documentary
Kieron Tyler
The trio of Sixties television documentaries assembled here are prototypical examples of Ken Russell’s oeuvre: hyper-real, and often frenzied, depictions of the lives of their subjects. Each not-quite or more-than documentary was made for the BBC in an era when boundaries were pushed and the corporation allowed directors to follow their artistic sensibilities. Although there is little immediate link with the Ken Loach of 1966’s Cathy Come Home, both he and Russell thrived in the fertile environment of a BBC which took chances.The Great Passions collects Always on Sunday (1965), a portrayal of Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It’s a fair bet that when Lewis Hamilton and his Formula One colleagues are driving to practice sessions they don’t have to queue for 90 minutes at a military checkpoint. This was just one illuminating vignette of the daily grind shown in Amber Fares’ interesting documentary about a group of Palestinian female car-racers, the first all-women team in the Arab world.This incident happened to team captain Maysoon, who marshals Marah, Noor, Mona and Betty, four very likeable women who love racing cars. Fares tells their stories through interviews with the women and their families, interspersed Read more ...
Fran Robertson
Situated next to the beautiful Welsh Harp reservoir in North London, the West Hendon council estate was built in the 1960s to provide 680 homes to low income families. I first went there in November 2014. I had been following various housing stories around London and had heard about an estate where residents were fighting a multi-million pound regeneration which was forcing them out of their homes and where land valued at £12 million had been sold to developers for just £3.The day I went to the estate, representatives of the private developers, the architects and the council had set up a mini Read more ...
Veronica Lee
For anyone living in the UK at the time, the Dunblane massacre on 13 March 1996 was an event so seared into their minds that they can remember exactly where they were when the shocking news came through.I was working on The Daily Telegraph's arts pages when, by a horrible coincidence, a film review was accompanied by a picture with a handgun in it; the page was quickly redesigned – as indeed was most of the paper as the awful story unfolded and the enormity of it became clear. In the small town of Dunblane, near Stirling, Thomas Hamilton had walked into Dunblane Primary School, and shot dead Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Murder is entertainment, which is why crime and the legal process are on television every night. But where drama and documentary focus on criminals and the police who catch them – and the barristers who cross-examine them in court – vanishingly little attention is paid to the worker bees of the legal process. That's partly because the Crown Prosecution Service is a shy organisation. The Prosecutors: Real Crime and Punishment is the first time cameras have been allowed to watch the CPS at work.Each episode has focused on contrasting cases to illustrate the many different ways in which evidence Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The expectation that late means great is one embedded deeply in our culture: that the consummation of creative endeavour finds its peak towards life’s conclusion, with experience assimilated into a rich finale. These two films from the very start of the career of the eminent Czech director Věra Chytilová (1929-2014), and the beginning of the remarkable movement that became the Czech New Wave, are a salutary reminder of the opposite, showing just what happens when youth bursts out with supreme energy.The Czech New Wave was a young movement, emerging directly out of the Prague Film School. Read more ...
David Kettle
The set-up behind Spanish film-maker Álvaro Longoria’s intelligent documentary on North Korea is almost as bizarre and unlikely as the regime he’s attempting to probe.Having felt compelled for several years to make a film about the country, he’s finally allowed to travel there thanks to intermediary and fellow Spaniard Alejandro Cao de Benós (pictured below), the North Korean government’s sole foreign employee (we’re told), and a passionate, unquestioning supporter of the regime. Permitted to film whatever he wants to (as long he’s accompanied by government guides, and as long as it’s what Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Who’s the Boss? occupies a square-eyed quadrant somewhere between Gogglebox and The Apprentice. If you like those, you’ll probably like this jaunty workplace experiment in which it’s not the boss who hires applicants for a new job, but the workforce. In Ancient Rome they called it Saturnalia, when for one day of the year the hierarchy was reversed. Nowadays you’d call it Siliconalia because like more or less everything these days the idea originated in Silicon Valley.It's quite a long way from California to a family fruit and veg distribution business in Hertfordshire. Reynolds needed a new Read more ...
graham.rickson
Taxi Tehran fits neatly into a recent tradition of films set entirely in cars; Jim Jarmusch’s Night On Earth comes to mind, as well as Abbas Kiarostami’s Ten. Initially we’re led to believe that we’re watching a fly-on-the-wall documentary, assembled from dashboard footage shot on a cheap digital camera by director Jafar Panahi as he drives a taxi through the streets of Tehran. There’s inevitably more to it; that the various passengers’ conversations are scripted becomes quickly apparent, despite the winningly natural performances which Panahi draws from his uncredited cast.Already banned Read more ...
Jasper Rees
This debate about the future of the BBC might be missing the point. In the black corner scowls the Dark Lord of Swingeing Arts Cuts John Whittingdale, while in the fluffy corner is everyone who doesn’t want anything to change. By their “I heart Lyse Doucet” shall you know the latter. We’re all of us, on both sides of the fence, of a certain vintage. The kids, who like it or not seem an absolute dead-cert shoo-in to inherit the future, haven’t got a dog in this fight. Why? Because they don’t watch TV. Any more than they buy newspapers. They watch YouTube. If they like the BBC it’s as a Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
One novel and two movies, but the BBC cheekily claims that this three-part series was inspired by Deborah Moggach’s 2004 novel These Foolish Things, and the pair of films The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel – but not related. How did the programme-makers come up with this, and keep a straight face?We have here a contrived documentary, taking eight sexagenerians and septuagenerians, from the delightful and diminutive character ballet dancer Wayne Sleep and the horizontally challenged, formidably intelligent actress Miriam Margolyes, to the singer Patti Boulaye and newscaster Jan Leeming to Jaipur, Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
China’s tumultuous recent past attempted to selectively obliterate the history of one of the world’s great and ancient civilisations, with the neatly complementary result in the past several decades of a huge upsurge in Chinese studies, East and West, from publications to exhibitions to enormous advances in archaeology. At the same time, a sense of preserving the material past has been threatened by urban development, a habit copied perhaps from the West.And here comes a six-part television history, sprawling and ambitious, of the past 4,000 years masterminded and narrated by Michael Read more ...