“Trust me when I say this is not a white saviour story. This is a white nightmare story.” I’m gonna hear about nothing but white people for 2 hours, aren’t I? Yes. Yes you are. Correct. Did You Wonder Who Fired The Gun? is an achingly obvious self-indulgent documentary whose alternate title may have been…
Fuck. Just out of I Am Not Your Negro. Absolutely fucking excellent. It’s an attempt to finish on film James Baldwin’s final unfinished manuscript sketching a history of America by tracing the deaths of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. What unfolds on the screen is a series of visual essays on the…
A film about Bassem Youssef, who is inspired by Jon Stewart’s Daily Show to set up a satirical comedy show in the period between the military dictatorships of Mubarak and El-Sisi. The guy’s really funny and so is the film, it makes me want to see more of his stuff. While the events in Egypt…
A documentary about a Dutch satirical sketch on slavery in chocolate production which develops into the creation of a global ethical chocolate company. It’s bizarre because what starts out as anti-commercialist comedy ends with a commercial entity. It’s a bit like the weird trajectory of Bob Geldof’s life which was to be a rock star…
A documentary about a postman who stands for mayor in his dying little village on the Bulgarian border with the plan to regenerate the community by hosting Syrian refugee families. This is met with a mixed reaction, some positive and some negative. He goes up against the incumbent and this absolute legend of a man…
Liberation Day was fucking awesome! Utterly mad and very funny. Laibach become the first outside band to play North Korea, and it’s as weird as a self-fellating monkey. Have you ever seen a documentary where an interview is interrupted by a goat’s fart? I have.
As everybody knows, cars are not my favourite thing and car films are somewhere below videos on slug mating rituals on YouTube on the list of things I wanna watch, so when I say that Speed Sisters is an excellent fucking movie, you know it’s a fact. Following the highs and lows of the Palestinian…
An absolutely beautiful, slow, moving documentary. The whole film is like a poem about water as a cosmological, geographical, spiritual, biological, historical force. Both personal and political, it is tells the story of Chile’s history as well as the filmmaker’s own life experiences in what becomes a song of water as a unifier between celestial…
A documentary by one of few foreign filmmakers granted access to film in North Korea. His attempts to get a real idea of the lives the 23 million people who live in this media punchline of a country are, of course, hopelessly thwarted and the movie becomes an examination of the propaganda war surrounding the…
A beautiful documentary about a year in the life of primary one class in Zambia where the official language is English but the teacher speaks Nyanja and the pupils speak Soli. Despite being focused on the disadvantage of learning in second language, this is a bright, hopeful, positive portrayal in which people are active in…