documentary
Joseph Walsh
Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov’s new documentary, Honeyland, is a lament for a vanishing world. Captured with the delicacy of honeycomb, it focuses on the last wild beekeeper in Europe. Hatidze Muratova lives in rural Macedonia on a craggy farm without running water or electricity. Her ailing, aged mother, Nazife, is her only company. They may bicker, but there’s a great deal of love, shown in the way Hatidze spoon-feeds her yoghurt and honeycomb, or washes her hair over a basin. Despite the hardships of her lifestyle, Hatidze is content. She is the wild bee’s caretaker. As Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
September 10 is World Suicide Prevention Day, and Channel 5 marked the occasion with this sobering documentary. Focusing on male suicide – incredibly, now the UK’s biggest killer of men under 45 – it studied six patients at the Riverside Mental Health Centre in Hillingdon, west London. The results were both harrowing and heartbreaking.Director Rachel Harvie stood back and let her interviewees tell their stories, which served as both therapy and confessional. Charlie, a sad, mild-mannered boy of 18 covered in self-inflicted scars, has been diagnosed with ADHD, depression, social anxiety and “ Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
“The Troubles” is a polite euphemism for the ferocious storm of sectarian violence and political chaos which convulsed Northern Ireland for 30 years, before being brought to a close by 1998’s Good Friday Agreement. Irish journalist Darragh MacIntyre fronts this seven-part history of those fearful days, and the first instalment of Spotlight on The Troubles: A Secret History (BBC Four) took us from the first stirrings of Catholic versus Protestant conflict in the mid-Sixties to the full-blown horrors of murders, bombings, mass internment and the British Army’s increasingly bloody involvement.It Read more ...
Veronica Lee
This was the first of a two-part investigation into... well, I don't know what. The voiceover of High Society: Cannabis Café said it was an experiment “to test the alleged benefits of weed” and the people featured all had “a personal motivation for getting stoned” as they visited an Amsterdam coffee shop, where dope is sold legally.The jaunty music and lack of scientific context suggested that it was essentially a voyeuristic exercise where we watched normally uptight Brits getting giggly, having the munchies and (a few) telling someone they loved them.There were occasional funny moments Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
It may sound perverse to say it, but Albert was the perfect twenty-first century prince. Thrust into the heart of the British monarchy he was simultaneously an oppressed outsider who – despite his reputation as the most handsome prince in Europe (not least when wearing white cashmere pantaloons) – struggled to make his voice and intelligence heard. This curiously female aspect of his plight certainly adds a frisson to a story that would be remarkable by any standards. Thank goodness for historians that it is: for two hundred years after both he and Victoria were born we are being Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
As Penny Lane’s documentary shows, America and Satanism have a long history. From the Salem Witch trials to the moral panic triggered by the Manson murders and films like William Friedkin’s The Exorcist in the 1970s, mass panic in America of the occult is nothing new. But, as Hail Satan? demonstrates, today’s worshippers of Lucifer are closer to being humanist activists involved in performance art and fighting for religious pluralism than they are the black robed, goat sacrificing clichés that are populated in the media. At the not-so-black heart of the documentary is Lucien Greeves, who Read more ...
Liz Thomson
It was a lovely summer’s day in southern England, much as it was in County Sligo. I was with my parents, driving to visit a very elderly relative. We arrived not long after the news of Lord Mountbatten’s death was announced and my great aunt was distraught, more over the death of someone she saw as a war hero than over the general carnage, I suspect. I don’t recall if my parents saw his death as a particular tragedy – “The Troubles” were a decade old that day in August 1979 and everyone hated the IRA for the destruction of so many lives, many on mainland Britain. When I went to interview Read more ...
Owen Richards
What’s the next level above national treasure? We’ll need a name for it by the end of All Woman, Kathy Burke’s new Channel 4 documentary. With a big heart and a foul mouth, she’s travelled the country trying to define 21st century womanhood – an incredibly tall order for three hour-long shows, but episode one proved she’s more than up for the task.The first concept under Burke’s watchful eye was beauty, and where better to start than former Love Island contestant Megan Barton-Hanson? The two shared a sympathetic conversation about the pressures young girls face to conform to beauty standards Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Ashley Joiner’s expansive documentary Are You Proud? opens with the testament of a redoubtable nonagenarian remembering his experiences as a gay man in World War II. Though followed by the admission that he had to live his later life as a lie, it’s told with considerable humour and concludes with a question – “How can you be criminalised for being born the way you are?” – to which the larger part of UK society would surely today reply with a degree of understanding.Whether it’s such tentative early moves towards reform – how good Fergus O’Brien’s 2017 film Against the Law was in bringing that Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
A sad story of lonely men, Simon Rawles's atmospheric and beautifully shot documentary has no narration, apart from the occasional faint, off-camera question from the interviewer. This makes everything more depressing. We’re alone on a nightmare ride, starting with Catfishman. “I catfish females. I’m a legend in the community, a hero.” He is living somewhere snowy and motionless in north America, we’re not told where, and spends his days constructing fake online profiles, targeting women. His mindset is grim. “I pose as a male model, good-looking and attractive, and I set up dates. I reel Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was on 16 July 1969 that Apollo 11 lifted off from Florida en route for the Moon, and exactly 50 years later, as we nervously anticipate the dawn of commercial flights into space, the event resonates louder than ever. Here, Professor Brian Cox called it “the greatest achievement in the history of civilisation.” According to veteran broadcaster Sir Trevor McDonald, it was “the most magnificent thing that ever happened.”The TV networks have been saturating us in moon-shot memorabilia, and in the cinema we’ve had Todd Douglas Miller’s imposing feature-length documentary Apollo 11, but this Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Not everybody is on Facebook, yet. So far, Mark Zuckerberg’s social media monolith has only managed to scrape together about 2.3 billion users, roughly one-third of the planet. But as this fascinating documentary revealed, Facebook’s plans are huge and its ambitions boundless.The title alluded to recent problems at Facebook, including the massive 2018 data breach in which the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica acquired information from 87 million Facebook users, and its struggles against online hate crime. These crises temporarily knocked 20 per cent off Facebook’s share price, and Read more ...