A24 released two movies last Friday. One, the buzzy horror movie I Saw the TV Glow, arrived in theaters after months of enthusiastic press, amid a flood of media appearances by its director and stars. The other, a documentary called The Sixth, appeared on digital platforms with little advance notice, and only a single review in a major outlet. Instead of glossy magazine profiles or a trip to the Criterion closet, Oscar-winning directors Sean Fine and Andrea Nix Fine got a Politico article wondering why the hottest distributor in town appeared to be “deep-sixing” a movie about one of the most significant political events of the 21st century: the attempted insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021.
The Sixth is not the only recent A24 release to fly beneath the radar: In 2024 alone, it has released several documentaries straight or all but straight to streaming, including My Mercury, a portrait of conservationist Yves Chesselet, and Open Wide, about the controversial but TikTok-famous orthodontic procedure known as “mewing.” In the case of My Mercury, it took trade publications almost a week to even notice that it had started streaming without notice. A24 may be legendary for its ability to turn a movie like Love Lies Bleeding into a much-hyped must-see, but not everything released under its banner gets or lends itself to the same treatment.
The Fines told Politico’s Michael Schaffer that A24 promised them that The Sixth would start streaming on Prime Video the day of its release, an understanding they shared with the movie’s participants, including Rep. Jamie Raskin, who had been voting to certify the election results when rioters breached the Capitol, and photojournalist Mel D. Cole, who said he turned down interview requests from other filmmakers but had agreed to participate in this documentary because of A24’s cachet. “The Fines are great,” he told Schaffer, “but I didn’t know them.”
Instead of streaming for free on Prime to a potential audience in the tens of millions, The Sixth is currently a $19.99 digital purchase, and although it will be available for rental Thursday, neither price point is likely to reach even a fraction of the viewers—especially when so few of them even know that it’s there. Did the studio behind Civil War get cold feet when it came to the depiction of a nonfictional uprising, or did it simply make the calculation that the documentary wasn’t worth the expense of a theatrical release? The Sixth itself suggests a third, equally troubling possibility: One of the darkest days in American history has simply become too uncomfortable to talk about.
The subjects of The Sixth, who also include two Washington police officers, the then chief of the Metropolitan Police Department, and a congressional spokesperson, recall that day in harrowing detail. Combined with footage from security cameras, body cams, and the insurrectionists’ smartphones, their testimony brings the events of Jan. 6 to vivid and unshakable life. Police officer Daniel Hodges, whose gas mask was ripped from his face by rioters as his body was crushed in a doorway, says he came close to death on numerous occasions, and it’s hard to shake the notion that, as bad as things got, it’s a miracle they didn’t get much, much worse. But amid the sickening sensation of watching American democracy hold on by the thinnest of threads, there’s another feeling woven through their accounts, one it takes Cole, who spent months photographing Trump rallies before ending up in the crowd on Jan. 6, to put into words. “I felt embarrassed for all of us,” he says. “For all of America.”
That’s not all that Cole, who is one of three Black witnesses among The Sixth’s six subjects, felt. He describes outrage at watching the battles his parents and grandparents fought still raging in his adult lifetime, and disbelief at watching Americans turn their backs on the injustice of George Floyd’s murder. (One intriguing through line is the rioters’ use of Black Lives Matter as a reference point: They appropriate the movement’s slogans, like “Whose Streets? Our Streets,” both to mock them and to assert their right to a parallel revolt—one modeled more closely on the violent caricature presented by right-wing media than on BLM itself.) But he’s also stunned by how far those largely white crowds got on Jan. 6, and how fragile that makes things seem. “The things that happened that day, theoretically, are not supposed to happen in this country,” he says. “You know—the greatest country in the world.”
The Fines have called their film nonpartisan, and in a less toxic political climate, its premise, that an election should not be disrupted by mobs in tactical gear assaulting law enforcement officers, ought to be one both sides could endorse without pause or equivocation. But with Donald Trump repeatedly saying he’d pardon the rioters if he is reelected and the Washington establishment war-gaming a repeat next Jan. 6, the issue remains very much a live one. I doubt that anyone who lived through the Capitol riot will ever forget it, and they certainly haven’t a mere three years and change later. But remembering can be a passive act, one that allows you simply to nod in recognition without actually engaging in thought, and that’s the kind of memory The Sixth is designed to reinvigorate. It might be uncomfortable to look back on, but it’s not nearly as uncomfortable as what might happen if we don’t.
