As an anthropologist educated and trained here in the US, I grew up on Malinowski's ethnographies. Indeed, I can boast that I have nearly every one of his great works on the shelves overlooking my desk as I write this. So, I was more than slightly interested in this film.
As a documentary, it takes a personal approach because the film maker is Bronislaw Malinowski's great-grandson. From the get-go, it's a no holds barred exposure of this great scholar showing all the moles and warts of a complex man. I'm old enough (80) to have talked to several of his students and had garnered a great deal of insight before reading his biography and his published diary. All of it squares with what I'd learned beforehand.
As a scholar and field investigator, he was brilliant, insightful and innovative. As a person, he was as human as you or I. The documentary goes to great lengths to make that point of the seeming paradox of his life and research. The disparaging remarks about his subjects of study in his diary seem to militate against his presentation of them as people in his ethnography. That's not at odds with reality. All of us who have done field work in miserable places under trying conditions, far from the comforts of home and our loved ones have harbored those feelings.
Good scholarship is often the product of a good mind and nasty comments made to oneself is likewise frequently the result of being human.