documentary
aleks.sierz
Journalism is a despised profession. And when you consider the story behind the interview that Diana, Princess of Wales, gave to BBC journo Martin Bashir in 1995 you can see why. As anyone who follows current affairs knows, it has been revealed that Bashir used less than honest methods to get this scoop and the whole sorry process has once again thrown an ugly light on the BBC as an institution.Now writer Jonathan Maitland, who has previously had Dead Sheep, An Audience with Jimmy Savile, and The Last Temptation of Boris Johnson staged at Park Theatre, gives us a documentary account of the Read more ...
Saskia Baron
On the Adamant is an endearing documentary by the French director Nicolas Philibert, best known here for his 2003 film, Être et Avoir, a portrait of a single-room school in the Auvergne.This time around, Philbert has placed his camera on the Adamant, a purpose-built barge permanently moored on the Seine in Paris. It’s a drop in centre for city dwellers battling with mental illness – a place where sessions of art therapy, communal cooking and mediated group discussions help troubled people from falling further into despair. Philbert’s style is to eschew Read more ...
Sarah Kent
If Madeleine Gavin’s Beyond Utopia doesn’t make you cry, you’re a hard nut to crack. The film records the fortunes of defectors fleeing North Korea, a hell hole that is more like a prison camp than a country.The phone rings with news that a family of five – an 80-year-old grandmother, her daughter, son-in-law and their two small girls – have crossed the Yalu River and are now trapped in China. They are desperate; if caught, they’ll be returned to North Korea to be tortured and either killed or sent to a concentration camp.The caller is part of the “underground railroad” network that helps Read more ...
Sarah Kent
It doesn’t do to be in a hurry in Nepal. In Baato, directors Kate Stryker and Lucas Millard follow Mikma and her family as they travel 300 kilometres from their mountain village in Eastern Nepal to the town of Terai. It takes the best part of a week for the five adults, two boys, and two dogs to walk the narrow paths until they reach the unpaved road where they can board rickety buses or jeeps to complete their journey.The trip is an annual event. Every winter for hundreds of years, villagers have been making the journey south to sell medicinal herbs gathered over the summer months in the Read more ...
Saskia Baron
This loose-limbed movie follows Shabu, a 14-year-old boy who is growing up on the public housing estate known as the Peperklip (Paperclip) in Rotterdam. It’s the summer holidays and he’d like to hang out with his girlfriend and his mates, but first he’s got to sort out some trouble. Shabu’s beloved grandma flew home to see her family in Suriname, and the lad took her car for a joyride and trashed it. Now he has to work out how to make enough money so his grandma can replace her car when she gets back.Making and selling frozen popsicles is one enterprise he tackles. We watch him concoct a Read more ...
Sarah Kent
It’s impossible not to fall in love with Matthew Tannenbaum, the man at the centre of this delightful film. Reading books and chatting to people about books are two of his favourite occupations, so running a bookstore is his idea of paradise. His pleasure is so infectious that the independent bookstore he’s run in Lenox, Massachusetts for over 40 years has become a hub of bonhomie.“My favourite thing to do,” says his daughter, “is to sit in one of the pink armchairs and watch his interactions with people. Everything is informed by kindness, patience, and generosity. He’s got time for everyone Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Devoted fans may not learn anything that new about Noel Coward from Barnaby Thompson’s documentary Mad About the Boy, but they will doubtless see some new things. And those who know “the Master” only from his early plays, hardy perennials these days in British theatres, will marvel at the sheer range and volume of his output.Thompson has been given access to archive materials, including Coward’s home movies, by his estate, and these provide a welcome garnish to the bare bones of his CV. See Coward propelling himself on a lilo across the sea at the foot of his beloved Jamaican property. Read more ...
graham.rickson
Studio Canal’s restored print of the 1953 documentary The Conquest of Everest is so sharp, so clear that initially it’s hard to believe that we’re not watching a studio reconstruction. Skies, snowscapes and sunlit uplands glow; it’s only in the perilous final stages that things turn murkier.Do listen to the bonus interview with producer John Taylor, recounting his struggle to get the film financed after a tip off that a British attempt to climb Everest was imminent, and the mad rush to edit the footage against a very tight deadline. Poet Louis MacNeice’s hastily-written commentary, spoken by Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Who created the term “electronic superhighway”? First described a system of linked communication that would become the internet? Envisioned a multichannel TV system where viewers chose for themselves what to tune into? Watch Amanda Kim’s excellent documentary Moon Is the Oldest TV and you find that the correct answer to all those questions is Nam June Paik.A diminutive impish South Korean, Paik was born into an eminent wealthy Seoul family, on a par with the Samsungs, and by 17 knew he had to get out. He had become a Marxist, then a communist. His intellectual interests would take him to Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The phrase “male gaze” was coined by the British film theorist Laura Mulvey in 1975 and has become a standard tool for analysing a film’s gendered content. What director Nina Menkes has set out to show in Brainwashed is that the techniques that create the male gaze have entered cinema’s DNA and become standard across the genders, for makers and watchers alike. “It’s like a law,” she says. This is bad news for us all, she argues, not just cineastes.The documentary uses as its framework a 2018 lecture Menkes gave to her film production students at CalArts in Los Angeles. We cut to and from it Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Since her death in 1995, Patricia Highsmith has prompted three biographies, screeds of often conflicting psychological analysis and now this documentary from the Swiss-born Eva Vitija. We hear the director say at the outset that by reading her then-unpublished diaries she learned to love, not just the writing, but the writer, which not all commentators have managed to do.It’s tempting to say, "Join the queue, lady.” Highsmith was the most prolific of seducers, haunting gay bars around the world and specialising in pursuing married women. None of the relationships lasted, except for a couple Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Netflix’s hit show Drive to Survive has proved that F1 can grab ratings, but Villeneuve Pironi: Racing's Untold Tragedy (Sky Documentaries) is a more esoteric offering.It’s a story from the annals of early-Eighties Formula One, in which filmmakers Torquil Jones and Gabriel Clarke (both have pedigree in sports documentaries, and Clarke also wrote and co-directed Steve McQueen: the Man and Le Mans) flash back to the fatally entwined careers of drivers Gilles Villeneuve and Didier Pironi. The film opens with the words of Villeneuve’s widow Joann: “This is a story about a very deep betrayal. It Read more ...