In Israeli-occupied Palestine, when they come and smash down your house, turn your family out on the street with nothing, and pave over everything for a illegal settlement, if you want to complain, you have to prove you actually lived there. Get together documents and evidence. Prove your existence. After decades of watching the occupation…
Nitrate Kisses is archival footage and interviews about queer culture and history in the early 20th century, as well as an examination of how it was repressed and erased. This movie was made in the 90s, and it kinda makes me realise what a road has been travelled from even that point. The notion of…
Purple Sea is an hour of ruined footage, starting from the moment the director goes into the sea when the boat taking her from Syria to Europe sinks in the Mediterranean. It is profoundly distressing to watch. There is no attempt to make a story out of this. It is brings you into the immediacy…
This was really interesting. Bottled Songs 1-4 is four essays in the form of letters between the two journalist directors, on the topic of ISIS and their propaganda. I don’t know how to say this without it sounding like a back-handed compliment, but I kinda expected less from this, you know, more of the totally…
The Tree House is a strange wee movie. It is incredibly ambivalent about itself. It has the feel of an old school anthropological ethnography, with all the negatives and positives that comes with. It focuses on indigenous Vietnamese folk, Ruc, Cor and H’mong. They live in the forests in the mountains of Vietnam. During the…
We’re Still Here is a film about the local community groups fighting gentrification and social cleansing in London. This is kind of a weird watch for me. You watch all these documentaries from all over the world and you see things you identify with even in the most disparate experiences, then it’s the stuff closer…
The thing I’ve quite liked about this Document film festival is how there are different ways to tell a story. Trouble is like that. It kinda has this absence at its centre, because it’s about the director’s da and he doesn’t want to be involved much, so you kinda have to get creative about how…
That was great. The Earth is Blue as an Orange is a documentary following a family as they make a movie about their experiences living through the 2014 Russian invasion of Ukraine. It is incredibly warm and intimate, like watching a little boat, aglow with light, weather a stormy sea. The film is set in…
No Data Plan is a film depicting a train journey taken across America by the director, an undocumented resident. He and his family came from the Philippines as a kid, and he has spent his life living in America, but is still seen as an illegal immigrant. The permanent sense of the fragility upon which…
Infinity Minus Infinity is an experimental art film on the theme of British racism. I’ll be honest this exactly the kind of thing I’d be invited to by a pal in art school and afterwards stand around with my hands in my pockets, going, “Mmm . . . Yeah.”