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      Beyoncé Edges Closer to Her First Oscar Nomination as Shortlists Are Revealed

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      “Be Alive,” which the superstar wrote with Dixson for “King Richard,” made the academy’s cut in preliminary voting. So did Lin-Manuel Miranda, Billie Eilish and Van Morrison.Will Beyoncé and Lin-Manuel Miranda compete against each other at the Oscars? That matchup became a possibility on Tuesday when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced the shortlists for best song and nine other categories.Beyoncé and the songwriter Dixson made the cut for “Be Alive,” from “King Richard,” a biopic about the father of Venus and Serena Williams. If the song makes it through the next round, it would be Beyoncé’s first Oscar nomination. Miranda was included for “Dos Oruguitas,” which he wrote for “Encanto,” the animated tale about a gifted family in Colombia. Other contenders in the category include Billie Eilish and Finneas (for the Bond song “No Time to Die”) and Van Morrison (for “Down to Joy,” from “Belfast”), who has made news recently for songs protesting Covid-19 lockdown measures. (Eilish was also the subject of a documentary that made the shortlist.)For best score, Jonny Greenwood and Hans Zimmer might be competing against each other and themselves. Both are included twice: Greenwood for “The Power of the Dog” and “Spencer”; Zimmer for “Dune” and “No Time to Die.”Another notable twofer: “Flee,” the animated documentary about an Afghan refugee in Copenhagen, made the documentary and international feature lists. The documentary finalists included several films that made critics’ year-end best lists, including “Summer of Soul” and “The Velvet Underground.” The same goes for the international feature category, with “Drive My Car” (Japan’s submission) and “The Hand of God” (from Italy) making the cut.Members will begin voting on Jan. 27, and the final nominees will be announced on Feb. 8. The winners will be revealed in a ceremony scheduled for March 27.Here are the shortlists:Original Song“So May We Start?” (“Annette”)“Down to Joy” (“Belfast”)“Right Where I Belong” (“Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road”)“Automatic Woman” (“Bruised”)“Dream Girl” (“Cinderella”)“Beyond the Shore” (“CODA”)“The Anonymous Ones” (“Dear Evan Hansen”)“Just Look Up” (“Don’t Look Up”)“Dos Oruguitas” (“Encanto”)“Somehow You Do” (“Four Good Days”)“Guns Go Bang” (“The Harder They Fall”)“Be Alive” (“King Richard”)“No Time to Die” (“No Time to Die”)“Here I Am (Singing My Way Home)” (“Respect”)“Your Song Saved My Life” (“Sing 2”)Original Score“Being the Ricardos”“Candyman”“Don’t Look Up”“Dune”“Encanto”“The French Dispatch”“The Green Knight”“The Harder They Fall”“King Richard”“The Last Duel”“No Time to Die”“Parallel Mothers”“The Power of the Dog”“Spencer”“The Tragedy of Macbeth”Documentary Feature“Ascension”“Attica”“Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry”“Faya Dayi”“The First Wave”“Flee”“In the Same Breath”“Julia”“President”“Procession”“The Rescue”“Simple as Water”“Summer of Soul”“The Velvet Underground”“Writing With Fire”International FeatureAustria, “Great Freedom”Belgium, “Playground”Bhutan, “Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom”Denmark, “Flee”Finland, “Compartment No. 6”Germany, “I’m Your Man”Iceland, “Lamb”Iran, “A Hero”Italy, “The Hand of God”Japan, “Drive My Car”Kosovo, “Hive”Mexico, “Prayers for the Stolen”Norway, “The Worst Person in the World”Panama, “Plaza Catedral”Spain, “The Good Boss”Sound“Belfast”“Dune”“Last Night in Soho”“The Matrix Resurrections”“No Time to Die”“The Power of the Dog”“A Quiet Place Part II”Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      ‘Reopening Night’ Review: The Show Goes On

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      This HBO documentary goes behind the scenes of the Public Theater’s post-shutdown, modern adaptation of “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” featuring an all-Black cast.Rudy Valdez’s documentary, “Reopening Night,” takes viewers behind the scenes of “Merry Wives,” the Public Theater’s first production after the coronavirus pandemic shut down Broadway and other venues until earlier this year.The documentary, which is streaming on HBO, shows the difficulties of mounting a show outdoors while contending with the ever-looming threat of coronavirus: A cast member tests positive, the weather leads to cancellations, and the set pieces are constantly at risk of water damage if it rains.“Merry Wives,” a modern adaptation of Shakespeare’s “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” was staged last summer as part of the Public’s Shakespeare in the Park program. The play, which was set in South Harlem, included an all-Black cast.So many things can and do go wrong, but this production diary’s most intriguing element is the way it considers the value of art at a time when the country seems to be on fire. Shakespeare feels “frivolous,” says one of the cast members, in the face of a national health crisis, protests against police brutality and calls for racial justice.Interviews with the members of the cast, crew and staff — like the playwright Jocelyn Bioh (who adapted the play), the Public’s managing director, Jeremy Adams, and the “Merry Wives” director, Saheem Ali — reveal complex and deeply personal reasons for such devotion to the theater.There would seem to be “a chasm between people of color and Shakespeare,” but many of the performers find his work particularly suited to experimentations with language and the expression of diverse lineages. “Merry Wives” is a showcase for the possibilities of theatrical adaptation.But there’s nothing fresh about the execution, and Valdez’s inspirational tone can feel overly saccharine. Nevertheless, “Reopening Night” should offer a certain kind of satisfaction for those among us who’ve waited for the return of live theater with jittery anticipation.Reopening NightNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. Watch on HBO platforms. More

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      Streaming the Year’s Best Documentaries

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      Streaming the Year’s Best DocumentariesDavid RenardDeciding what to watch ��️Searchlight PicturesThe best movies of 2021 were even better on a big screen, The Times’s co-chief film critics, Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott, wrote at year’s end.But many of their top picks are available to stream. Try these documentaries → More

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      ‘President’ Review: Zimbabwe’s Struggle for Democracy

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      In a riveting new documentary, Camilla Nielsson follows the first democratic election in Zimbabwe since 1980.Eight months after Robert Mugabe, who ruled Zimbabwe autocratically for nearly 30 years starting in 1980, was ousted in a 2017 coup, the nation was set to elect a new president in its first democratic election since the start of Mugabe’s rule.Camilla Nielsson gives viewers a front-row seat to that July 2018 election in “President,” a riveting documentary that follows Nelson Chamisa, a charismatic 40-year-old lawyer, as he runs against Emmerson Mnangagwa, the strongman who unseated Mugabe.Nielsson’s access to Chamisa allows for an intimate look at the Catch-22 of establishing a democracy amid state-sanctioned violence and corruption, and the grit of those fighting for it. The juxtaposition of the candidates’ strategies is apparent when, as both sides arrive at a courthouse for a pivotal case, the camera pans first to the pile of papers with which the opposition will make its case and then to the police stockpiling nightsticks.Chamisa says repeatedly that he is willing to die for his cause. His charisma and connection to the people make him an excellent anchor for the film, reflecting and representing Zimbabwe’s decades-long struggle for a fair democracy. The film includes harrowing images of citizens being beaten, hosed down and shot at by the military and police for demonstrating in support of Chamisa.President Mnangagwa claims victory in the election, despite allegations of vote rigging that are raised by the opposition. It’s a somber end to a film that opens with and is undergirded by Zimbabweans’ hope for change.PresidentNot rated. Running time: 2 hours. In theaters. More

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      ‘Juice WRLD: Into the Abyss’ Review: Free Fall

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      This unfocused documentary looks at the career of the rapper Juice WRLD, who died of an accidental overdose in 2019.“Juice WRLD: Into the Abyss” opens with three and a half minutes of Juice WRLD, the rapper born as Jarad A. Higgins, freestyling in a single take. Not long after, the film shows him doing the same on a radio show. The most exciting moments in this documentary, directed by Tommy Oliver, showcase the artist’s ability to rap “off the top of the dome,” as the singer and rapper iLoveMakonnen says.But much of the film consists not of blistering to-camera improvisation but of loosely structured backstage footage. Juice WRLD died at 21 of an accidental overdose in late 2019, and there’s an argument to be made that anything with him on camera has value. Even so, “Into the Abyss,” which mixes material from Juice WRLD’s tour stops with interviews and hangout and recording vignettes, isn’t particularly focused. At one point, Juice WRLD and the rapper Ski Mask the Slump God engage in a toy light saber battle.The film shows its subject in a TV appearance talking candidly about anxiety and depression. “Whether he knew it or not, Juice was a therapist for millions of kids,” the music producer Benny Blanco says at the conclusion.But “Into the Abyss” includes enough onscreen pill-popping to raise uncomfortable questions about documentary ethics. In retrospect, certain lyrics (“I pray to God for some water to wash down these Percs,” Juice WRLD sings in a previously unreleased track featured in the movie) unavoidably sound like warnings.Juice WRLD: Into the AbyssNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. Watch on HBO platforms. More

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      ‘My Girlfriend’s Wedding’: Her Life Plays Like a Movie

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      Newly restored, Jim McBride’s 1969 documentary is about his lover who gets married to another man. Her story remains anything but boring.“We waited for a movie like the one we wanted to make, and secretly wanted to live,” says one of the protagonists of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1966 youth film, “Masculine Feminine.” That secret desire is the pretext of “David Holzman’s Diary,” a classic of the American New Wave, made by Jim McBride in 1967, that was the original mockumentary.McBride’s fictional “cinéma vérité” was occasionally mistaken for the real thing — not least because his 1969 follow-up, “My Girlfriend’s Wedding,” actually was a diaristic documentary. Newly restored, it is screening at Anthology Film Archives in Manhattan along with its precursor and a seldom-seen sequel, “Pictures From Life’s Other Side.”A counterculture love story cum screwball comedy, “My Girlfriend’s Wedding” is mainly a portrait of McBride’s inamorata, a young Englishwoman named Clarissa Dalrymple (nee Ainley) with whom he shares an East Village pad. McBride shoots most of the movie on the day Clarissa secures her green card by marrying someone who is not McBride (his divorce isn’t yet final). The bridegroom, whom Clarissa has only just met, is a self-identified Yippie, happy to confound the system.Life imitates art. “My Girlfriend’s Wedding” often seems to satirize McBride’s original satire, as when, interviewing Clarissa, he directs her to hold up a mirror, thus revealing the camera that is recording her. The difference between the two movies is that, unlike David Holzman’s girlfriend, who was alienated by the filming process, Clarissa is cheerfully complicit in her objectification. She first appears wrapped in a bedcover.Although “My Girlfriend’s Wedding” was dismissed as tedious when it opened in New York at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1973, Clarissa is anything but boring. Later becoming an influential art curator, she is less garrulous than one of Andy Warhol’s superstars or the subject of Shirley Clarke’s “Portrait of Jason.” Even so, she seems quite comfortable living the movie of her life, discussing the two children she had out of wedlock, cursing her father (and reading a letter he sent her), and obscurely ruminating on “the revolution.”Adding an extra complication, Clarissa, who recently had an abortion, may or may not be pregnant again. She is, however, perfectly composed, appearing in a demure white minidress to be married in the Manhattan Municipal Building. After the ceremony, the newlyweds have lunch where Clarissa obsesses about being late for a new job (waiting tables at Café Figaro), as her husband questions the whole notion of work and holds forth even less coherently on revolutionary politics.“It doesn’t seem to be a movie I’m making anymore,” McBride complains that evening. “Let’s not film.” Just when it seems that “My Girlfriend’s Wedding” might end, like “David Holzman’s Diary” with an on-camera breakdown, the movie cuts to a title: “Four Days Later We Leave for San Francisco.” What follows is a hyperkinetic road movie accompanied by Al Kooper’s strident declaration “I Can’t Quit Her.”If not exactly a happy ending, it’s a good deal happier than the “Diary” denouement. As much as anything, “My Girlfriend’s Wedding” globalizes a quotation attributed to the screenwriter Bob Schneider: Love is when two people who care for each other get confused.My Girlfriend’s WeddingThrough Dec. 21 at Anthology Film Archives, Manhattan; anthologyfilmarchives.org. More

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      Let’s Look Back on 2021, When We Couldn’t Stop Looking Back

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      There’s now a thriving cottage industry for content that re-examines the recent past through a contemporary critical lens. Is that a good thing?Time is an abstract and collectively imaginary concept, and often our brains must latch onto contemporary metaphors to fathom its churn. So I will say, with all due respect to our (gulp?) probable future president Matthew McConaughey, this was the year I no longer felt that time was a flat circle.I found it to be moving more like a social media feed, dominated by freshly excavated and somewhat randomly retweeted remembrances of the recent past. A bit of cultural flotsam from the last 25 years would suddenly drift back up to the top of our collective consciousness and spread wildly, demanding renewed attention in the context of the present.Sometimes this was harmless fun — a welcome distraction from the fact that, this being Year 2 of a global pandemic, the actual present was depressing and exhausting to think about for too long. So everybody started watching “Seinfeld” and “The Sopranos” again. Taylor Swift released note-for-note replications of two old albums, allowing everybody a brief opportunity to get mad at an ex-boyfriend she had stopped dating a solid decade ago. “Bennifer,” the most gloriously of-their-time celebrity couple of the early aughts, were back together, baby! It was almost enough to make you want to live-tweet a contemporary rewatch of “Gigli” and declare it an unfairly maligned and subversive take on sexual fluidity, or something. (I said “almost.”) In 2021, the turn-of-the-millennium past was back in a big way, even if the eyes and ears through which we were taking it all in had grown older and — just maybe — wiser.Documentaries like “Framing Britney Spears” helped bring fresh attention and outrage to old injustices in part because they took the popular form of the streaming true-crime series.Brenda Chase/Online USA, Inc.,via Getty ImagesA word I sometimes noticed bandied about this year when talking about pop culture was “presentism.” Like so many other terms whose meaning has been distorted and hollowed out by contemporary, social-media-driven use — “problematic,” “intersectionality,” “critical race theory” — it began its life as jargon confined mostly to college classrooms and undergraduate term papers. As the Oxford English Dictionary defines it, “presentism” is a philosophical term describing “the tendency to interpret past events in terms of modern values and concepts.” To translate that into pop-culture speak, it is the modern tendency to look at an old video of David Letterman grilling Lindsay Lohan on late-night TV and feeling compelled to tweet, “Yas queen, drag his ass!”But this year some of these reassessments went refreshingly deeper, and they were long past due. What’s the opposite of partying like it’s 1999? Recycling the empties, dumping out the ashtrays and soberly assessing the damage to property or — worse — people? Whatever it was, there was suddenly, and very belatedly, a lot of it going on in 2021.All year, headlines and trending topics were monopolized by old, familiar names suddenly being scrutinized under new lights, using language and means of critical thinking that had gone mainstream in the wake of both the #MeToo reckoning and last summer’s protests for racial justice. The lines separating heroes and villains, victims and monsters, were being redrawn in real time. Flashbacks to salacious media coverage of the late ’90s and early 2000s were reminding people how horribly both Britney Spears and Janet Jackson had been treated in the court of popular opinion, and how Justin Timberlake’s white male privilege had allowed him to skate through both of these controversies unscathed. (The New York Times released documentaries about both Spears and Jackson.) In a New York courtroom, the victims of R. Kelly were telling the same stories they’d been telling for years and finally being heard, if damnably too late to reverse the trauma he had inflicted in plain sight, while far too many of us turned away..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}So many of these conversations were so long overdue, kicked down the road because of how difficult it is for masses of people to face hard truths. But documentaries like “Framing Britney Spears,” “Allen V. Farrow” and “Surviving R. Kelly” (from 2019) helped bring fresh attention and outrage to old injustices in part because they took the popular form of the streaming true-crime series, using a familiar narrative vocabulary to sharpen viewers’ understanding of familiar events they thought they knew all about. As uncomfortable as most of these documentaries were to watch, their mass consumption helped shift public opinion, set the terms of cultural conversation, and in some cases maybe even expedited justice.Victims of R. Kelly were finally heard this year, if regrettably too late to reverse the trauma he had inflicted for years in plain sight.Tannen Maury/EPA, via ShutterstockBut not every reconsideration felt as vital as the next. By now it feels like there is also a thriving and somewhat formulaic cottage industry for content that reconsiders the recent past through a contemporary critical lens. In September, Rolling Stone released an updated version of its “500 Greatest Songs of All Time” list, a fascinating and (given the racial and gender biases of its previous iterations) even noble endeavor whose critical perspectives will nonetheless, in time, look as dated and of-their-moment as those of the one it replaced. A month later, the online music magazine Pitchfork caused a brief furor when it “rescored” 19 of its old reviews, seemingly to reflect changing public opinions. (I worked there from 2011 to 2014, and one of the rescored reviews was mine.)Operating from a similar point of view, HBO has released several music documentaries in partnership with the entertainment and sports website The Ringer that invite the viewer to relive massively popular ’90s cultural phenomena (the rise of Alanis Morissette; Woodstock ’99) through the seemingly more enlightened perspective of 2021. (I worked at The Ringer from 2016-19.) Directed by the filmmaker Garret Price, “Woodstock 99: Peace, Love, and Rage” first came to HBO Max in July. The documentary makes the case — through repeated and rather heavy-handed montages of Columbine, the Clintons and music videos featuring angry young men in cargo shorts — that 1999 was a very particular time in pop culture, seemingly alien to anyone who didn’t live through it. The economy was prosperous and so bands were apolitical, raging against nothing in particular, or so we were told.“The intention was to do something contemporary,” the Woodstock promoter Michael Lang says at the end of the film, summing up the hubris of the original festival’s turn-of-the-millennium update. Woodstock ’99’s catastrophic failures — countless sexual assaults; several preventable deaths; massive, horrifying crowds of white people gleefully rapping the N-word — are presented in the documentary with a comforting assurance that this was the kind of thing that only could have happened in the wacky, angsty late ’90s. Never again! Right?It is surreal to watch this documentary in the aftermath of November’s Astroworld Festival tragedy, which led to 10 deaths. The parallels to Woodstock ’99 (or, since time is still kind of a flat circle, the 1969 Altamont Free Concert) are haunting, with security forces that were inadequate to control such large crowds. The past, it seemed, wasn’t even past.At one point in “Woodstock 99,” the music critic Steven Hyden reflects back on the aura surrounding the original 1969 festival, and how much of it was constructed by the idyllic documentary “Woodstock.” “The problem is that instead of learning from mistakes that were made, we instead created this romanticized mythology in the form of the documentary,” Hyden said. “People watched the film, and they chose to believe that’s the way it really was.”Todd Haynes’s “The Velvet Underground” didn’t so much depict the past through the limited critical lens of the present, but instead conjured its own visceral temporality. Apple TV+I wonder if something like the opposite is happening now: The allure of presentism is causing people to romanticize contemporary perspectives at the expense of an excessively vilified past. It’s uncomfortable to dwell in gray areas, to admit imperfections, to acknowledge blind spots — better to have a 100-minute documentary or four-part podcast to allow us to tidily “reconsider” something that we got wrong the first time around, so we never have to think too hard about it again.But to believe the linear, one-dimensional narrative that Woodstock ’99 or misogynistic media coverage of Britney Spears can only be visible in hindsight is to gloss over the fact that plenty of people felt uncomfortable with these phenomena while they were happening. To dutifully perform belated horror at how tabloids wrote about Spears in the early 2000s, how macho rock culture was in the late ’90s, how blithely racist white people who listen to hip-hop used to be, is in some ways to believe a comforting fiction that all of these problems have been solved once and for all.The past was imperfect, yes, but so is the present. Inevitably, the future will be too. The lesson to be taken from all these reconsiderations is not necessarily how much wiser we are now, but how difficult it is to see the biases of the present moment. If anything, these looks back should be reminders to stay vigilant against presentism, conventional wisdom and the numbing orthodoxy of groupthink. They invite us to wonder about the blind spots of our current cultural moment, and to watch out for the sorts of behaviors and assumptions that will, in 20 years’ time, look nearsighted enough to appear in a kitschy montage about the way things were.The best movie I saw this year broke this cycle, essentially by presenting another, more harmonious way the past and present coexist. Todd Haynes’s remarkable and immersive documentary “The Velvet Underground” didn’t so much depict the past through the limited critical lens of the present, but instead conjured its own visceral temporality — a little bit like Andy Warhol did in his own slow, strange art films.I was not alive in 1967, the year the Velvet Underground released its debut album, but for a heady and hypnotic two hours, I could have sworn I was. Split-screen images suggested the validity of multiple truths. The music’s blaring brilliance rained down self-evidently rather than having to be overexplained by talking heads. Lou Reed, John Cale, Nico and Moe Tucker all seemed, at various moments, to be both geniuses and jerks. Neither glorified nor condemned, 1967 came flickering alive and seemed about as wonderful and awful a time to be alive as 1999 or 2021. Or, it stands to reason, 2022. More

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      Sterlin Harjo Can Do a Lot More Than ‘Reservation Dogs’

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      The filmmaker directed “Love and Fury,” a Netflix documentary about Native American artists, before his hit Hulu series.Sterlin Harjo has had a year.In August, FX on Hulu released the series “Reservation Dogs,” the acclaimed dark comedy about four Native American teenagers in rural Oklahoma that Harjo created with Taika Waititi. The next month, Harjo presented a prize at the Emmy Awards alongside the show’s four young breakout stars. Two days before I talked to him, “Reservation Dogs” won the Gotham Award for short format breakout series. (Was he expecting it? “I was not. I would have had less wine.”)And to top it off, Netflix this month released “Love and Fury,” Harjo’s second documentary, about Native artists navigating their careers, both in the United States and abroad. What happens, the film asks, when they push Native art into a postcolonial world?The dancer Emily Johnson, as seen in Harjo’s “Love and Fury.”Netflix For roughly a year, Harjo and his crew followed more than 20 artists, few of whom were complete strangers: Members of the band Black Belt Eagle Scout, the recording project of Katherine Paul, sometimes stay with him in Tulsa, Okla., when they are on tour. Tommy Orange, the author of the acclaimed “There There,” asked Harjo to moderate an event he was speaking at. (Harjo then filmed the event for this documentary.)Harjo, of course, is a Native artist, too: The Seminole and Muscogee Creek filmmaker directed three features (“Four Sheets to the Wind,” “Barking Water” and “Mekko”) and a documentary (“This May Be the Last Time”) before brainstorming “Reservation Dogs” over tequilas with Waititi.These artists pass through one another’s orbits constantly, drawing closer and closer together. As he explained on a recent call, Harjo wanted to express that notion himself — but through the lens of community.Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.Why love and fury? How are those two concepts related?As artists, I think collectively we have all of these different experiences and these different types of survival that we come from. And you can take that survival, you can take any sort of oppression, and feel bitter and feel like things are hopeless. Because some of us are displaced, some of us have lost our language, a lot of us have, there’s a lot of abuse in boarding schools, a lot of things that happened throughout history. Not just Western expansion. It was also a lot of things, a lot of U.S. policies, that really did oppress our people.And so you can take that and convert that into feeling bitter and angry. Or you can take that anger and turn it into love and creation. And I think that’s what each of these artists do. All of them are connected to community, all of them have community-driven work. And they take this history and try to make sense of it and express themselves in this way that people can connect to. And I think that that is love.Devery Jacobs, left, and Paulina Alexis in “Reservation Dogs,” which Harjo created with Taika Waititi.Shane Brown/FXThe last film you made was in 2015. Does it feel different this time around, after “Reservation Dogs”?I made this before “Reservation Dogs.” So I was making this very low-budget, and I just really wanted to tell a story that needed to be told. Contemporary Native art has not been looked at and presented in a way that I felt like it should be. There’s such a dated view of what Native art is in the world. I’m friends with all of these artists, and I’ve just known artists forever. It felt like an opportunity to show this world that hasn’t been seen and also help reframe Native art.I wanted it to organically expand. So if I’m filming with one artist and then I meet a couple more artists, I would follow them and go do stuff with them.I’ve done many documentaries where I do the sit-down interview with slow motion B-roll over it, and that’s great. But I wanted to do something different. I purposely didn’t do a lot of sit-down interviews. I was looking at a lot of Les Blank films, specifically, “A Poem Is a Naked Person,” about [the musician-songwriter] Leon Russell. But you watch the film, and it’s really about this time period [the early 1970s].We watched this documentary called “Heartworn Highways” that’s about Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt, Steve Earle, back in the ’70s. It was what it sounds like: It’s a visual document of what was happening. That’s what I wanted to do with this: film people doing their thing.Did you go into this with specific people you knew you were going to follow?Yeah, originally it was [the singer] Micah P. Hinson, [the interdisciplinary artist] Cannupa Hanska Luger, [the painter] Haley Greenfeather English and my friend Penny Pitchlynn, who has the band Labrys. Penny’s tour didn’t happen, so I didn’t end up going with her on tour. She’s still on the film, but [the dancer] Emily Johnson becomes a bigger part of the documentary. And it was really following them, and then organically letting it expand with other people.I wanted to show this community: how everyone’s connected in this Native art world. If you look at “Reservation Dogs,” it’s similar; it’s about a community. I’m really interested in community-driven filmmaking and storytelling.You’ve now made three features and two documentaries. Is there as much room for artistic freedom with documentaries as there is with a feature film?There’s not, but I think it’s just a different way of telling a story; I really like the boundaries that you have with documentary. With “Love and Fury,” I set up these rules [for] each person on the camera, including myself. I said, “Act like you’re the only person in the room getting footage, like it’s 1970 and we only have one camera.” If you don’t get it, no one will.We all shot with zoom lenses. So instead of cutting and reframing, we could zoom in to do close-ups or zoom out for wides. The idea was, act like we’re not editing. So don’t do a fast zoom; let it be fluid so I can keep it in the film. I love working that way because it’s a challenge. And it’s very different from the control you have on a narrative. There’s something in that challenge that I really like as a storyteller.What do you think the documentary itself, and these artists, have to say about endurance?All of these artists have been working for so many years. And we’re in a time period right now, myself included, where people want to pay attention to Native art and Native stories, and there’s talk of inclusion and diversity. I think that they all just kept working, even though there was no money and no way of guaranteeing they would have careers. And the fact that they kept pushing and keep pushing to this day is just a testament to their endurance, but also their people’s endurance. I think that that’s what drives us: our people survived a lot of things, and our endurance in this art world is connected to that. More