Documentary on deportation of 48,000 Jewish Amsterdammers during Holocaust prompts city to act
On 8 August 1944, an Amsterdam tram took Anne Frank from Weteringschans prison, past the “secret annexe” where she had hidden from the Nazis, on the start of a journey to her death.
It was one of a series of Dutch night trams that deported 48,000 Jewish Amsterdammers during the Holocaust, trams commissioned by the Nazis and paid for with the Jewish wealth they stole.
Continue reading...The adult film star – at center of hush-money payments in run-up to 2016 election – is featured in the new documentary Stormy
Stormy Daniels, the adult movie star who received hush-money payments at the center of one of Donald Trump’s pending criminal cases, says she is “so tired” as she confronts the prospect of testifying against the former president, whose supporters have flooded her social media accounts with threats.
“I’m desensitized to some of it … but I’m also tired,” Daniels says in a new documentary premiering on Monday on Peacock, according to Slate, which reported viewing the film in advance. “Like, my soul is so tired. And I don’t know if I’m so much a warrior now as out of fucks, man. I’m out of fucks.”
Continue reading...Liz Oliva Fernández says the sanctions, imposed 60 years ago and upheld through Biden, have led to a ‘desperate situation’
A Cuban journalist is looking to spread awareness of the US trade embargo in two illuminating documentaries arriving in early 2024.
Liz Oliva Fernández says whenever she covered news or events on the island, be it the push for democratic reforms, or the private businesses springing up after the Castros loosened their grip on power, they always intersected with the sanctions.
Continue reading...Adult Human Female, which asserts that women are defined solely by biological sex, stopped after activists block entrances
The screening of a controversial film asserting that women are defined solely by their biological sex has been cancelled by Edinburgh University after trans rights activists occupied entrances to the venue.
The screening of the documentary Adult Human Female was organised with the university’s support after a previous event in December was prevented from taking place when protesters confronted audience members and occupied a screening room minutes before it was due to be shown.
Continue reading...Director dedicates award to all political prisoners after film about Russian opposition leader wins best feature documentary
Russian liberals on Monday celebrated the Oscar win of Navalny, a documentary about the poisoning and imprisonment of the “hero” Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
The film, which won best feature documentary at the Academy Awards in Los Angeles on Sunday, follows an investigation by Navalny’s team together with the Bellingcat group as they unmask FSB agents who were sent to poison Navalny in 2020. The Kremlin has always denied involvement.
Continue reading...The Oscar-winning film-maker has announced he is months into making Musk, which will examine the controversial entrepreneur
Oscar-winning film-maker Alex Gibney has announced that he is in the process of making a documentary about Elon Musk.
The documentarian behind films such as Taxi to the Dark Side and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room is months into the making of Musk, “a definitive and unvarnished examination” of the provocative tech entrepreneur.
Continue reading...Lorna Tucker says not enough is being done to help Britain’s homeless people, and what is being done is not working
The film-maker Lorna Tucker was once a teenage runaway, sleeping rough in London for 18 months. Twenty-five years later, she has relived the harrowing experience for a documentary, returning to her former haunts and speaking to homeless people at a time when record numbers are living on Britain’s streets.
She was reunited with some of those she left behind, including “Darren”, who has been on the streets since his alcoholic mother was unable to care for him. “Darren sleeps where I used to sleep under Waterloo Bridge,” she said. “He still has the same eyes he had as a 15-year-old boy. He’s still got this beauty, but obviously he’s been very affected by it.”
Continue reading...Cameraman Daniel McGovern copied footage of Hiroshima and Nagasaki devastation to ensure lessons were learned
The photograph shows devastation in Nagasaki after the atomic bomb: a scorched wilderness where there was once a city. At its centre stands a lone man with a camera.
It was 9 September 1945 and Lt Daniel McGovern, a US Army Air Force cameraman, was documenting ground zero, the point directly below the bomb’s detonation four weeks earlier. Few would recognise McGovern, but the vision of apocalypse is familiar from documentary footage of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of the second world war.
Continue reading...Film speaks with men at a rehabilitation centre in Saudi Arabia who had previously been held at Guantánamo Bay detention camp
A group of former Guantánamo prisoners are calling for the film Jihad Rehab to be withdrawn. In an open letter, the men express their “discomfort with the content of the film and its methods of production.”
The letter was published after the film was screened at the Doc Edge festival in New Zealand under a new name, The UnRedacted. “Changing the title of the film doesn’t change its harmful narrative or lazy stereotyping,” says Moazzam Begg, a former prisoner and director of the Cage advocacy group. “Following widespread criticism, the team behind Jihad Rehab had an opportunity to listen and learn. Yet this has been met with little corrective action or even acknowledgment.”
Continue reading...A new documentary takes viewers back down the rickety stairs to the trailblazing Gateways in Chelsea
The Gateways is back. The longest-running lesbian club of all-time – the one whose actual clientele appeared in the 1968 film The Killing of Sister George; the one where Mick Jagger tried to talk the owner into letting him crash in a frock; the one that was a sanctuary to every class and sort of woman, from well-known figures such as the writer Patricia Highsmith and the artist Maggi Hambling (then an art student) to swimming-pool attendants at the Tooting Bec lido – has been given a new lease of life in the first full-length documentary film to celebrate its history, and ensure that it is not erased.
Behind a dull green door on the corner of King’s Road and Bramerton Street in Chelsea, down some rickety steps to the basement lay the dive, a former strip club. The lease had been won in a bet at a televised boxing event at the Dorchester hotel by course bookie Ted Ware in 1943, and initially he offered it as a hang-out to a group of his lesbian pals who had been kicked out of their old Soho haunt the Bag O’ Nails pub after new owners took over and banned them.
Continue reading...Cherish Oteka’s film is about a former police officer who discusses his memories of homophobia and racial profiling in the Met
The Guardian documentary The Black Cop has won the Bafta for best short film.
Directed by Cherish Oteka and produced by Emma Cooper, The Black Cop is about Gamal “G” Turawa, a former Metropolitan police officer who explores his memories of homophobia, racial profiling and racial harassment in his early career.
Continue reading...In the damning new Netflix documentary Downfall: The Case Against Boeing, the errors and oversights that led to two crashes are examined
For the vast majority of travelers, stepping foot on an airplane entails a tremendous act of near-blind faith. We control our own cars, trains operate on set tracks at ground level, but flying requires us to put total trust in the expertise of a complete stranger to operate a machine too complex for us to understand. Every time these gargantuan hunks of metal don’t plummet screaming from the sky towards a certain fiery doom, it feels like a miracle, even if that’s how the majority of flights play out. Rory Kennedy’s damning new documentary Downfall: The Case Against Boeing takes a close look at two incidents included within the small number of flights when things go wrong, and shows us the tragedy that strikes when that sacred compact between passenger and airline is violated.
“I fly a good deal, and the truth is I’ve got a bit of a fear of flying,” Kennedy tells the Guardian from behind the wheel of her car, talking transit in transit. “I like to think that when I walk down that jetway, the manufacturer of that plane is invested in keeping it up in the air, that the regulatory agencies focused on safety are doing in their job, and that at least in our country, the government is making sure the regulatory agencies enforce those safety measures. In this case, it seems that all of those agencies failed us.”
Continue reading...He escaped death, fled across the Baltic, and eventually found love and a new life. Jonas Poher Rasmussen describes how he turned Amin’s often harrowing story into an uplifting, award-winning animation
When the Danish film-maker Jonas Poher Rasmussen was 15, an Afghan refugee moved to his small village. Rumours circulated about how the boy, Amin, had got there. Some said he had walked all the way from Kabul, others that he had seen his whole family slaughtered. Rasmussen became the newcomer’s friend and confidant – Amin even came out to him as gay when they were teenagers – and their closeness endured into adulthood. When they both suffered bad break-ups in their 20s, for instance, Rasmussen went to stay with Amin; they refer to that period now as “the heartbreak summer”. He still didn’t know the truth about how his friend came to Denmark, though, so he did what any documentarist might do: he proposed making a film about him. Amin refused to reveal his identity on screen – but what if the film were animated?
The result is Flee, which alternates between scenes of Rasmussen interviewing his friend, dramatisations of Amin’s perilous journey to Copenhagen via Moscow, and present-day interludes showing him househunting with his boyfriend in which the concept of settling down presents unique challenges for someone who has spent his life running. Aside from the occasional excerpt of archive footage – the war-scarred streets of Kabul, the unruly waves seen from a boat smuggling people across the Baltic – every frame of the movie is animated, most of it in a simple, straightforwardly realistic fashion that matches Amin’s narration.
Continue reading...Frank Hurley’s 1919 silent footage turns Sir Ernest Shackleton’s gruelling expedition into a travelogue with cute penguins
Pioneering Australian photographer and film-maker Frank Hurley was the official witness to Sir Ernest Shackleton’s gruelling expedition attempting to cross the Antarctic landmass, which lasted three years from 1914 to 1917. For most of the time the crew were utterly cut off from news of the outside world and the expedition became an epic ordeal when, on the way there, their ship (aptly named Endurance) was crushed and sunk by pack ice. Shackleton and his men were forced to journey onwards in a lifeboat in the desolate cold, finally to South Georgia, then rescued and brought by a Chilean vessel to the harbour in Valparaíso where they were accorded a hero’s welcome.
This 1919 silent movie is Hurley’s filmed record of Shackleton’s voyage and what is startling about it is its weird tonal obtuseness: so often it feels like a home-movie travelogue in which the mood is bafflingly jaunty. Towards the end of the film, just at the point when their lives have been saved and disaster averted, the film spends about 10 minutes on the adorable behaviour of the penguins. This is at the moment when Shackleton’s victory was said to consist simply in his heroic survival, the expedition itself having, of course, been a failure, but the film simply sets aside the obvious poignant or tragic dimension.
Continue reading...Salomé Jashi’s film follows the journey of hundreds of mature trees as they are uprooted across Georgia to populate a rich man’s garden
Like a sad, greedy king in some fairytale or parable, the Georgian billionaire and former prime minister Bidzina Ivanishvili set out, six years ago, to buy and uproot hundreds of magnificent mature trees and transport them at colossal expense and difficulty across Georgia to be transplanted in his own huge private garden. It sometimes involves taking a tree by water, along the Black Sea coast – a truly surreal image.
Salomé Jashi’s fascinating and deadpan film shows, in a series of tableau-type shots, the effect that these purchases are having up and down the land. Local workers squabble among themselves at the dangerous, strenuous, but nonetheless lucrative job of digging them up. The landowners and communities brood on the sizeable sums of money they are getting paid and Ivanishvili’s promises that roads will also be built. But at the moment of truth, they are desolate when the Faustian bargain must be settled and the huge, ugly haulage trucks come to take their trees away in giant “pots” of earth, as if part of their natural soul is being confiscated. (Surely at least some of these trees will have died en route, although this is not revealed.)
Continue reading...In a new documentary premiered at Sundance, Wood claimed she was ‘coerced into a commercial sex act under false pretences’
The actor Evan Rachel Wood has accused the rock musician Marilyn Manson of raping her on the set of the music video for his 2007 single Heart-Shaped Glasses (When the Heart Guides the Hand).
In Phoenix Rising, a new documentary about her life and career which premiered at the 2022 Sundance film festival, Wood said that during a previously discussed “simulated sex scene”, Manson “started penetrating me for real” once the cameras were rolling.
Continue reading...Éléonore Weber’s documentary, air-strike footage of pilots on night missions, could work well in a gallery
This hypnotic meditation on modern warfare from Éléonore Weber is an experimental cine-essay that feels closer to a gallery installation than a documentary. Watching it is a bit of a test of concentration: 75 minutes of helicopter airstrike footage from American and French missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Clip after clip of pilots following what’s on the ground hundreds of metres below. Who is that in their crosshairs: a Taliban fighter holding a Kalashnikov or a farmer with a rake? Farmers know that they get mistaken for fighters, so run and hide their tools when they hear helicopters. Which of course makes them look suspicious.
In the cockpit, we hear American voices: “Request permission to engage.” “We got a guy with an RPG.” This is the notorious video WikiLeaks dubbed Collateral Murder, a US airstrike filmed from an Apache helicopter in 2007. The rocket-propelled grenade launcher turned out to be a camera tripod belonging to a Reuters photographer, who was one of a dozen civilians killed in the attack. It’s impossible to watch and not think of computer games. “Kill! Kill! Kill” we hear in another video – you can almost feel the itch to shoot everything that moves.
Continue reading...Kelly Duda faces fascist-era charge of ‘offending the honour or prestige’ of prosecutor in case alarming free speech advocates
An American film-maker has been put on trial in Italy for “offending the honour or prestige” of an Italian prosecutor after testifying in a criminal case against a former health ministry chief and representatives of a pharmaceutical company accused of supplying Italians with tainted blood products.
Kelly Duda, who revealed how contaminated blood taken from prisoners in Arkansas was sold around the world, faces up to three years in prison if found guilty of an offence that dates back to Italy’s fascist period.
Continue reading...Camilla Nielsson’s thrilling documentary takes a behind-the-scenes look at the 2018 election that followed the ousting of Robert Mugabe
“A free, fair and credible election.” These words of promise echo throughout Camilla Nielsson’s riveting documentary, capturing the fervour of the 2018 presidential vote in Zimbabwe, the country’s first without Robert Mugabe since its independence.
While opening with the rip-roaring rallies for Nelson Chamisa, who is running for the presidency against the incumbent Emmerson Mnangagwa, Mugabe’s former aide, President is more than an intimate portrait of a charismatic opposition leader. Considering the fraudulent electoral practices that existed under Mugabe’s 30-year reign, this election concretises a collective cry for democracy to triumph over decades of corruption and lies. Such a desire, alas, comes with blood, sweat and tears.
Continue reading...The Oscar-winning director’s new documentary explores warmth, joy and anger through the eyes of a farmyard animal. She reveals what it taught her about life
Andrea Arnold’s films are known for their spare dialogue, and in her first documentary it is more pared-backed than ever: Cow consists of 94 minutes of moos, with the odd off-camera interjection from farmhands. It is hardly a thriller (though the ending is pure Tarantino). But it is one of the most beautifully crafted and tender portraits of a life you are likely to see.
Arnold, who started her professional life as a rollerskating TV presenter on the children’s Saturday show No 73, began thinking about documenting an animal’s life nine years ago. Eventually she settled on a cow. “I thought a cow would be interesting because they work so hard, getting pregnant and giving milk their entire lives. It’s a huge job they do.” She chose Luma because she was told she had a big personality and was feisty. Arnold and her team spent four years, on and off, filming her. Why did she make Cow? “I wanted to show a non-human consciousness. I was intrigued as to whether we would be able to see her consciousness if we followed her long enough.”
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