Four picks across television, film and podcast that will take American viewers and listeners to places with vastly different systems and understandings of justice.
The true crime genre can often feel very America-centric: Crimes that take place in the United States, with American perpetrators, victims and investigators. So the systems at play — political, legal, cultural, press — are all anchored to a similar playbook, and the failures and successes of these systems can feel repetitive.
But lately, more documentaries and podcasts take audiences far from American shores and immerse them in societies with very different customs and expectations — and little in common with how crimes are approached, understood, pursued and solved in the United States. Here are four picks that will transport American viewers and listeners.
Documentary Mini-Series
“Wanted: The Escape of Carlos Ghosn”
This four-part docuseries on Apple TV+ takes viewers on a well-paced ride between Japan, France and Lebanon that involves an escape almost too fantastical for Hollywood. At its center is Carlos Ghosn, a Lebanese chief executive, born in Brazil and raised in Lebanon and France, with a Midas touch when it came to automakers. Among other feats, he brought Nissan back from the brink of failure about 25 years ago. By doing so, he became a glitzy and beloved figure in Japan, until he was arrested there for alleged financial wrongdoings.
Along the way — through interviews with journalists, Ghosn’s wife, his associates (business and otherwise) and Ghosn himself — the stark differences in how executive compensation, justice, surveillance and criminal investigations are thought of and handled in these various countries are on display.
Documentary Film
“Missing: The Lucie Blackman Case”
The police processes of Japan are explored from another angle in this Netflix documentary, which tells the story of Lucie Blackman, a 21-year-old British woman who was living and working in Tokyo when she went missing in 2000. Immediately after, her distraught family, led by her unyielding father, traveled there and — after proving that they would not be dismissed or diminished — spurred a massive search for her.
Cultural clashes frustrate the family and complicate the effort, and you may finish this documentary with as many questions as when you started (though they will be very different questions). Unlike many true-crime stories, there is closure to the case, and the outcome is shocking.
Podcast
“Notes on a Scandal”
In this podcast, one of Pakistan’s first in the true crime realm, we travel to Karachi in the late 1960s and early ’70s, when the city’s lust-fueled nightlife and high-society scandals would rival the most sensational eras of Hollywood or New York.
This story has it all: the mysterious death of a tortured poet, Mustafa Zaidi, whose body was found next to his unconscious muse and lover, the socialite Shahnaz Gul, renown for her beauty; a rumored suicide pact; an exhumation; a murder trial; breathless media coverage; and even revenge porn, which was not digital as we understand it today, but printed on thousands of fliers.
The show’s hosts, Tooba Masood and Saba Imtiaz, Pakistan-based journalists, have been researching the circumstances surrounding Zaidi’s death for years. Over two seasons, they share their findings in great detail, attempt to apply logic to the gossip of that time and debate the legitimacy of the possible scenarios. This is an independent podcast, and some might find the format — a conversation between the hosts, with a couple of notable guests in Season 2 — simplistic, but there is nothing simple or boring about the tale they’ve resurfaced.
“Rough Translation: Love Commandos”
In India, arranged marriage, as its known in the West, is simply known as marriage — but marrying for love, which still accounts for only a small fraction of marriage there, is an anomaly called “love marriage.” As we learn in “Love Commandos,” the final season of NPR’s “Rough Translation” podcast, love marriage can be a dangerous, even deadly, proposition for the young couples who follow their hearts instead of their parents’ wishes.
In this five-episode podcast — hosted by Gregory Warner, guest-hosted by Mansi Choksi and drawing on years of reporting by the NPR correspondent Lauren Frayer — listeners are taken to modern-day India, where a mysterious Delhi-based group called Love Commandos has for about a decade offered shelter and safety to those who marry for love. Now, its leader, Sanjoy Sachdev, is facing allegations of extortion. As Warner puts it, “Escape is far from the same thing as freedom.”
Over five episodes, we hear from couples who’ve lived at the Love Commandos compound and from Sachdev himself. But the possible crimes perpetrated by Sachdev in many ways take a back seat to some of the painful details that illustrate the prevalence and normalization of fear, harassment, abuse and human rights violations seemingly inherent to love marriages — details that abound in nearly every story told.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
