documentary
Adam Sweeting
The first film in this extraordinary series, Seven Up!, was made for Granada Television’s World in Action in 1964. It picked 14 seven-year-old British children from different social backgrounds, aiming to revisit them every seven years to see how their lives were progressing. Paul Almond directed the first programme, but ever since this has been Michael Apted’s baby.The slow, methodical progress of the series down the decades has meant that it has steadily accumulated a strange power, as these lives of others have in some ways become merged with our own. Those original seven-year-olds are now Read more ...
Owen Richards
Set in the months and years after the Libyan revolution, Freedom Fields follows several women aiming to compete in international football. The documentary finds the players excitedly preparing for their first overseas tournament. However, it soon becomes clear that liberation doesn’t equate to freedom, as threats of violence from religious extremists cause the Libyan Football Federation to cancel the trip.It’s clear that British-Libyan filmmaker Naziha Arebi originally planned to follow the women to the tournament, an uplifting tale of competition and sisterhood. Instead, we catch up a year Read more ...
graham.rickson
The British Transport Commission was created in 1948 by the Atlee government, an ambitious attempt to organise rail, road and water transport under a single unwieldy umbrella (for a time it was the world’s largest employer, with a staff of over 900,000). British Transport Films was set up a year later, the biggest industrial film unit in the UK. It was run by renowned documentary maker Edgar Anstey and survived until the late 1980s, its intention to promote the virtues of a newly nationalised transport network. The BTF’s output included travelogues and training materials, the more popular Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Director Asif Kapadia's documentary on the controversial 1980s sporting legend Diego Maradona premiered at Cannes this week, and there's something unsatisfying about the fact it doesn't have a one-word title. It would have created a neat synchronicity with his previous two films (Amy and Senna), but we soon learn why this is the case.Kapadia's central thrust is the dichotomy of the public and private lives of a superstar, whose legend even the uninitiated are familiar with. The private figure is Diego – a sweet (self-described) mummy's boy from the slums of Argentina who rose through the Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Is there some tongue-in-cheek irony in BBC Two starting a five-part biographical documentary on Margaret Thatcher this Monday? Mrs Thatcher was Britain’s first female Prime Minister, Conservative to boot, and regardless of gender her years of leadership were among the most forceful and controversial ever. And it may be just days – May ends in June, as one headline put it – before the second Conservative female Prime Minister bows out amidst Brexit chaos and the potential implosion of the Conservative Party as a capable political force.In this first episode, Making Margaret, we heard from Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
This layered medical memoir by practicing midwife Leah Hazard unpacks riveting tales of all kinds of deliveries and is underpinned by distress at the parlous nature of the understaffed and overworked NHS.Medical tales (including Adam Kay’s This is Going to Hurt, Christie Watson’s The Language of Kindness, David Nott’s War Doctor, and How to Treat People by Molly Case) hit a nerve. We are fascinated because we have all been there and the NHS is absolutely central to our culture.What sets Hard Pushed apart is that while not all of us are mothers, but we have all been born.We meet all kinds of Read more ...
Owen Richards
When Jason and Tracey were trying for a baby, the worst happened. Tracey was diagnosed with breast cancer, and although she eventually recovered, was unable to carry a child. For Jason, the answer was clear - as a trans man, he would become pregnant instead.The new documentary A Deal with Universe follows Jason and Tracey’s journey as they attempt to conceive. It might sound niche, but in reality, it’s a universal story of love and determination. Like many couples, they struggle with failed IVF treatments and miscarriages; Jason’s gender is almost an afterthought. Told through home Read more ...
james.woodall
Documentaries about the 20th century’s most fabled quartet keep coming. There’s no special call for The Beatles: Made on Merseyside (BBC Four), which looked at the group’s Liverpool beginnings, though at a stretch it could be argued that in the 50th anniversary year of their horrible break-up we need reminding of pop’s Biggest Bang in 1963. This was almost the film to do it. Yet for such an explosive moment in cultural history it was curiously downbeat.That might be because, as we were reminded throughout, the group’s genesis was scruffy and full of false starts. Liverpool in the 1950s seemed Read more ...
Owen Richards
Where would you go for a devastating study on the human condition? The home movies of teenage skaters would be very low down on that list. But most of those movies aren’t filmed, compiled and analysed by Bing Liu, the director of Minding the Gap. Perfectly balancing perspective and curiosity, it’s perhaps the most unexpected achievement on the year.Liu has apparently always been the one behind the camera. From his early teens, he’s been pointing the lens towards his friends, primarily Zack and Keire. They’re both friends we recognise: Zack is the joker, always up for partying hard, and Keire Read more ...
Owen Richards
It’s always interesting to see how presenters make their presence known in documentaries. Louis Theroux hovers on the sidelines like an ethereal presence, Stacey Dooley connects immediately on an emotional level, and one-time host Keith Allen handled proceedings like a fight before a Millwall game. Alice Levine wasn’t the most obvious choice to tackle the rise of the far right; she’s best known for her work on Radio 1 and comedy podcast My Dad Wrote a Porno. In her first foray into TV journalism, there was some promising headway but her inexperience ultimately shone through.Levine is Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Bill Morrison’s Dawson City: Frozen Time is an intoxicating cinematic collage-compilation that embraces social history – in microcosm, via its story of the titular Canadian mining town – as well as the history of film itself. But it goes further, too, to achieve something that's close to a meditation on history itself, on time, on the organic process of development and decay. In the 21-minute interview that is the main extra on this Second Run release, Morrison calls it a “window into a time that’s gone”, his phrase capturing nicely the film’s treatment of the four decades or so of North Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
A picture is worth more than a thousand words, never more so than with the photographs of Don McCullin. The octogenarian photographer’s black-and-white imagery made the Sunday Times colour supplement the talk of international media in the 1970s. McCullin, a North Londoner born and bred, travelled the world’s war zones before coming home 35 years ago to a Somerset world of landscapes and still-lifes, whilst still periodically going off to new conflicts, most recently to Syria and Yemen. With a major retrospective opening at Tate Britain this week, Adrian Sibley’s film followed him as he once Read more ...