An Irish documentary on a relatively obscure American figure can illuminate so much

Sinéad O’Shea is one of Ireland’s finest documentary makers. Her last film was a compelling documentary on Edna O’Brien, called Blue Road. Her latest, out in Irish cinemas this Friday, is All About the Money. In it she follows the American communist activist Fergie Chambers.

From the billionaire Cox family, a few years ago he cashed out. In recent years he used some of his money to establish a collective in Massachusetts, donate to humanitarian causes in Gaza, invest (if you want to call it that) in a Tunisian football team, move to Ireland, and occupy a space in culture that can come across to some as contradictory: a man hugely wealthy thanks to a family fortune but who is avowedly anti-capitalist.

He was arrested in Spain last July on foot of an extradition request from the US and accused of money laundering, in a case many characterise as politically motivated.

All of this is fascinating, a strange tale of our times. But O’Shea’s approach to her subject and her craft tells us a bigger story, one that lives not in conclusions and certainty, but in complexity and nuance. At a preview in Dublin last week, she spoke afterwards about truth.

Her perspective is this: “It has become quite political to be truthful. It’s not seen as a neutral space. Reporting what you see leads to accusations of bias.” Her words stayed with me because that’s not just about a film, but where we are in all sorts of discourse; political, social, cultural, digital.

Documentary making can be a lens through which we witness the broader world, literally. But what happens when you don’t render issues or people right or wrong? What happens when nuance and contradiction is favoured over partisanship?

It’s not just the story O’Shea tells that illuminates complex times, it’s her approach to staying in the truth of things rather than leaping to easy answers for the purpose of entertainment or attention-hooking.

As an avid consumer of documentary film I will watch pretty much anything, although I’m not big on true crime. But if there’s a doc out there on a long-retired NFL quarterback, a country musician I’ve never listened to a song of, an arcane subculture or forgotten scandal, I will watch it. So much of this stuff is of course hagiography bordering on propaganda, one of heroes and monsters, successes and failures.

Watching All About the Money, you can almost see another film hiding in the distance, a lesser film, one with the flashy animated graphics, corny voiceover, whiplash twists, stacked cliffhangers that stretch the story over several hours begging the viewer to not even wait for the next episode to buffer, all wrapped in the algorithmic structure that plagues contemporary documentaries in the streaming age.

This sort of form is what is binged. When we talk about binging streaming series we rarely talk about the aftermath of the binge, which like all binges, renders the consumer addled yet spaced out, full yet empty. What’s also relevant is how truth is sacrificed in the pursuit of attention.

And yet something else is happening in documentary making that is unseating this culture of short, sharp, and simple. Suddenly it appears people are searching for something deeper. You Can See Everything, Nathan Fielder’s documentary on the disgraced Elizabeth Holmes who rose to power and wealth on hubris, delusion, and ultimately fraud, is being lauded as the film of the year. It may even become the first documentary nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards. It is also just under three hours and audiences are going wild.

Musk, Alex Gibney’s latest documentary on the tech oligarch and man responsible for dismantling USAid leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths, is three hours and 45 minutes long. The consolidation and politicisation of media power has infused its promotion, with YouTube, Meta, and TikTok, all restricting its advertising and then reversing that, citing “errors”. Who knows what the truth is?

The second installation of Julia Loktev’s My Undesirable Friends, which follows independent Russian journalists in exile, clocks in at close to six hours. The first part, which follows the journalists while still in Moscow in the run up to and in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, is five hours 25 minutes. Its length is justified because the time spent with the film’s subjects is essential to effectively capturing the relationship between time and how the repression of free speech escalates.

Speaking to O’Shea the day after the screening, she discussed what is being lost right now which is truth. “Truthfulness is sort of out of fashion. Documentary making is one thing, but everything has become a giant football match. Everything is so partisan. The truth is much more nuanced, and that’s almost not conventional at the moment.”

This isn’t just about filmmaking, it’s sort of about, well, everything.

Misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy, censorship, lies, pretences, propaganda, denials, vested interests, the growing struggle to determine what is “real” in the age of AI – all of this has created a great untethering across politics, culture and social discourse.

It’s interesting that an Irish documentary on a relatively obscure American figure can illuminate so much. What it tells us is when one makes a decision rooted in journalistic integrity, not the pursuit of commercial gain, the truth does actually out. There’s a lesson in that that goes far beyond a single film.