documentary
Jasper Rees
In the early 1980s the television producer Richard Denton was given considerable access and freedom of movement to make Public School. His documentary about Radley College remains the only really frank account of what goes on inside such an institution. It was a fine piece of patient fly-on-the-wall filmmaking of the kind that simply doesn’t exist anymore, so a documentary which sought to find out what happened to Public School’s subjects was also an elegy to a bygone age of television.A Very English Education was superficially a kind of 35 Up. It tracked down the young chaps who had taken Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“We grew up like animals,” says FAME Studios’ founder Rick Hall of his upbringing. “That made me better… I wanted to be somebody.” He did become somebody, and in the process put Alabama’s Muscle Shoals on the map. This film tells the story of how a small city birthed some of the greatest American music of the 20th century, and of the ripples which subsequently spread. The Rolling Stones recorded there in 1969. Five years earlier they had released their version of Arthur Alexander’s “You Better Move On”. Hall was behind the original, his first production.Tucked just inside the north-west Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Respect and dignity, intolerance and hatred: the poles were set far apart in Stephen Fry: Out There. It’s good to have Fry the thoughtful presenter back – it’s been a long time since his The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive – on a subject close to his heart, how gay people are faring in various parts of the world. This first episode took us to Uganda and Los Angeles, while part two on Wednesday drops in on Brazil, Russia and India. Quite an itinerary for two hours of television – fitted in over two years, during gaps in Fry’s other commitments – and it’s to Fergus O’Brien’s directing Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Bees, whenever called upon, have always been ready for their close-up. They had a sizeable cameo in Disney’s Winnie the Pooh, played the lead villain opposite Michael Caine in The Swarm and got to be heroes in Bee Movie. Most recently there was The Secret Life of Bees, in which Dakota Fanning’s grieving teen finds solace in beekeeping. That was in 2008. Five years later the world is waking up to the fact that in reality there’s no solace to be had from making honey. More Than Honey explains why.From a very left field indeed, this documentary about the catastrophic collapse in world bee Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s a great line near the beginning of Fox’s nine-parter Meet the Russians: “Money can’t buy you taste. It can buy you a personal shopper.” If this show's participants had splashed out on a bit of PR advice as well, you wonder whether the answer would have come back to steer clear of such television exposure, even when Fox came knocking. Not because there are any dreadful secrets to be found in those ample closets – unless you count some of the interior design – but because the result makes them look a bit like they’re out of a bad soap.It’s all so easy to mock. Just as it’s easy to Read more ...
Giles Terera and Dan Poole
The idea behind Muse of Fire was a simple one. We wanted to spend a year travelling the world and find out from as many sources as we could why Shakespeare is both so loved and so feared. We wanted to try and eradicate our own deep-rooted anxieties and help others to remove theirs. This was the goal. How we would achieve all this was the ordeal. It has been a five-year adventure but now the film is complete and ready for its world premiere at Raindance Film Festival, we can say that every moment of an incredible journey was worth it.Before we became filmmakers we were already Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Belarusian director Sergei Loznitsa recently made an impact with the powerful In the Fog, a delicately balanced examination of the pressures at play in World War II Russia. Before that, his international calling card was My Joy (2010), a first venture into fiction. Both form part of a prodigious body of work otherwise dedicated to non-fiction. The release of the documentaries Blockade, Landscape and Revue in one package gives non-Russians a first chance to sample what dominates his output.Blockade (2006) takes archive footage of the Leningrad Blockade of 1941 to 1944, when the city was Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Eleven life stories, and memories stretching back more than half a century. The protagonists of Sebastian Lifshitz’s Les Invisibles (The Invisible Ones) tell their different stories of growing up homosexual in France in years when their sexual identity was far from accepted by society. What a kaleidoscope of experience they have behind them, how moving a perspective they present as they view the lives they have lived from age. This is a film as much about looking back, about le temps perdu, as it is about the ramifications of sexual orientation.Some talk hesitantly, other unstoppably. They Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The reason to obtain a DVD or Blu-ray disc of Sarah Polley's unforgettable documentary is because making sense of it requires several viewings. What starts out as a straightforward memoir centred on the presence of an absence – her mother Diane, lost to cancer at 54 in 1990, when Sarah was 11 – turns into a kaleidoscopic meta-narrative that makes the Canadian actor-director ponder her motives.The impassive on-screen observer of the perplexing oral history of her engendering, Polley seemingly works from a position of clarity toward the realisation that families are conundrums, for everyone. Read more ...
Beeban Kidron
While newspapers alternately praise and panic about the glittering world of the Internet, there is a generation of children who have grown up with 24/7 connectivity and a smart phone in their hand.Public discourse seems to revolve around "grooming" and "privacy", two issues that embody the fears and concerns of adults. What is less discussed is what it really means to always be on, never alone and increasingly bombarded by a world that has something to sell you and appears to know you better than yourself. A world that is so ubiquitous that it is the first and the last thing you see as you Read more ...
David Benedict
BBC Four’s new series Sound of Cinema: The Music that Made the Movies is shocking. The overwhelming majority of arts-based TV consists of programmes consigning specialist knowledge/presenters to the sidelines in favour of dumbed-down, easily digestible generalisations mouthed by all-purpose TV-friendly faces. But this three-part series is fronted by, gasp, a composer who uses insider knowledge to hook and hold the viewers.To be fair, film composer Neil Brand was onto a winner since TV, the home of show and tell, is an ideal place in which to examine and explain exactly how music works with Read more ...
Claudia Pritchard
Parents who separate make their children old before their time. The five young people in Olly Lambert’s spare and frank BBC2 documentary, Mum and Dad Are Splitting Up, certainly know more about dysfunctional adults than you would wish upon a child. Joining the pet rabbit and the little brothers and sisters at home have been alcohol, jealousy, non-communication, disillusionment and deception. The parents, now apart, were interviewed, for the most part, together, their wise child sitting in; they told the camera what you wish they had told Relate, or better still, each other, before the point Read more ...