Tag: Documentary
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For Sama.
Reviewing documentaries is a very different beast to reviewing fiction. There are different considerations to be taken when attempting to weigh up the positive and negative qualities of a documentary film. Attempting to review For Sama is a whole separate challenge. Where to start with this compelling, horrifying, masterful movie? Director Waad Al-Kateab filmed many…
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Ray & Liz
Bleak and brilliant, Ray & Liz opens with scenes from a fly-infested council-flat bedroom where a man resides – sleeping, smoking, drinking, but never leaving. He passes the time looking out the window and listening to the radio. This is Ray, alcohol-dependant and isolated. These scenes make up one third of Richard Billingham’s Ray &…
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Island of the Hungry Ghosts.
With less than 2,000 residents, Christmas Island – an Australian territory located in the Indonesian Ocean – has a detention centre where thousands of individuals are held indefinitely. As well as these facilities, the island is also known for its annual red crab migration, in which over 40 million crabs make their journey to the…
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My Favourite Films of 2018.
2018 has been a rather disappointing year for my personal cinema expeditions. With the exception of The Shape of Water, award season was a collection of deflated disappointments with the likes of Lady Bird, Three Billboards and I, Tonya all leaving me a little let down in their mere adequacy. The most unexpected treats of…
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A Woman Captured.
With astonishing access to a truly horrifying issue, A Woman Captured is as astounding as a directorial debut gets. Formerly a film school student in Budapest, Bernadett Tuza-Ritter embarks on an emotional journey with house slave Marish, who has resided with an abusive family for over a decade. Tuza-Ritter’s access is the most remarkable element of the…
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Documentaries Changing the World: A Northern Soul
Sean McAllister returned to his hometown of Hull in 2017 after being appointed Creative Director of City of Culture. Residing back with his parents after years spent all over the world making award winning documentaries, McAllister now faced a new kind of challenge. Over the course of the year McAllister would attempt to engage his…
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Skate Kitchen.
Crystal Moselle’s follow up to debut The Wolfpack is being praised as a docudrama-hybrid; a scripted, fictional narrative woven into the director’s real-life experiences with an all-female Manhattan skate collective. Loner Camille, lives an isolated existence across the water in Long Island. In the film’s opening minutes Camille is already in hospital after an eye-watering skating accident.…
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American Animals
Dramatised non-fiction is old territory for director Bart Layton whose first feature documentary The Imposter included tense re-enactment. His latest work takes things even further in an attempt to intertwine documentary and drama even more tightly. American Animals, based on a shambolic real-life heist at an American University in 2004, is for the most part a…
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Whitney.
Nick Broomfield and Kevin Macdonald, both giants of the British documentary industry, have each explored the self-destructive life and intense global career of Whitney Houston. Almost exactly a year after Broomfield’s Whitney: Can I Be Me comes Macdonald’s simplistically entitled Whitney – this time signed off by Houston’s family and estate. Where Broomfield’s limited access meant he drew largely…
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McQueen.
London bad boy turned fashion designer extraordinaire, Lee Alexander McQueen boldly conquered the world of fashion in his late twenties. His violent, dramatic designs earned him international acclaim and at the mere age of twenty-seven he found himself chief designer at Givenchy, remaining in the position for the following five years. In 2010, McQueen committed suicide…
Hannah McHaffie 