Book reveal: MONDO DOCUMENTARY
“A love letter to the art of nonfiction filmmaking” (Judd Apatow)
Doc Voices is pleased to exclusively announce the publication of MONDO DOCUMENTARY by my colleague Thom Powers. The book highlights more than 350 documentaries that Thom has presented in his twenty years as TIFF’s documentary programmer, plus an autobiographical introduction where he traces his career journey. The films range from the famous to the infamous and the overlooked. As I’m editing my own doc, this book reminds me how rich, complex and multifaceted the genre is and how much more there is to explore. Filmmaker Geeta Gandbhir calls it “the ultimate guide to the last two decades of documentary filmmaking.” – Bella Racklin
The official publishing date of Mondo Documentary is September 3 but you can pre-order your copy now. It’s available exclusively from our new imprint of Pure Nonfiction Books (not on Amazon).
I asked Thom about his motivation for writing the book and what he discovered in trawling through two decades of programming.
Bella: What motivated you to compile this book?
Thom: It only started a few months ago in April when I started thinking about the milestone of my 20th year in this job as TIFF’s doc programmer. I was thinking about it in relation to a number of recent deaths. I write in the book’s introduction about the significance of Noah Cowan to my career. He was TIFF’s codirector who hired me in 2006 and he gave me a foundational education in festivals that I put not only into TIFF, but in my later work cofounding DOC NYC and the Montclair Film Festival. Three years ago, Noah was diagnosed with brain cancer. He wasn’t a person to dwell on regrets, but he did express a lament to me that in our work as programmers we’re always looking forward and that can cause us to miss opportunities to look back. He died a year later and that gave me a strong resolve to make time for looking back.
Bella: And what did you find in that process?
Thom: Throughout the book, you can catch signals of what was yet to come. For instance, I look at that first year of 2006 and the film Ghosts of Cité Soleil, about two Haitians caught up in the violent convulsions of their country. It’s by the Danish director Asger Leth and that was a harbinger of so many strong documentaries to come out of Denmark, followed by Janus Metz’s Armadillo in 2010, and so on.
I can chart a new profusion of fashion documentaries that takes off with Valentino: The Last Emperor in 2007. In the wake of that comes The September Issue, The Gospel According to Andre and so many others. I can trace similar movements with documentaries about music and sports. Look at the chapter on 2009 and you’ll see the emergence of ESPN’s 30 for 30 series with Peter Berg’s Kings Ransom about Wayne Gretzky.
Bella: The book is full of veteran doc makers – Barbara Kopple, Frederick Wiseman, Raoul Peck. Can you talk more about directors in these pages who were still emerging?
Thom: Lucy Walker came to TIFF with her second film Blindsight in 2006 that’s about a group of young blind Tibetan students being taken on an expedition up Mount Everest. In 2014 Dieudo Hamadi from the Democratic Republic of the Congo brought one of his early works National Diploma about students trying to navigate a broken education system. He’s continued moving from strength to strength. And it’s been exciting to watch a groundswell of documentary making from India, exemplified by films such as The Cinema Travellers and While We Watched.
Bella: You include an essay you wrote called “Wanted: Documentary Critics” in 2008. It reminds me just how much film criticism in general has shrunk since then.
Thom: I have to credit Eric Kohn, formerly a critic at Indiewire, now a programmer at the Southampton Playhouse. For many years, Eric taught a class at New York University and invited me as a guest speaker after giving students that essay to read. That made me come back to it in recent years and made me realize that its basic tenets still hold: there are a wealth of documentaries waiting to be discussed and debated. Of course, film criticism is changing. Today, maybe the platform is Letterboxd or Substack instead of newspapers and magazines. Whatever is the venue, I’m eager to see more people jump in to engage the past, present and future of documentary. I hope Mondo Documentary can be an inspiration for that.
Bella: The book brings us all the way up to this year. What should audiences look out for at TIFF Docs in 2025?
Thom: You can trace my strong interest in journalism throughout this book in titles such as The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers or one of the great films about war photographers Shooting Robert King. Now in 2025 that theme of journalism is prevalent across several films including Cover-up by Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus about investigative reporter Seymour Hersh or Love+War by Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin about the Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Lynsey Addario. And that’s just for starters.
Journalism and documentary work is also central to stories in The Eyes of Ghana, Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk and Nuns vs the Vatican. I describe Mondo Documentary as a book of love letters. These are films that moved my heart and I hope audiences will experience the same.
See you next week!
Bella