Finding Vivian Maier (no cert)

Since being accidentally unearthed by historian John Maloof, photographer Vivian Maier now sits with Man Ray and Ansel Adams at a table marked "social history's great chroniclers".

What a story. In 2007, Maloof bought a box of negatives at a crumby auction in Chicago, unearthing a staggering photographic document of a changing US. He became obsessed, hunting down anything else he can by this deceased nobody and followed a paper trail to those who knew this fiercely private and idiosyncratic Gallic-American nanny. Over five decades, Maier took some 100,000 stills, stately black and white portraits from the American streetscape that tremble with beauty, perversity and pathos.

Maloof and co-director Charlie Siskel, however, are uninterested in merely heralding Maier's artistic prowess. The key hook of Finding Vivian Maier is the manner in which she is brought to life so animatedly via a playful mix of testimony by now-adult children she minded and narratively apt stills that her life projects through. There, we find darkness and obsession.

It is rare to find a documentary as beautifully weighted or that lives and breathes with as much spirit as this secret history. Essential viewing.

IFI and selected cinemas