DCist’s selective and subjective guide to some of the most interesting movies documentaries playing around town in the coming week.

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Could be be filming his own murderer? (Music Box Films)

Happy People: A Year in the Taiga

Ian Frazier’s 2010 book Travels in Siberia presents a land with certain creature comforts despite its stature as a forbidding tundra: the butter and ice cream was the best he’d tasted anywhere. Lest the West take Siberia for a picnic, a new documentary immerses us in a land where men build their own shelter and transportation, and sprinkles might as well be caviar. Russian filmmaker Dmitry Vasyukov made a four-hour TV documentary about the life of Siberian fur-trappers, and this footage caught the eye of director/character Actor Werner Herzog (Grizzly Man, Jack Reacher). Herzog condensed Vasyukov’s footage and wrote narration for the latest chapter in his life’s work documenting man’s sometimes harrowing relationship with the natural world.

View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street Landmark Cinema.

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Left to Right: Avraham Shalom, Ami Ayalon, Yaakov Peri, Yuval Diskin, Avi Dichter, Carmi Gillon(Avner Shahaf/Irit Harel/Sony Pictures Classics)

The Gatekeepers

Six former heads of Shin Bet, the Israeli secret service, discuss how they reconsidered their hard-line positions in this documentary. The Gatekeepers was nominated for Best Documentary Feature, and while I’m personally rooting for Searching for Sugar Man, the buzz is good around Dror Moreh’s film, which reportedly uses conventional talking head interviews to weave a compelling and morally complex story. Read Ian Buckwalter’s Atlantic review here.

View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Landmark E Street Cinema and Bethesda Row.

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Little Heaven

Belgian filmmalker Lieven Corthouts has directed two films about Ethiopia, where he lived for seven years. Little Heaven is structured around the diaries of young Lydia, who writes of her thirteenth birthday as a happy day when she didn’t have to go to school. But the day is a powerful milestone for another reason, for it is the day when a nurse at the orphanage where she lives informs Lydia that she is HIV positive. Part of the Human Rights Watch Film Festival. Read an interview with director Courthouts here.

View the trailer.
Wednesday, February 27 at 7:00 pm at West End Cinema.

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The Photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher

The abandoned industrial properties that dot our modern landscape may seem like eyesores best forgotten. But these harsh structures have a dry art that lures a certain kind of photographer. Bernd and Hilla Becher started to photograph these structures in 1959, and the resulting photographs became their Typologies project and influenced a whole school of German photographers.

View the trailer.
Monday, February 25 at 6:30 pm at the Goethe-Institut.

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The Iran Job

Athlete Kevin Sheppard has had an international career. As a teenage soccer player he was courted by Manchester United. He left Jacksonville University for a career in professional basketball that led him not to NBA stardom but to teams in South America, China, and Israel before he found his most challenging post: the Iranian Super League.

View the trailer.
Friday, Februrary 22 at 7:00 pm and Sunday, February 24 at 2:00 pm at the Freer. Free. Directors Till Schauder and Sara Nodjoumi will appear at the Sunday afternoon screening.

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Also opening this week, Dwayne Johnson, aka The Rock, stars in Snitch, inspired by a true story. We’ll have a full review tomorrow.