with a philosophical observation about movement: When a train running beside him starts accelerating after he does, he notes, “there is a moment when we’re going exactly the same speed.”

Other parts of “I Didn’t See You There” veer closer to social critique. To get access to the world, Davenport says, he has sought to live in urban areas — such as Oakland, California, his home at the time of filming — that have continuous sidewalks and good public transit. Even so, at times we see people blocking his path with a car or a thick electrical cord. A bus driver, instructing him on how to sit on the bus, as if Davenport had never ridden a bus before, is infuriatingly curt. Later, the filmmaker discusses how he became politicized over the years.

He also considers a historical view. A circus tent near his apartment keeps intruding in his shots. “The tent made me think about the legacy of the freak show,” he says. “About being looked at, but not seen.” He recounts the “complex disenfranchisement” experienced by famous circus performers. By coincidence, his hometown, Bethel, Connecticut, was the birthplace of showman P.T. Barnum. “A cynical part of me wonders if I have joined the show,” Davenport muses at one point. “I’ve made a career out of putting myself in front of the camera.”

But the movie has a sweet side as well. Late in the film, in an endearing family interlude, he gives his young niece a chance to operate the camera. She’s the only other cinematographer listed in the closing credits. (Rent it on Amazon and Apple TV.)

‘Nothing Lasts Forever’ (2022)

Diamonds are apparently not, with apologies to Marilyn Monroe, a girl’s best friend. Instead, in the documentary “Nothing Lasts Forever,” they become a fascinating prism for exploring the concept of value.

This documentary, directed by Jason Kohn (“Manda Bala”), starts as an industry exposé but clearly has bigger questions on its mind. The filmmaker begins by asking one of his subjects, gemologist Dusan Simic, why diamond mining continues if equally flawless diamonds can be made in a lab more cheaply. “Some people want something that really belongs to the earth,” Simic replies. But he adds: “From the gemological point of view, there is really no difference.”

That’s just the tip of the iceberg. To ask whether a diamond is real or fake is, in the film’s schema, to miss the point. Notwithstanding gentle pushback from a DeBeers executive, Kohn and his interviewees persuasively argue that the worth of all diamonds is an illusion: The stones, we’re told, aren’t geologically rare, and their prices are artificially high because the supply is controlled. Although Kohn visits India and China to illustrate processes by which synthetic diamonds can reach the market undetected, fake diamonds might not be as much a concern for sellers as you would think.

“The problem is not the mixing,” says jewelry designer Aja Raden, whose acerbic dismissals of all things diamond-related are a delight throughout. “The problem is consumers finding out about the mixing.” If a buyer doesn’t know the difference, she says, “The difference doesn’t exist.” And the myth that natural diamonds are valuable, she suggests, gives the synthetic variety a perceived value as well.

Even diamond broker Martin Rapaport, perhaps the movie’s staunchest opponent of lab-grown diamonds, admits, “We don’t really sell diamonds. We sell the idea behind the diamonds” — that is, the symbolism of love and commitment. John Janik, from the tech side, describes the stones in less romantic, more pragmatic terms. In the film he foresees a future in which diamonds end up as transistors in personal devices. (Stream it on Paramount+.)

‘Cooked: Survival by ZIP Code’ (2018)

Thirty years ago this summer, a heat wave in Chicago led to a staggering 739 deaths, according to one widely accepted estimate. But the mortality rate wasn’t evenly distributed; it was far higher in economically disadvantaged neighborhoods. At a striking moment in “Cooked: Survival by ZIP Code,” Steven Whitman, who had been director of research in the city’s public health department in the 1990s, explains that the neighborhoods with the most heat-related deaths could be mapped, almost perfectly, onto areas plagued by other social problems: vacant lots, violent crime, high rates of diabetes and breast cancer, and so on.

The thesis of this documentary, in which director Judith Helfand looks back on that summer, is that while the heat may technically have led to those deaths, it was also a convenient scapegoat. The real disaster — extreme, neglected poverty — arrived long before the temperatures rose and persisted long after. “Had the heat not occurred, they wouldn’t have died that week, that’s for sure,” Whitman says in the film, referring to the deceased. “But they would have died too soon anyway.”

Much of the retrospective material is still enraging. Helfand, in voice-over, reflects on the queue of refrigerated trucks, filled with bodies, that parked outside the county morgue that July. (“They finally got the air conditioning they needed — while awaiting autopsy.”) She questions a comment by then-Mayor Richard Daley on the “number of nonviolent deaths” in the city. (“Being cooked to death behind closed doors seemed to me to be a pretty violent way to die,” she says.)

But Helfand extends her purview beyond Chicago. She argues that the 1995 heat wave was a forerunner of the social disparities seen a decade later during Hurricane Katrina. She looks into the disaster-preparedness industry, in which people spend vast sums of money rehearsing for extremely unlikely cataclysms. In the most surreal and damning moment, she films Chicago firefighters elaborately role-playing a tornado response; what’s absurd isn’t the drill — the Midwest ought to prepare for tornadoes — but the fact that, according to a news clip, the simulation was financed with a $250,000 federal grant and took place in Englewood, a South Side neighborhood that Helfand has, by that point, visited repeatedly in the movie. In this food desert, a $250,000 investment could do immediate, obvious good. (Stream it on Ovid. Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV and Google Play.)