Category Archives: Documentary

Into the storm: a film-maker’s bizarre quest to figure out QAnon

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In a new HBO series, Cullen Hoback falls deep into a rabbit-hole while investigating the conspiracy theory-spreading cult

Anyone who spends enough time online will eventually have one of those rabbit-hole experiences, in which late-night hours slip away as one click after the other draws a person deeper into an engrossing vortex of information. Mostly, it’ll be a perfectly innocent obsession with the history of curling or the various shapes of pasta. But thousands of web-surfers have gone through this with the world of QAnon, a difficult-to-define movement combining cult-like religious fervency, the ideological action-plans of a political party, and computer games connecting the virtual dimension to reality.

Related: Groomed: how a film-maker learned to confront a childhood of abuse

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‘We know exactly what we want to say’: inside a film that normalizes stuttering

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Stuttering affects one in 20 children, yet is still stigmatized, something the documentary My Beautiful Stutter hopes to correct

One of the most moving scenes in My Beautiful Stutter, a documentary now streaming on Discovery+, involves just a microphone and an open stage. Many of the attendees at Camp Say in Hendersonville, North Carolina, a getaway for youth who stutter hosted by the New York-based organization the Stuttering Association for the Young, grew up feeling broken or confused, ostracized by a neurological disorder that tangles the flow of fluent speech. Some campers recite poetry, others get through just their name before breaking into tears, all afforded the space to speak rarely given in the non-stuttering world (what can take a non-stutterer a minute to read or say could take a person who stutters 10 times as long). Tears abound; the scene hums with the bottomless human desire, felt most acutely as a teenager, to be seen, heard, loved, accepted.

Related: 'They become dangerous tools': the dark side of personality tests

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Australia in Colour: recolourised film ushers into existence a new kind of fiction

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As the new series of SBS’s film revitalisation project airs, Guardian Australia’s film critic considers the consequences of this trend in film-making

Paolo Cherchi Usai – the Italian curator and former head of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (NFSA) – once put forward an elegant definition of moving image preservation, calling it “the science of gradual loss and the art of coming to terms with its consequences”. Those melancholic words present the dispossession of our celluloid and digital pasts as inevitable, and efforts to maintain them a will-o’-the-wisp exercise: impossible to achieve, like reaching the gold at the end of the rainbow.

But loss is far from the first thing that comes to mind after watching the second season of SBS’s four-part documentary series Australia in Colour. Separated into different themes, the first episode is devoted to family, exploring issues such as changing gender roles, the stolen generations and the arrival of contraceptive pills; the second, about sport, investigates national heroes and drinking culture.

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‘They become dangerous tools’: the dark side of personality tests

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In the documentary Persona: The Dark Truth Behind Personality Tests, the discriminatory nature of a widely used tool is put under the microscope

Scrolling dating apps in 2015, Tim Travers Hawkins didn’t know who his type was. He didn’t even know what a type was. Hawkins, a British film-maker then new to New York, “noticed something that was very different to people’s profiles in the UK and that was the use of these four letters,” he said to the Guardian. Curious, he looked it up. “I was like, ‘Huh, that’s different’.”

Related: 'We're all part of the story': behind Will Smith's 14th amendment docuseries

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Woody Allen denies claims in Allen v Farrow HBO documentary

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The film-maker and wife Soon-Yi Previn claim film is ‘hatchet job riddled with falsehoods’ on abuse allegations

Woody Allen has rebutted renewed allegations, in the HBO documentary Allen v Farrow, that he sexually assaulted his daughter Dylan in 1992, calling the series “a hatchet job riddled with falsehoods”.

In a statement to the Hollywood Reporter, Allen and his wife, Soon-Yi Previn, said that film-makers Amy Ziering and Kirby Dick had “spent years surreptitiously collaborating with the Farrows and their enablers to put together a hatchet job riddled with falsehoods”.

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Bear Grylls: ‘There’s no point getting to the summit if you’re an arsehole’

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The TV adventurer talks near-death experiences, what he learned from Eton and why he decided to go public about his religious faith

“The ninjas of the future,” says Bear Grylls, “are going to be those who can learn how to navigate the fear. It’s like a firefight. You can’t move backwards. You’ve got to move towards it, you know?” Not really. But I’ve never been in a firefight. And if I saw one, I doubt I’d move towards it. Like most people, I’ve been raised in mimsy, risk-averse Britain. Few of us have acquired the wild wisdom of Edward Michael “Bear” Grylls OBE. Unlike the 46-year-old TV adventurer, we have never simmered a sheep’s eyeball in geyser water, paused on Everest to reflect on the corpse of a late friend, wrestled snakes, outrun lions, or broken our backs parachuting. Rather, we’ve been raised in a land where a PE lesson can consist of Tudor-dancing.

Grylls wants to change all that. He wants kids to embrace fear and risk. “If you meet somebody who says they don’t have fear, it means one of two things: one, they’re not telling the truth; or two, they’re not going for anything big enough in their life. What I’ve learned through many trips and many failures is that you have got to move towards the difficult stuff. And the irony is that the things we fear most often dissipate.”

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On my radar: Jason Williamson’s cultural highlights

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The Sleaford Mods frontman on a favourite singer-songwriter, a hellish horror film and why he spends seven hours a day on Twitter

Jason Williamson, lead vocalist of English electronic punk music duo Sleaford Mods, was born in Grantham, Lincolnshire in 1970. He moved to Nottingham in 1995, where he began working with rock band Spiritualized and electronic duo Bent. In 2009, he met Andrew Fearn and they released the first Sleaford Mods album, Divide and Exit, in 2014. They have since been called “the voice of Britain” by their fans and “the world’s greatest rock’n’roll band” by Iggy Pop. Their latest album, Spare Ribs, is out now on Rough Trade Records. The band will tour the UK in late 2021.

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Vive l’indifférence! Netflix’s Room 2806 exposes France’s #MeToo apathy

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Centred on a sex-assault case involving former French presidential hopeful Dominique Strauss-Kahn, this docuseries reveals worryingly outdated attitudes

Most people will have only the haziest recollection of the fallout that occurred after the French presidential hopeful and then head of the International Monetary Fund Dominique Strauss-Kahn was accused of sexually assaulting a room attendant in a New York hotel in 2011. That allows the Netflix documentary Room 2806: The Accusation to possess all the qualities of a slick political thriller. Who will be believed? The immigrant, hotel cleaner, a single parent living in a flat in the Bronx or the globally powerful, immensely rich politician?

This tense, four-part documentary has astonishing material to work with. There is plenty of CCTV footage, filmed from the ceiling, of chambermaid Nafissatou Diallo making her way to the presidential suite, and later, visibly distressed, being shepherded by her supervisor to a subterranean network of shabby staff offices in the bowels of the building, away from the gilded foyer, where she wipes away tears and recounts how she has been assaulted by Strauss-Kahn as she cleaned his rooms.

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Michael Apted, director and Seven Up documentarian, dies at 79

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British director made films Coal Miner’s Daughter and The World is Not Enough, and the long-running Up documentary series

The British director Michael Apted has died at the age of 79.

The film-maker and documentarian was known for films such as Gorillas in the Mist and Coal Miner’s Daughter, as well as his long-running series of Up documentaries.

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Stowaway tells how he survived 11-hour flight to UK in new film

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South African man, now known as Justin, speaks for first time of friend Carlito Vale, who died after 430-metre fall, in Channel 4 documentary

A South African man who survived an 11-hour flight from Johannesburg to London after hiding in a plane’s undercarriage has told of the last words he exchanged with a friend whose body fell from the same British Airways flight as it came in to land at Heathrow.

“He said: ‘We made it,’ and then I passed out with the lack of oxygen,” said the man, who was then known as Themba and who has spoken publicly for the first time about the desperate journey both men undertook in 2015.

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‘Like a mission to Mars’: making David Attenborough’s A Perfect Planet

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Disco-dancing crabs, flamingos under a volcano … and a frog freezing itself alive. Behind the scenes of the BBC’s new nature documentary

Ed Charles, producer, Weather and Oceans
We were really lucky on this series in that we had finished our filming and were in the edit when coronavirus hit, so it was something that we could do remotely. I’ve been working on this project since 2016 so it has been a long time in the making.

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Scottie Pippen: ‘I told Michael Jordan I wasn’t too pleased with The Last Dance’

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The ex-Chicago Bulls star won new fans in the acclaimed Netflix documentary. He talks about his special relationship with MJ – and basketball’s equality problem

Born in Arkansas in 1965, the youngest of 12 children, Scottie Pippen is one of basketball’s all-time greats. He played alongside Michael Jordan for the Chicago Bulls when they dominated the sport in the 1990s, winning six NBA championships. (He also won two Olympic gold medals.) That period, the Bulls’ and, in particular Jordan’s, extraordinary achievements are the focus of the 10-part, critically acclaimed Netflix docuseries The Last Dance, which has been a major hit in 2020.

You and Michael Jordan seemed to have a special bond in the film. When you were both on your game, it seemed like the team was going to win. Was that the case?
Yeah, that relationship, we established that we felt like that in the late 80s, playing against the Pistons, just starting to grow and mature and have each other’s backs. We grew up together and we defended each other. That respect we had on the court, that competitiveness we took through to the top – it was special. That was the respect we had for each other, because we had to be on the court to do what we did. We had to be dominant.

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Carole Baskin: ‘After Tiger King, my phone rang every two minutes for months’

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The animal sanctuary owner was catapulted to fame by the Netflix series – and became an unlikely fashion trendsetter

Carole Baskin watched the Netflix documentary series Tiger King as many of us did: she binged it, devouring all seven episodes in one sitting as soon as it was released in March. “It was like watching a dumpster fire, you just couldn’t turn away from it,” says Baskin on a video call. “It was just mesmerising that there could be this many crazy people doing so many wretched things to animals.”

Of course, one of the “crazy people”, the show implied, was her. Baskin, a 59-year-old owner of the Big Cat Rescue sanctuary in Florida, she she had been told by the film-makers that Tiger King would be an exposé of the mistreatment of the animals by private owners in America. Instead, the series mainly focused on a long-running feud between Baskin and Joseph Maldonado-Passage, a mulleted, polygamous, country music-loving zoo owner from Oklahoma who calls himself “Joe Exotic”.

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‘They created a false image’: how the Reagans fooled America

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A new docuseries studies the damaging reign of Ronald and Nancy Reagan and the insidious myth-making that still surrounds their legacy

Ever since Richard Nixon’s sweaty upper lip during a debate with John F Kennedy cost him the election in 1960, television has been the most crucial proving ground for any presidential hopeful. Granting the gift of sight to the general public changed the game, as campaigners and office-holders have been forced to school themselves in careful image management and conscious branding. In American politics, a well-crafted position on foreign policy won’t get a person nearly as far as the easy telegenic charm that makes voters feel comfortable grabbing a pint, a dissonance that’s allowed some dubious characters access to the highest stations of authority.

Related: Ronald Reagan called African UN delegates 'monkeys', recordings reveal

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Trial 4: how a teen spent 22 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit

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Sean Ellis was 19 years old when he was arrested for killing a police officer in Boston. Decades later, he prepares for his fourth trial in Netflix’s Trial 4

Sean Ellis was 19 when he was arrested by Boston police over the killing of an officer in October 1993. Head down and nearly collapsing, barely keeping pace with police, Ellis wore his best suit as officers dragged him into custody – he had just attended the funeral of Celine Kirk and Tracy Brown, his cousins, who had been murdered by Celine’s ex-boyfriend in Ellis’s neighborhood of Dorchester. Ellis had spoken voluntarily to police about his cousins, with whom he was close; days later, he was on trial over the murder of a crooked cop as he slept in his car in a Walgreens parking lot.

Related: A Wilderness of Error: the year's most troubling true crime series

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Explosive interview with Diana leaves one big question: how was it secured?

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Story of BBC journalist Martin Bashir’s dealings with Princess of Wales is of searing public interest

It was just six days before transmission that Buckingham Palace learned that the BBC’s Panorama programme was to broadcast Martin Bashir’s compelling, explosive – and now highly controversial – interview with Diana, Princess of Wales.

In the palace press office, there was dismay and resignation. “Then everybody looked at each other and said: ‘Martin who?’” recalled Dickie Arbiter, then an assistant palace press secretary.

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Angry TV film-makers stop release of lauded Iranian documentary

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Coup 53, which charts MI6’s role in the shah’s restoration, has been blocked by makers of an 1985 show, who say it sullies their names

Coup 53 was heralded by critics this summer as a “powerful and authoritative” documentary “as gripping as any thriller”, and judged by historians as crucial to understanding Britain’s relationship with the Middle East.

Made over 10 years by Walter Murch, the celebrated editor of Apocalypse Now and The English Patient, in collaboration with the Anglo-Iranian director Taghi Amirani, it tells the story of covert British intervention in Iran after the second world war and stars Ralph Fiennes, left, as an MI6 spy in a reconstruction of a key incident.

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American Apparel ‘used fake comments to fuel founder’s bad boy image’

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Ex-worker tells documentary series staff would post on articles about Dov Charney

A documentary series has revealed how American Apparel helped fuel its founder’s bad boy mythology in order to bolster interest in the clothing company online.

In the nine-part Big Rad Wolf, a former employee reveals she would leave approved fake comments under salacious articles about Dov Charney on celebrity media blogs such as Gawker and Jezebel, in order to manufacture his reputation as predatory.

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Sue Perkins: Along the US-Mexico Border review – darkness leavened with a dash of wit

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More of a travelogue than a documentary, Perkins begins in the border town of Tijuana, where she finds tequila-fuelled parties sit uneasily alongside the scale of asylum seekers’ suffering

Watching Sue Perkins present a programme always brings to mind the moment in Blackadder when Edmund, in financial straits, is showing prospective buyers around his home. “You’ve really worked out your banter, haven’t you?” says one of them. “No, not really,” replies Blackadder. “This is a different thing – it’s spontaneous, and it’s called wit.”

Wit is Perkins’ USP. All presenters have warmth and intelligence, though both can vary in degree and kind, and in the proportions in which they are blended. But it is Perkins’ ability to think on her feet – and, I suppose, the willingness of her editors to keep it in and not flatten her into traditional affectlessness – that marks her (and the likes of Grayson Perry and Paul O’Grady when he lets rip) out. It adds zest to proceedings. This is always welcome, even when – as with last night’s opening episode of the two-part Sue Perkins: Along the US-Mexico Border (BBC One) – the programme’s subject matter is notably colourful stuff on its own.

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