documentary
Owen Richards
Major Fakhir is a deminer, responsible for disarming hundreds of mines around Mosul every week. His American counterparts know him by a different title: Crazy Fakhir, a man who rides the edge of his luck, constantly in imminent danger. Yet to him, death is nothing compared to the heavy conscience he would carry by doing nothing.The Deminer is an extraordinary insight into the life of Major Fakhir, compiled from around 50 hours of amateur footage. Armed with little more than a pair of wire cutters and a knife, Fakhir tackles a variety of bombs with worrying abandon: he hacks around landmines Read more ...
Owen Richards
As if the real world wasn’t scary enough... Ghost stories are en vogue at the moment, and after the BBC’s hit-and-miss Requiem, Channel 4 brings True Horror to the small screen – a collection of "real" ghost stories, told by witness interviews and dramatised with a decent budget. And just like Requiem, our first tale took us to the rolling hills of Wales.Wales, according to the wide-eyed Pastor Matt Tricker, is a land of old gods and occultists – a description which doesn’t match my Cardiff suburban upbringing, but who knows what happened behind closed doors? The Rich family certainly could Read more ...
Katherine Waters
When doctors told Doreen Lawrence her son had died she thought, "That’s not true." Spending time with his body in the hospital, aside from a cut on his cheek, it seemed to her he was sleeping. The death of a child will always be strange, and in the aftermath Neville, his father and her husband, even wondered if he might have been struck by the Biblical curse of the loss of his first-born.Quarter of a century after Stephen Lawrence was killed in an unprovoked racist attack on Well Hall Road in Eltham, a pall of unreality still hangs over his murder. Doreen and Neville’s pain remains raw and Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
QCC isn’t the name of a new football club, nor some higher qualification for those toiling at the Bar, but stands for "Queen’s Commonwealth Canopy". Had you heard of it? On the eve of the Commonwealth conference, along came Jane Treays's gently hilarious, and finally rather tender film to fill in the gaps. Its central focus was on the nation’s favourite nonagenarians, the Queen herself and Sir David Attenborough, pottering about and chatting in a garden – that quintessential English idyll – and not just any old garden, but that of Buckingham Palace. Quietly, they talk about saving the Read more ...
Barney Harsent
The title signalled what was coming so clearly, it may as well have been called When Bands End Badly: the two camps, the arguments and sniping and the eventual collapse of Culture Club’s US and UK tour to promote an album of new material. It’s hardly a surprise though – this is a band that, history shows, would have benefitted from the visible presence of an armed UN peacekeeping force.What is surprising is the way in which Boy George appears to be cast (by the rest of the band at least, if not explicitly the filmmakers) as the architect of this collapse: a sort of Fred Dibnah to the band’s Read more ...
Jasper Rees
After the suave theatrical persuasions of Simon Schama and the earnest professorial shtick of Mary Beard, in episode six of Civilisations (BBC Two) it was the turn of David Olusoga, the third of the documentary's triumvirate of presenters. He began, naturally, with Africa, from which he derives the Nigerian part of his identity, but a bit of Africa transplanted to the British Museum which he was taken to see as a child making contact with his heritage.The Benin Bronzes, violently filched and sold off in the late 19th century, are exhibited far from their original home. This is of course true Read more ...
David Kettle
The crucial yet almost indefinable role of music in film – it’s a subject ripe for exploration and celebration, from the musicological technicalities of leitmotifs and ostinatos, through to the colourful characters working to bring directors’ sometimes vague musical notions to sonic reality. All of which gets raced through in this jam-packed documentary by first-time director Matt Schrader, a somewhat frenetic, 93-minute dash through the subject.Schrader has clearly put in a massive amount of work, and Score is very much a labour of love. He’s amassed dozens of interviews, with remarkable Read more ...
David Kettle
A feature-length documentary on whaling in the Faroe Islands: you might think you can see it unfolding already. Hardy Viking fishermen battling the elements, gruesome killings of majestic sea creatures, implied or outright condemnation of the shocking brutality.Scottish director Mike Day’s masterful film is no shock-factor exposé, though – although what it does expose is far more chilling than the low-level hunting it shows. The Islands and the Whales is a haunting, deeply troubling portrait of a modern community on the edge, a film that paints an uncompromisingly complex, contradictory Read more ...
Owen Richards
Last year, the BFI commemorated the 50th anniversary of the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality with the release of Queerama, part of its Gross Indecency film season. Now available on DVD, the documentary from Daisy Asquith eschews standard storytelling for something all the more provocative.Queerama is compiled from the BFI’s huge film and television archive, one hundred years of LGBT+ documentaries, dramas, musicals and comedies, all told through the heterosexual lens of the day. Curiosity, confusion and disgust were narrative constants.But in Queerama, the narrative has been Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
There is a jaguar in the house. Aged five days, and having been rejected by her mother, Maya has arrived from the wildlife park where she was born for hand-rearing by Giles Clark at his home in Kent. The cub is going to spend her early days with his family, with round-the-clock care from Giles, obsessed as he is with the situation of big cats worldwide.For Maya, it will be an attempt to make sure of her survival, not least as an ambassador for endangered species at the Big Cat Sanctuary nearby, where Clark works as head of cats and conservation. A charity, it houses some 50 big cats from 15 Read more ...
Jasper Rees
They don’t commission many television documentaries like Being Blacker (BBC Two) any more. That is not unconnected to the fact that Molly Dineen downed her camera a decade ago. Dineen began filming in another age, before the arrival of kiss-me-quick multi-channel digiverse, and has kept to the habits she learned back then - to observe and probe her subject over months or even years, wielding her own camera. Those habits are expensive and time-consuming and result in richly detailed films like this which tell an epic story on a miniature canvas.The title refers to Steve Burnett-Martin, better Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Hedy Lamarr really ought to be the poster girl for the Time's Up movement. “Any girl can look glamorous," she once said. "All she has to do is stand still and look stupid.” She was the model for Catwoman and Disney's Snow White. It's less well known that she patented an invention which led to the creation of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. If she were alive now, she might be sitting on a £30 billion dollar fortune. As a star of the golden age of Hollywood, her story can be read as a lifelong laboratory experiment in the pros and cons of looking like a million dollars.That capacious narrative has been Read more ...