Here is a an excerpt of a note appeared at Guardian Unlimited titled "The Muckrackers Clean Up", it is mainly about Moore but it does talk about other documentaries that helped change the way these films are perceived by the public.
It includes a mention to Julio Medem's "The Basque Ball: The Skin Against the Wall", a documentary about the Basque Conflict which the Spanish Government attempted to censor and even tried to prevent for the documentary to be screened at international film festivals.
Here you have it:
The serious documentaries have been the work of passionate movie-makers, independent spirits pursuing personal themes, often but not always political. Robert Greenwald for instance, a leading producer of feature films and TV mini-series, was so affected by the stealing of the 2000 election that since then he's devoted himself entirely to documentaries. His Uncovered: The War on Iraq is the most lucid account of the events leading up to the Iraq war. For Outfoxed , he built up a network of volunteers across America to mon itor the multiple mendacities of Murdoch's Fox News. These are urgent, well-researched polemics.
Altogether cooler is The Fog of War, a masterly cross-examination of Robert McNamara, President Kennedy's Defence Secretary, by the veteran documentarist Errol Morris, that throws light on American life from the Depression to the present. It's arguably the best movie of its kind this year and one of Morris's rare ventures into politics.
The political documentary, however, is not restricted to the US. From Brazil this year we've had Bus 174, which examines poverty and police brutality through the hijacking of a bus in Rio; from Spain The Basque Ball, a revealing look at the complex history of Basque separatism; from France The Wall, a powerful, deeply affecting report on the effects of the wall being built between Israel and Palestine; from Canada The Corporation, a film about the responsibilities of large companies.
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