As in years past, 2022 promises a trove of documentaries – some still on delayed releases due to the pandemic – about the world’s biggest celebrities, scandals and contemporary forces (namely: TikTok). The coming year will see the unveiling of a Kanye West project 20-plus years in the making, an investigation into the aftermath of two Boeing aircraft due to design flaws, Amy Poehler’s documentary debut on Lucille Ball, and perhaps the premiere of the long-gestating and still-unnamed Rihanna film.
With more sure to be announced in the coming months, here are some of the most anticipated documentaries of 2022:
Jeen-yuhs: A Kanye West trilogy
Arguably the most anticipated documentary of the year, Jeen-yuhs culls 20 years of footage from the rapper and producer Ye’s (the name West now goes by) early career in Chicago to provocative (for better or for worse) superstardom into a “documentary trilogy”. Directed by longtime collaborators Coodie & Chike (the Chicago natives Clarence “Coodie” Simmons and Chike Ozah, who directed the video for Ye’s debut single, Through the Wire, in 2002, Jeen-yuhs promises never-before-seen footage of Ye’s early career. A first-look clip released in September finds a young Ye and Mos Def trading bars to a camera in New York, 2002. Netflix reportedly paid $30m for the project, which does not involve Ye though did receive his approval for use of the archival material. The Sundance entry will hit streaming at an unannounced date later this year.
The Janes
The Janes, an HBO-produced Sundance entry from Tia Lessin and Emma Pildes, revisits the Jane Collective, a clandestine network of women from Chicago who helped women obtain safe, illegal abortions between 1969 and 1973, the year the supreme court guaranteed a woman’s right to an abortion in Roe v Wade. It’s a look into the past – an underground service of safe houses, code names and blindfolds assisting women desperate for help – which could foreshadow a dystopian future of criminalized abortion in the US, as the conservative supreme court appears poised to overturn or at least gut the landmark decision in 2022.
Rihanna
Just like her follow-up album to 2016’s Anti, the still-untitled Rihanna documentary by director Peter Berg (Friday Night Lights) appears to be on seemingly permanent delay. The long-gestating project – the film has been in the works for six years and was acquired by Amazon for a whopping $25m in 2019 – has no confirmed release date after the pandemic delayed its initial planned 2020 release until summer 2021, and then again until … who knows. Maybe 2022? Perhaps the extra couple of years allowed Berg to assemble even more footage than the reportedly 1,200 hours he filmed before 2020, during which time the Barbadian singer launched her Fenty beauty line, became the first black woman to head a luxury line for LMVH, debuted her now staple lingerie line Savage x Fenty, started dating fellow musician A$AP Rocky, and maintained global superstardom.
Benjamin Franklin
Documentary titan Ken Burns’s latest is a deep dive into one of the most prolific and dynamic Americans of the 18th century: Benjamin Franklin, the writer, printer, philosopher, inventor, diplomat and socialite, a rare transcontinental celebrity in his own time. The two-part, four-hour project, which airs on 4-5 April on PBS, promises to admire Franklin’s life with a critical eye uncommon to biographies of the founding fathers; the logline notes that Franklin’s life was “full of contradictions” – he eventually denounced slavery but owned enslaved people in middle age, he condemned violence against Native Americans but championed white expansion on to indigenous lands.
We Need to Talk About Cosby
The comedian and CNN host W Kamau Bell delves into one of the most fraught cultural legacies in recent memory: that of Bill Cosby, the comedian and former television staple convicted of sexual assault in 2018. (Cosby was freed in 2021 after the Pennsylvania supreme court overturned his conviction on a legal technicality; at least 60 women have publicly accused him of sexual assault, often through a sickening pattern of tranquilizing drugs and denial.) According to the logline, Bell’s four-part series, which premieres at Sundance and airs on Showtime on 30 January, incorporates archival material and cultural and political analysis to “reconsider his mark in a society where rape culture, toxic masculinity, capitalism and white supremacy is shaping how we re-evaluate sex, power and agency”.
The Occupied City
Award-winning director Steve McQueen’s documentary about Nazi-occupied Amsterdam during the second world war has been in production for several years, and may not be ready by the end of 2022 (no release date has been announced). But anticipation is high for the Oscar winner’s $5.7m-budget film based on the book Atlas van een Bezette Stad, Amsterdam 1940-1945 by McQueen’s wife, the Dutch film-maker and producer Bianca Stigter, whose debuted her own Holocaust-set documentary, Three Minutes: A Lengthening, at the Venice film festival.
Downfall: The Case Against Boeing
In October 2018, Lion Air Flight 610, a Boeing 737 Max jet, plunged into the Java Sea minutes after takeoff from Jakarta, killing 189 people. Four months later, another 737 Max, Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, crashed six minutes after takeoff from Addis Ababa, killing 157. Investigators later concluded that malfunctioning automatic flight controls caused the planes to nosedive, and that mentions of recent changes to said system were deleted from pilot training manuals. Downfall: The Case Against Boeing, directed by Rory Kennedy, is the second documentary project to explore the American company’s prioritization of profit over safety in less than a year; the Netflix film follows Boeing’s Fatal Flaw, the PBS Frontline and New York Times collaboration which premiered in September 2021. Kennedy’s film, which premieres at Sundance, will explore the company’s PR crisis in the wake of the disasters.
TikTok, Boom
For those looking for a visual deep dive into TikTok’s rapid ascent to the forefront of digital culture, there’s TikTok, Boom, from director Shalini Kantayya. The Sundance entry chronicles TikTok’s rise to prominence from Music.ly to the most downloaded app in the world (owned by the Chinese company ByteDance) and its stupefying forces of virality, through the perspective of Gen Z app users and stars, journalists and experts.
Chocobar
The celebrated Argentinian film-maker Lucrecia Martel follows Zama with her first entry into non-fiction: Chocobar, a hybrid fiction-documentary project about the murder of the indigenous Argentinian activist Javier Chocobar by a white landowner in 2007. The film, which Martel has described as “a documentary which is mortally wounded in its pretensions to be a documentary, because the problem in this story is the document”, won the top international prize at the 2020 Locarno film festival’s The Films After Tomorrow Initiative, in Switzerland, for films stalled by the pandemic. No release date has been announced.
The Princess
We are reaching peak saturation of Diana content, from the disastrous Diana: The Musical to the critically acclaimed fourth season of The Crown to Kirsten Stewart’s likely Oscar-nominated turn in Pablo Larraín’s surreal Spencer. Now comes Ed Perkins’ The Princess, premiering at Sundance with an HBO Max streaming date to be announced, which purports to examine the life of the People’s Princess and her influence on the public’s view of the monarchy, both during her life and long after her death in 1997.
Lucy and Desi
Amy Poehler’s documentary debut, produced by Ron Howard, examines the life of the groundbreaking comedian Lucille Ball and her intense, devoted partnership with husband and I Love Lucy co-star Desi Arnaz. Poehler, who has directed the feature films Wine Country and Moxie, took on her first non-fiction project as a longtime fan of Ball. It was inspired by “her story and what kind of woman she was in business, and what kind of culture she was in when she was making the show”, she told Variety in 2020, as well as the “interesting and complicated and loving” relationship with Arnaz. Here’s hoping reviews are stronger than for last year’s coolly received Being the Ricardos, Aaron Sorkin’s feature starring Nicole Kidman as Ball and (controversially) Spanish actor Javier Bardem as the Cuban American Arnaz.