Directed by Jeremy Workman
Featuring YouTube creator and domino artist Lily “Hevesh5” Hevesh
Runtime: 1 hour and 30 minutes
Streaming on Discovery+ on August 26th

by Ian Hrabe, Staff Writer

There is a fairly straightforward formula for making a documentary: find someone with a passion for something, film them engaging in that passion, share the result with the public so they can sit on their couch and say, “THAT IS SO COOL!” Of course that doesn’t work for every documentary, but it’s definitely a specific type of documentary that has a lot of popular appeal. The Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature tends to split the difference between these types of docs and the social problem docs on the other end of the spectrum. Recent Best Documentary winners like My Octopus Teacher (2020), Free Solo (2018), Searching for Sugarman (2012), and Man on Wire (2008) are all great examples of this formula at work, and while the new Discovery+ documentary Lily Topples the World doesn’t exactly have that extra level these aforementioned Best Documentary winners have that makes them truly outstanding, you aren’t going to regret the 90 minutes you spend with Lily Hevesh and the incredibly niche world of domino art that she reigns over.

Now you might find yourself asking “what the hell is domino art?” and I’m here to tell you...it’s exactly what it sounds like. Domino artists set up thousands of dominoes arranged in intricate patterns and designs, knock them down, and then post the results on YouTube. It’s an artform that feels custom made for the internet. Despite boasting 3.31 MILLION subscribers to her YouTube channel, Lily Hevesh’s work feels like a callback to a simpler time on the World Wide Web. There’s nothing political or trolling or cruel or unpleasant about anything she does. It’s nothing but a young woman knocking down dominoes and it’s pure, mesmerizing joy. Even the most hardened cynic has to admit that her videos are cool, because their coolness is kind of irrefutable. 

That said, after watching a few of Hevesh’s videos before digging into Lily Topples the World, I wondered how director Jeremy Workman was going to be able to wring a feature film out of a subject that seemed better suited for short-form. Of course I was totally wrong and there is plenty of story to work with here. The overarching story of an artist doggedly pursuing their passion in an unconventional medium is compelling (see: Passion + Filming That Passion = Profit), but the little side-roads this film explores are what kept me glued to the screen. The film touches on the importance of girls in STEM programs, the weird world of YouTube celebrity, and the importance of doing your own thing even if you’re only one of a handful of people doing it. 

Most interesting was the story of Hevesh’s parents adopting her from China in the late 1990s during China’s infamous One Child Policy. Since most Chinese families wanted boys--the data on China’s current gender imbalance checks out on this and though the One Child Policy has since ended, the repercussions will be felt for decades--girls were either left on the doorsteps of orphanages or worse. Mercifully Hevesh was one of the former, and the story of her being abandoned by her parents and the lifelong psychological trauma that causes took what I thought was going to be a breezy little flick about offbeat art and made it into something else altogether. You wonder how many Chinese girls abandoned by their families are out there doing amazing things for other countries due to China’s internalized patriarchy. This notion was in the news recently when Chinese-Canadian swimmer Maggie MacNeil won the gold medal for Canada in the 100 M Butterfly at the Tokyo Olympics. These stories eviscerate this whole notion that “bOyS aRe BeTtEr” and they don’t even have to do any heavy lifting. That we still need to fight for gender equality in 2021 is absolutely psychotic, and while it isn’t the primary aim of Lily Topples the World, it has a lot of that stuff baked in. 

It’s nice to see the Discovery+ putting out programming that lives up to the general notion of what their channel is supposed to be about. The Discovery Channel, the History Channel, and TLC all descended into a sort of reality TV hell over the last couple of decades and are largely unrecognizable from any of their namesakes, but Lily Topples the World feels like the sort of thing you’d find on the vintage Discovery Channel. It’s cool, inspiring, and you can spend an hour-and-a-half watching it and not feel like you just wasted an hour-and-a-half of your life like you would if you were watching, say, “Naked and Afraid of Love” which is a real show that the Discovery Channel is currently hyping that asks the question: What if we had a dating show, but the contestants are surviving together ass-naked on an island. Look, I get that it’s becoming harder and harder for networks to stay afloat these days given how much things have changed since Cable TV’s heyday, but if it takes a network having to launch a streaming network with designs on competing with all the other streaming services and putting out actual quality content as a result, I’m here for it. While I can’t say for sure whether or not Lily Topples the World is worth subscribing to Discovery +, I can say that it’s definitely worth burning your 7-day free trial to check out.