Encounters You don’t have to stop watching documentaries for the rest of the year just because the South African International Documentary Film Festival closed this past weekend.
With award-winning, motivational true stories like Rise: The Siya Kolisi Story and Blind Ambition, heartbreaking true-crime dramas like Girl, Taken, and Stella Murders, and jaw-dropping, so-crazy-it-must-be-true tales like Rosemary’s Hitlist, 2023 is shaping up to be a banner year for African documentaries on Showmax.
100 FOOT WAVE S1-2
In Season 2 of the HBO documentary series 100 Foot Wave, big-wave surfing pioneer Garrett McNamara, his surfing contemporaries, and some unexpected newcomers continue to test the frontiers of their sport and of their minds and bodies.
Season 1 was nominated for Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Series at the 2022 Emmys and won for Outstanding Cinematography. Additionally, it was nominated for a Cinema Eye Honours Award for Best Cinematography and received a Producers Guild of America Award for Outstanding Sports Program.
On Rotten Tomatoes, the show got a perfect score from critics, with LA Weekly describing it as “a wild ride… both maddening and captivating to watch.”
LOVE, LIZZO
Lizzbians, pay attention! The HBO documentary Love, Lizzo tells the story of a trailblazing celebrity and body-positive hero who, by being herself, started the movement the world so urgently needed.
Lizzo has now received four Grammy Awards, including the coveted 2023 Record of the Year. In 2019, she was named Time Magazine’s Entertainer of the Year. She also has an Emmy (Watch Out For The Big Grrrls), 13 million Instagram followers, over 26 million TikTok followers, and more than a billion likes, making her the platform’s Most Viewed Artist in 2022.
Love, Lizzo, directed by Grammy and Emmy nominee Doug Pray (The Defiant Ones), was nominated for the 2023 MTV Movie + TV Awards’ Best Music Documentary.
WOMEN WHO ROCK S1
A four-part documentary series called Women Who Rock honors the countless pioneering female musicians who have stormed the stage, wielded their instruments, amplified their voices, and sang the music that has become the background to our lives.
The show honors female artists and their tales of notoriety, influence, candor, defiance, and fought-for success.
Women Who Rock include artists such Shania Twain, Norah Jones, Sheryl Crow, Joan Jett, Pat Benatar, Chaka Khan, Janis Joplin, Annie Clark (as St Vincent), Macy Gray, Nancy Wilson, Tori Amos, and Mavis Staples on it, and it was nominated for the 2023 Cinema Eye Honors Awards for Outstanding Anthology Series.
JANET JACKSON
Despite having over 100 million album sales and five Grammy awards, Janet Jackson has also undergone enormous tragedy and a turbulent personal life under intense media scrutiny.
The legendary pop artist opens up about her private life for the first time in the four-part documentary series Janet Jackson. She talks openly about growing up in the spotlight as a member of one of the most famous musical families of all time and, of course, about her brother Michael. The five-year-long production includes interviews with stars including Mariah Carey, Samuel L. Jackson, Whoopi Goldberg, Regina King, Debbie Allen, Janelle Monáe, and Tyler Perry in addition to archival footage, never-before-seen home films, and other notables.