This film is a real accomplishment. It takes contemporary footage of Stalin’s funeral and cuts it together with foley. It makes you feel like you’re watching it on 24-hour news, not as historical archive footage. That’s the good news. The bad news is it’s like watching 2 and quarter hours of a state funeral on…
Pictures From Afghanistan is a film memoir of Glaswegian BBC photojournalist David Pratt of his time reporting on Afghanistan from the 1980s to present day. I like the way this was filmed, really grounding Afghanistan as a place, not a news item. It’s strange to see a guy get in a taxi outside O’Neills pub…
Always In Season focuses on the death of Lennon Lacy, through the wider context of the history of denial, impunity and erasure of lynchings in the States. Lennon Lacy was a 17-year-old boy who was found hanged from a swingset in the public green behind the house where he lived. Local police immediately ruled it…
As anyone who knows me knows, Toni Morrison is my favourite ever author, along with Sylvia Plath. Toni Morrison has a large body of work, each one of which is unique and interesting in its own way, and deeply moving. This a gentle documentary, letting Toni tell her story in her own words, while her…
You know if there’s a story about a 13-year-old girls being raped, and the assault being filmed, and the video being distributed at her school, with impunity, before the title card even comes up, the movie’s going to be brutal. Netizens is a documentary about online gender violence and harassment. It features names you may…
Freedom Fields is a documentary following the women of the Libyan national football team. Kinda like Permission, this movie is about female athletes being thrown under the bus, but this time in real life. On the eve of the team’s journey abroad for their first international tournament match, the football federation cancels their flight and…
The Feeling of Being Watched is a documentary about a journalist’s struggle to uncover the decades-long mass surveillance of her hometown community of Muslim Arab-Americans in Bearview, Illinois. In some ways the film ends up focusing more on her than on the subject she’s covering because she can never concretely get tangible proof and the…
Aquarela started 15 minutes late because the producer decided to introduce the movie by giving its entire thesis. As she did so, I had a sinking feeling the movie might be shit. This was compounded when the opening theme music, repeated intermittently throughout the film, was a bash of utterly shit nu metal. When it…
A documentary about the refugee crisis and its media coverage. Really difficult in places, had me in tears, watching people desperately trying to throw their children across police lines, lifting them up and on to trains, trying in any way to save them. This is juxtaposed with the omnipresent media contingent, who maintain an invisibility…
A beautiful, vibrant, colourful documentary on the armed conflicts in the Democratic Republic of Congo. I didn’t realise this, but a lot of these rebellions are just a grift for soldiers to raise their wages. If you’re sick of shit at your work, you go, “I want a raise or I’m leaving”. In the army,…