Mussolini’s Sister review – interestingly quirky portrait of a grumpy octogenarian

This acute documentary gets under the surface of its Palestinian film-maker’s sharp-tongued grandmother to the loneliness and resentment within

Juna Suleiman’s documentary about Hiam, her octogenarian grandmother who lives in Nazareth, is no journey through a picture-perfect family album. Hiam is not the cake-baking kind of grandmother. In fact, she is grumpy, foul-mouthed and very politically incorrect. It could have been quite annoying to spend more than an hour with someone so disagreeable, and yet Suleiman’s love for her grandmother’s quirks shines through, making this familial snapshot an interesting watch.

First off, Hiam is not the sister of that Mussolini. For reasons untold, her parents named one of her brothers after Il Duce. Another child, named Hitler, died in infancy. Still, the film does not dwell much on Hiam’s younger days, and instead focuses on her day-to-day activities, which include berating her ever-changing cleaners, venting bitterness about the news, and lamenting her son’s rare visits. Mostly shot inside Hiam’s apartment, the film acquires an undeniable sense of claustrophobia, which renders her bitterness understandable rather than unforgiving. Instead of turning a senior citizen into a one-dimensional cliche, the decision to capture both Hiam’s humour and her unpleasant side gives us the fullness of her personality. Hiam may look harmless, but you would think twice before crossing her.

Continue reading...

‘How is Pauli Murray not a household name?’ The extraordinary life of the US’s most radical activist

She explored her gender and sexuality in the 20s, defied segregation in the 40s and inspired Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Now, a film is bringing her trailblazing achievements to light

It seems inconceivable that someone like Pauli Murray could have slipped through the cracks of US history. A lawyer, activist, scholar, poet and priest, Murray led a trailblazing life that altered the course of history. She was at the forefront of the battles for racial and gender equality, but often so far out in front that her contributions went unrecognised.

In 1940, 15 years before Rosa Parks, Murray was jailed for refusing to move to the back of a bus in the Jim Crow south. In 1943, she campaigned successfully to desegregate her local diner, 17 years before the Greensboro lunch counter sit-ins of 1960. Her work paved the way for the landmark supreme court ruling Brown v Board of Education in 1954 – which de-segregated US schools – to the extent that Thurgood Marshall, a lawyer for the NAACP civil rights group, called Murray’s book States’ Laws on Race and Color “the bible for civil rights lawyers”.

Continue reading...

‘Maybe the guy’s a masochist’: how Anthony Fauci became a superstar

The US diseases expert has been spoofed by Brad Pitt and lauded as the ‘sexiest man alive’. Now the pop culture phenomenon is the focus of a documentary

Beer and bobbleheads. Candles, colouring books, cupcakes and cushions. Dolls, doughnuts, hoodies, mugs and socks. T-shirts and yard signs that declare “Dr Fauci is my hero” and “In Fauci we trust”.

Anthony Fauci, an 80-year-old scientist, doctor and public servant, has become an unlikely cult hero for millions of people during the Covid pandemic.

Continue reading...

The Lost Leonardo: has a new film solved the mystery of the world’s most expensive painting?

Is the $450m Salvator Mundi a fake? This film – featuring tearful sycophants, sneering experts, dodgy dealers and a secretive superyacht – may finally settle the great da Vinci controversy

It is almost exactly 10 years since Salvator Mundi was unveiled, this “lost Leonardo” instantly triggering astonishment around the world. Since those giddy days, the work has had a turbulent time. As well as becoming the most expensive painting in history, going for $450m (£326m) at auction, Salvator Mundi was denounced by many as a fake and subsequently vanished from view. The painting is now the subject of The Lost Leonardo, a documentary by Andreas Koefoed that opens in cinemas this week.

“I would be surprised,” says Luke Syson, “if I went to see this documentary.” Syson is the curator who, back in 2011, first displayed The Saviour of the World, as its title translates, at the National Gallery’s Leonardo da Vinci blockbuster. Syson is probably making a wise choice. He’s in the film and the way he clams up mid-interview makes him look like the archetypal embarrassed expert caught out on screen.

Continue reading...

Islander review – change and contradictions on Robinson Crusoe island

Stéphane Goël’s documentary merges the past and present of this small island off the coast of Chile

In an age of overconsumption and technological saturation, many yearn for an abstract “simpler” time in the past. Opening on a vessel bobbing on the ocean waves, Stéphane Goël’s Islander takes us on a journey that transcends both the past and the present, effectively dissecting and uncovering many contradictions and preoccupations dormant under this utopian ideal.

At the centre of the documentary is Robinson Crusoe island, west of Chile, and one of the inspirations for Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel. Booming over the magnificent landscape of volcanic mountains is Mathieu Amalric’s evocative narration, as he takes on the role of Swiss aristocrat Alfred von Rodt who bought the island in 1877. Juxtaposed with these ghostly recollections are intimate interviews with Von Rodt’s descendants who are still living there. Also carefully observed are the inhabitants’ daily routines; at one point, a young boy is taught how to shoot a rabbit.

Continue reading...

Purple Sea review – panic and terror as Syrian refugees battle to stay afloat

Syrian director Amel Alzakout records her own stranding in this difficult-to-watch film on a day when 40 people died off the coast of Lesbos

Powerful but painful to watch, this experimental documentary challenges viewers to avert their eyes from the tragedy unfolding before them. It consists almost entirely of footage recorded on a waterproof camera that was strapped to the wrist of Syrian co-director Amel Alzakout while she was floating in the sea off the coast of Lesbos, after the boat she’d been travelling in sunk. Like the other 300 people on the vessel that day in 2015, Alzakout had paid people smugglers to help her escape the war in Syria and find a better life abroad. While she lived to make this film and was reunited with her partner and co-director Khaled Abdulwahed, some 40 people died in the water that day.

It’s possible that some of the perished are even captured on film here – though to be honest, it’s hard to make out much for long stretches as the images thrash around, evoking the panic Alzakout and her fellow passengers, many in lifejackets, must have been experiencing as they tried to stay afloat. Sometimes the camera is above the waterline and we can hear people crying, calling hysterically, blowing whistles to call for help. Otherwise, the view is of jeans-clad legs and other jumbled bodies twisting in the water, the sound muffled by the sea.

Continue reading...

Jeanie Finlay: ‘I don’t film alpha males. They don’t need more exposure’

She spent a year in her room as a teenager, and now makes heart-wrenching documentaries about people looking for safe spaces in record shops, on goth cruises – and even on the set of Game of Thrones

There are many wonderful moments in the films of Jeanie Finlay but my current favourite is in Seahorse, her intimate and profoundly moving 2019 documentary about the struggles of transgender man Freddy McConnell to conceive and give birth to his own child. The scene takes place during a party at Freddy’s mum’s house as a room full of family friends, all women, talk to Freddy about the clothes he’ll wear during pregnancy.

Related: ‘It’s so normalised you think it’s part of your job’: the woman who lifted the lid on harassment in TV

Continue reading...

Sabaya review – extraordinary documentary shows struggle to free women kidnapped by Isis

Hogir Hirori’s film follows Mahmud as he and his team of volunteers infiltrate the dangerous al-Hawl camp in Syria to liberate Yazidi women trafficked as sex slaves

The first 20 minutes of Hogir Hirori’s extraordinary documentary has the beat of a gripping thriller, full of hushed voices, car chases, and the terrifying sounds of gunfight. Much of it shot at night, the film follows Mahmud, a member of an organisation called the Yazidi Home Center (YHC), and his trips with other volunteers to the dangerous al-Hawl camp in Syria which holds people with Isis links. The group’s goal is to retrieve and rescue Yazidi women who were kidnapped and sex-trafficked by Isis. Termed “sabaya” by their captors, the women endured unimaginable abuse, leaving them with debilitating lifelong trauma.

Intertwining with these tense, heartbreaking moments is the mundane daily life at Mahmud’s house, which doubles as a temporary shelter for the women. Recurring moments of his mother making food or his young son playing about the courtyard act as a calming balm to the victims’ psychological hurt, a semblance of the normality that hopefully awaits them in their home town in Sinjar. Sabaya is also especially poignant in how it doesn’t see Mahmud as a heroic figure. There’s a moving matter-of-factness to his routine of checking the continuous messages from people seeking their loved ones or his calm confrontation with Isis sympathisers who hide the Yazidi women in the camp.

Continue reading...

True Stories: Spaces review – impressive short docs from folk horror to a Lebanese marvel

This short film collection from the True Story platform ranges across continents to look at how we interact with our environments

Deeply psychogeographical, this collection of documentary shorts from the streaming platform True Story roams among spaces old and new, and across continents. Personal and public memories are intertwined, creating portraits of how human beings interact with their environments, and vice versa.

Paul Heintz’s nocturnal Shānzhài Screens is a meditative study of liminal urban spaces, shot in a Chinese district that specialises in fine-art reproductions. Rectangular frames populate the screen, from flickering apartment windows, hurried video calls, to endless replicas of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. Authenticity is elusive, and loneliness reigns.

Continue reading...

‘Stop patronising me and give me an interview’: the female journalists speaking up for India’s poor

India’s only all-women news organisation is the subject of an award-winning documentary. The film-makers explain their inspiring courage and energy

A woman explains how a group of four men repeatedly broke into her house and raped her; six times so far. Did she go to the police? Yes, but officers refused to investigate. Instead, they threatened her and her husband. “These men can do anything. They can even kill us,” the victim says to the reporter, Meera, who is filming on her smartphone. As Meera leaves, the woman’s husband tells her that she is their only hope. “We don’t trust anyone except Khabar Lahariya.”

Khabar Lahariya is India’s only all-female news organisation. Based in Uttar Pradesh, its journalists passionately believe in reporting rural issues through a feminist lens.

Continue reading...

‘We have a hostility to being boring’: Sparks, still flying in their 70s

Their Adam Driver musical sent Cannes into raptures and Edgar Wright has made an all-star documentary about them. The Mael brothers explain why they’ll always be hopelessly in love with pop

In 1974, John Lennon was startled as he was watching Top of the Pops. He rang Ringo Starr. “You won’t believe what’s on television,” he reportedly said. “Marc Bolan is playing a song with Adolf Hitler.”

This was Sparks, performing their glorious pop opus This Town Ain’t Big Enough for Both of Us. “It was equidistant between the Beatles on Ed Sullivan and the Daleks on Doctor Who,” says Edgar Wright, the director of Baby Driver and Shaun of the Dead, and now a documentary about the duo, The Sparks Brothers. “Fifteen million people saw it. Think of the next generation of bands watching: the Sex Pistols, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Duran Duran, Joy Division, Squeeze, Vince Clarke. They’re all watching and they’re all thinking the same thing.”

Continue reading...

Stevie, Gladys, Nina … Summer of Soul uncovers a festival greater than Woodstock

As the US boiled with violence, 1969’s Harlem cultural festival nourished spirits with soul, jazz and gospel. Now, Questlove has turned lost footage of it into a brilliant, pertinent documentary

It’s 29 June 1969, and at Harlem’s Mount Morris park (now Marcus Garvey park), the 5th Dimension are about to take the stage. The Los Angeles group are already stars, thanks to hits including Up, Up and Away and Aquarius, from the musical Hair, which topped the Billboard charts that spring. But their pop-oriented repertoire, often penned by white songwriters, has kept them off the US’s R&B radio stations and thus from Black audiences. “We’d tried to separate ourselves from the segregation in our society, but we still got caught up in all that,” remembers the group’s founding singer, Billy Davis Jr, today. “And the average Black family didn’t earn enough to come see us at the nightclubs we were playing. They’d seen us on TV, but they’d never seen us live.”

That was about to change with their headline performance on the opening day of the Harlem cultural festival. A series of six Sunday concerts that summer, the festival showcased the cream of the era’s soul, gospel, blues and jazz artists before an audience of 300,000, many from the surrounding neighbourhoods. “I looked out and saw a sea of faces, and their response was so loving, so welcoming and exciting,” says Davis Jr’s wife and bandmate, Marilyn McCoo, for whom the festival remains a treasured memory. She’s not alone. Harlemite Musa Jackson, then just a five-year-old, still remembers how the 5th Dimension’s orange costumes, gleaming in the sun, made them look “like Creamsicles”.

Continue reading...

The Earth Is Blue As an Orange review – subtle doc tells Ukrainian family’s war story

Iryna Tsilyk sensitively captures a family caught up in the conflict with Russia who are trying to make a film of their own

This sensitive and astute Sundance-winning documentary, in which Kyiv-based director and poet Iryna Tsilyk haunts the back alleys of the Russo-Ukrainian war, is the antidote to the warped propaganda-fest the conflict was depicted as in the 2018 film Donbass. It layers fact and fiction as delicately as an onion as it focuses on the Trofymchuk-Gladky family, who are attempting to shoot piecemeal their own fictional work, called 2014, based on their wartime experiences. But, here, artifice and cinema work entirely in the service of good. They are a source of self-expression and spiritual nourishment for Ukrainians beaten down by close to a decade of fighting.

Tsilyk mentored budding film-maker Myroslava Trofymchuk at a workshop, and it is the teenager we see here calling the shots for her family as they act in scenes hunkering down in their cellar; echoes of the shock and trauma they are simultaneously living for real, inspecting bomb damage by smartphone light. The whole household – including single mother Anna and her other three children – is clearly deeply invested in the project, squabbling over shot choices at dinner. After jubilantly celebrating her daughter being accepted for a film scholarship in Kyiv, Anna packs her off, still in hyper-protective mode: “The only thing, I beg you, if you are being bullied, please call me.”

Continue reading...

Last Man Standing review – Biggie and Tupac murder case reinvestigated

Nick Broomfield returns to the deaths of the two titans of 90s gangsta rap, and the disturbing influence of record label boss Suge Knight

Nearly 20 years ago, Nick Broomfield released his sensational documentary Biggie and Tupac, in which he uncovered hidden facts about the violent deaths of US rappers Tupac Shakur and Christopher “Biggie” Wallace, and found that intimate witnesses to this murderous bicoastal feud were willing to open up to a diffident, soft-spoken Englishman in ways they never would to an American interviewer. Since then, there have been two very unedifying movies about Tupac: the sugary docu-hagiography Tupac: Resurrection (2003), produced by the late rapper’s mother, and the similarly reverential drama All Eyez on Me (2017).

Now Broomfield returns to the same subject, updating his bleak picture of the 90s rap scene, a world in which energy, creativity and radical anger were swamped with macho misogyny, drug-fuelled gangbanger paranoia and a poisonous obsession with respect. Marion “Suge” Knight, head of Death Row Records in Los Angeles, cultivated a violent gang-cult image by associating with the Bloods, and encouraged his acts and proteges to do the same, including Tupac – and Biggie’s perceived oppositional identity condemned him. But even more disturbingly, the LAPD allowed its officers to moonlight at Knight’s firm as “security” (a term that euphemistically covers all manner of paramilitary violence and intimidation).

Continue reading...

WITCH: We Intend to Cause Havoc review – the history of Zamrock, Africa’s great forgotten rockers

Film-maker Gio Arlotta and two young musicians are on a quest to track down the legendary leader of a 1970s Zambian band

Who knew 1970s Zambia had its own thriving musical genre? This modest documentary revisits the brief, almost-forgotten history of “Zamrock” – or at least what remains of it, which appears to be very little beyond the back catalogue of its leading band, Witch. Witch’s rhythmic blend of British blues, funk, psychedelic and garage rock has aged very well, and reissues of their albums in the 2010s found a new audience, including Italian film-maker Gio Arlotta, who consequently undertook an expedition to Zambia to try to find the band, accompanied by two young Dutch musicians, Jacco Gardner and Nic Mauskovic.

There’s now a well-trodden route for such musical travelogues, laid down by the likes of Buena Vista Social Club and Searching for Sugar Man, and while this lacks the polish or drama of either of those, it’s an engaging and uplifting journey. One of the problems it runs into is a lack of surviving footage of Witch in action. Arlotta and co scour Zambia’s pre-digital archives, but the best they come up with is some unseen footage of James Brown. Nor does it help that most of Witch’s original lineup are dead.

Continue reading...

The Viewing Booth review – seeing is believing in the Israel-Palestine conflict

Volunteers respond to politically polarised film footage from Israel and the Palestinian territories in this critical look at interpretation

Even though he tries to maintain a cool, scientific demeanour, Israeli director Ra’anan Alexandrowicz finally lets slip a twinge of despair at the end of this interesting geopolitical Rorschach test. Alexandrowicz sits studiously behind a monitor as he invites a succession of volunteers to enter an adjacent booth. There, they have a choice of 40 clips to watch, snippets of life in Israel, while he asks them to share their thoughts on what they see. Half of the clips are from rightwing Israeli sources; the other half are from B’Tselem, an Israeli human-rights organisation that aims to document abuses of power in Palestinian territories.

Alexandrowicz quickly zeroes in on the pensive Maia, a Jewish American who supports Israel, but brings an insistent scepticism to everything she watches. He is the director of pro-Palestine documentaries such as The Inner Tour (2001) and The Law in These Parts (2011) – and believes her to be his ideal audience: a possible convert.

Continue reading...

How did a £120 painting become a £320m Leonardo … then vanish?

A film about the disputed Salvator Mundi blames the National Gallery for its role in giving credibility to the claim that it was the artist’s lost work

The National Gallery is facing controversy over its role in the tangled story of how the world’s most expensive painting emerged from obscurity before being sold for a staggering £320m, only to vanish again from the public eye.

The gallery exhibited the Salvator Mundi in its Leonardo da Vinci exhibition a decade ago when it was an unknown work with doubts about its attribution, restoration and ownership.

Continue reading...

Finding fangs: new film exposes illicit trade killing off Bolivia’s iconic jaguar

Undercover documentary investigates the trafficking of Latin America’s big cat to meet demand in China

Elizabeth Unger was a 25-year-old biology graduate working as a PhD research assistant for big cat and climate projects in Latin America when she heard about the Bolivian authorities intercepting dozens of packages containing jaguar fangs sent by Chinese citizens to addresses in China.

“I was really blown away as [the story] was completely under the radar,” she says. Six years later, she is making her directorial debut with a film about the trade, which is contributing to a decline in the population of Latin America’s iconic big cat.

Continue reading...

Hong Kong film censors get wider ‘national security’ powers

Observers worry rule change in Chinese city will restrict pro-democracy movement even further

Hong Kong’s censors have been given expanded powers to vet films for national security breaches in the latest blow to the Chinese city’s political and artistic freedoms.

In a statement on Friday, authorities said the film censorship ordinance had been expanded to include “any act or activity which may amount to an offence endangering national security”.

Continue reading...

Manfred Kirchheimer, the greatest documentary maker you’ve probably never heard of

The 90-year-old German American director, who completed a trio of documentaries during lockdown, reflects on his career, his black activism and asking his father difficult questions about Nazi occupation

Manfred Kirchheimer, the US’s least-known great documentarian, may be 90 years old, but his memory is as sharp as a knife. “I wasn’t always a film aficionado,” he recalls. “Then, in 1949, I was at Manhattan’s City College and the students were on strike against two professors – one antisemite, the other anti-black. I saw someone filming a police horse and I asked him why. He said: ‘I’m making this for the film department.’ I had signed up for chemistry, but I didn’t like chemistry. So I went to the office of its head – the film-maker Hans Richter – and I said, ‘Professor, are there any opportunities in film?’ He said, ‘Yes – opportunities are plenty. But no jobs!’ I went anyway.” He chuckles fondly.

Kirchheimer was born in 1931 in Saarbrücken, Germany. His Jewish parents, sensing which way the winds were blowing, moved to the US five years later, eventually landing in New York’s Washington Heights, where they joined a close-knit and prosperous community peopled by so many exiles it was sometimes known as Frankfurt-on-the Hudson. Kirchheimer might have stopped practising the faith in his early 20s, but across the decades, his films all benefit – rely, even – on his migrant eye. They’re endlessly curious about how his adopted city works, searching for its often-overlooked architectural or environmental details, alive to its marginal voices.

Continue reading...