Won’t You Be My Neighbor

In contrast to the individualistic cinema tradition of the “main character” picture, there exists a counter-tradition of the community film, movies in which the “protagonist” is a city block, a neighborhood, an entire village, and screen time is generously distributed across a variety of local characters, each with their own motives, works that allow the viewer to understand how they cohere into an organic whole—even if the organism isn’t necessarily healthy. Stopping in such diverse destinations as Tokyo’s Yoshiwara red-light district, the dinky Dordogne village of Trémolat, and South Central LA, with films by Kenji Mizoguchi, Claude Chabrol, John Singleton, and more, the movies in Won’t You Be My Neighbor are studies of community ecosystems, in which a single splash can spread ripples across the entire pond.