If you do one thing this weekend, binge-watch this series.
To my mind, there are two kinds of empathy in movies. The first, endemic to narrative fiction films, involves experiencing characters as real people. Their lives transcend the screen; after the scene ends, they’re still there, sitting on the bed, left with the thunderous silence of their thoughts. These characters matter to us because we feel like we know them. We see bits of ourselves in them—warts and all.
Then, there’s the breed of empathy that’s specific to the living, breathing people found in documentary. A great doc will chip away at your subjectivity; you’ll find yourself immersed in a life. Your emotional bandwidth will stretch to accommodate different wavelengths of the human experience.