Let’s overcome coronavirus boredom

By Steve Graham

A lot of us might be spending more time at home watching TV in the next few weeks, and Nuggets games and Avs games have been cancelled for a while, reducing your viewing options. So, get cozy and learn something about your home state. From a celebration of our natural vistas to a shocking story about an Aurora motel, there are plenty of interesting documentaries about Colorado. Here are five favorites.

The Secret Sauce

We’re going to start with a surprisingly uplifting and informative documentary about health care, one of the biggest and most intractable issues in the nation. The Littleton-based Kokopelli Agency created this small but well-crafted 27-minute movie about how Grand Junction became a national leader in making medicine more patient-centered and cost-effective. Through honest and revealing interviews with patients, providers and leaders, it shows how a community can collaborate and cooperate to improve results for everyone.

The movie is available on Amazon Prime.

Heart of the World: Colorado’s National Parks

Our local PBS stations have an extensive library of solid documentaries about Colorado history, culture and landscape. The Colorado Experience offers shows about everything from the Colorado constitution and the Ludlow Massacre to the history of mountain biking and Denver’s amusement parks. However, perhaps the most attractive production is “Heart of the World,” a three-part series from 2016 that showcases Colorado’s five national parks over three hours of stunning aerial photography, soaring music and informative narration by country star Kathy Mattea. Each episode includes about 10 minutes of geology, history and topography in each park, smoothly shifting from the Great Sand Dunes to Mesa Verde and Colorado National Monument. It’s a high-quality, if unabashedly cheerleading, documentary that celebrates some of the most beautiful parts of our beautiful state.

The series is available on Amazon Prime or at the Colorado Public Television website.

Voyeur

As if to prove that Colorado is not all snow-capped peaks and striking canyons, Netflix produced a 2017 documentary about a very ugly and hidden part of our history — Gerald Foos’ decades of watching guests at his Aurora motel from a secret observation platform he built into the attic.

The movie is also largely about Gay Talese, a legendary and eccentric journalist who wrote about Foos and his deviant scheme. It’s really the story of the intersection of these flawed but fascinating real-life characters, and layers scandal upon scandal.

The film is available exclusively on Netflix.

Rolling Papers

This 2015 documentary is a look at a formerly scandalous behavior gone legitimate and mainstream — mostly. It ostensibly profiles the Denver Post’s Ricardo Baca, the first marijuana editor at a major newspaper. However, it also broadens its scope to cover the newspaper industry as well as short dives into many aspects of Colorado’s pot culture. It was the first place in the world to legalize marijuana for recreational use, even though the drug remains federally illegal, of course. Somewhat ironically for a movie about such a relaxing substance, it’s frenetically paced and flits between a few too many subjects, but there are some fun characters and interesting insights, nonetheless.

The movie is available on Netflix or Kanopy.

Trinidad

The town of Trinidad in southern Colorado is a growing hub for both culture and recreation. But a decade ago, it was known throughout the state only as the sex-change capital of the world.

This fascinating 2008 documentary takes a generous and personal look at the story of Dr. Marci Bowers, who took over the Stanley Biber’s famed gender reassignment center in 2003. It explores her impact on the small town, and particularly the story of two of her patients.

“A lot of the girls feel like they were born here,” said one woman in the movie. “It’s when they finally are born into the body that they feel like they should have been born into.”

The movie is available on Kanopy, a free streaming service for anyone with a library card.