Category Archives: Documentary films

Louis Theroux: ‘I worry about not coming up to scratch’

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He made a film on Joe Exotic a decade before Tiger King, lulls interviewees into personal revelations – and can rock a leather suit. So why is he so anxious?

“There’s no getting away from the fact that, even aged 50, I’m a slightly awkward person, a fearful person, worry-prone,” says Louis Theroux, wriggling in his seat. The film-maker picks up and puts down a coffee without drinking. He wears all blue: navy sweater, stock denim, one of those indestructible plastic Casio watches on his wrist. “I worry about what people think,” Theroux continues, “I worry about giving offence, being judged, not coming up to scratch, being thin-skinned.”

We are in the corner of a photography studio in London, sheltering from rain on a Friday afternoon. The room has long emptied of people, but, even so, as Theroux chats, he snatches quick glances over his right shoulder, as if expecting to find somebody or something lurking there. “Everyone has things that preoccupy them, right?” he says. “I just tend to think, on a spectrum of people in general, I definitely skew, uh, anxious.”

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‘What appointments did these dogs have to keep?’: long lunches and brief liaisons in a radical new dogumentary

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To mark National Puppy Day, Elizabeth Lo’s acclaimed film Stray gives humans rare insight into the canine gaze, courtesy of homeless mutts in Istanbul

From the moment Zeytin makes her first appearance in Elizabeth Lo’s feature Stray, there is no doubt you are in the presence of a unique spirit. As she surveys an Istanbul side street at dawn, her features are alert, her gaze is uncompromising and her deep, dark eyes sparkle with intelligence. There’s something of Katharine Hepburn in The African Queen about her, or maybe Brad Pitt in one of his less kempt moments. But non-dog comparisons don’t do her justice. This is one indomitable bitch.

Lo first encountered Zeytin and her friend Nazar on a 2017 casting trip to Turkey, and knew immediately that she had found the star she was looking for – which is to say, a dog who could carry a human film. “We were wandering through a busy underground tunnel filled with people when suddenly these two giant stray dogs streaked past us,” she says. “They were running with such a sense of purpose and it was so intriguing. What appointments did these dogs have to keep?”

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‘I have picked people up on the street’: the secret life of architect Alvar Aalto

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He built wild, magical buildings and furniture that is still thrilling today. But a new film suggests the celebrated Finn was also a domineering philanderer deeply indebted to his talented wives

Wonky lumps of misshapen, scorched bricks burst from a block of student flats in Cambridge, Massachusetts, giving a warty look to the long wall that winds its way along the Charles River. “The lousiest bricks in the world,” is how Finnish architect Alvar Aalto described the local New England materials he used for his Baker House dorms at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1947. It was meant as a compliment – he loved their twisted, blackened, brutish texture, which gave the walls the look of coarse tweed.

The pockmarked wall is one of many such strange and beautiful things covered in a new feature-length documentary film about Aalto, Finland’s most famous designer export and one of the most celebrated architects of the 20th century, who built a career on his obsessive attention to material details. Always thinking about the human experience of moving through a building, he considered everything from the feel of a leather-wrapped door handle to the pleasure of a misshapen brick.

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While We Are Here review – enigmatic study of romance is hard to love

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There is an avant-garde bravery to this international love story – but how can we invest in protagonists we never see?

Here is a thought-experiment of a movie from Brazilian film-makers Clarissa Campolina and Luiz Pretti: it’s a dramatic essay, or docu-fictional romance, or perhaps the cinematic equivalent of an epistolary novel, and it has been much admired on the festival circuit.

Related: Streaming: indie films from Latin America

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‘We knew so little’: the young film-makers who captured early quarantine life

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HBO’s Covid Diaries NYC stitches together five documentary shorts by film-makers between 16-22, covering the dizzying, surreal first days of the pandemic

The middle of March 2021 will bring, for most Americans, a strange, surreal anniversary: the year mark of the horrifying realization – be it through a tweet, a cancellation, a diagnosis of a loved one or a celebrity, a lost job or gig – that the coronavirus was a very real threat that would implode the world as we knew it. For Aracelie Colón, then a 16-year-old high school junior in Manhattan, it was the email announcing a two-week closure from school. For fellow high school junior Shane Fleming, it was the positive diagnosis of a classmate and the closure of the Film Forum, where the movie buff caught a final feature showing on 14 March. For Arlet Guallpa, then 22, it was an ambulance outside her building in Washington Heights, fetching the first of many residents who would succumb to the virus.

Related: 'They refused to act': inside a chilling documentary on Trump's bungled Covid-19 response

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Sir Alex Ferguson: ‘I feared I would never speak again’

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Former Manchester United manager tells of brain surgery worries ahead of documentary about his life

Sir Alex Ferguson has said he feared he would never be able to speak again after suffering a brain haemorrhage in 2018. The former Manchester United manager told a Q&A at Glasgow film festival he was worried that he could lose his voice and memory after undergoing emergency surgery.

A new documentary about the two-time Champions League-winning manager premiered at the the film festival on Saturday.

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Notturno review – lives scarred by Isis and the west in haunting cine-poem

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Gianfranco Rosi’s documentary depicts a Middle East emerging from trauma, but it is self-conscious at times

Documentary film-maker Gianfranco Rosi has created a very characteristic cine-poem of sadness, about the Middle East as it emerges from Isis terror, but remaining scarred by the intervention of western powers who had promised so much. It’s an intensely considered curation of scenes: glimpses, perhaps, into a collective mind or soul. Rosi has assembled this from years of filming in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq. It’s similar in its observational procedures to films such as Sacro GRA, his 2013 study of those who live on the periphery of Rome, near the “GRA” ring road, and also his masterly Fire at Sea from 2016, about the lives of desperate migrants who arrive in Lampedusa, Sicily, and the locals who are coming to terms with them.

The title means “night” or “of the night”, and many scenes seem to be happening at nightfall (or possibly at daybreak), particularly the opening, extended sequence of soldiers drilling, jogging around in a circle. There are many striking moments and beautifully realised images and vignettes here, a rhetorical structure that is perhaps inspired by the play that, in one scene, psychiatric patients are shown rehearsing about the lives of people in Iraq. But I worried a little that Rosi’s techniques are becoming a self-conscious mannerism, and furthermore that the film is a little too diffuse, taking in four different places and effectively homogenising them.

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Allen v Farrow is pure PR. Why else would it omit so much?

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The new HBO documentary in which Mia and Dylan Farrow revisit their 1992 allegation against Woody Allen claims to be an even-handed investigation. But its failure to present the facts makes it feel more like activism

“HBO Doc About Woody Allen & Mia Farrow Ignores Mia’s 3 Dead Kids, Her Child Molester Brother, Other Family Tragedies” was the headline on one US showbiz site, above its review of the four-part documentary, Allen v Farrow, about the continuing battle between Woody Allen and Mia Farrow, now entering its fourth decade. But this review was very much an outlier. In the vast main, reaction to the strongly anti-Allen series has been overwhelmingly positive, with Buzzfeed describing it as a “nuanced reckoning” and Entertainment Weekly comparing it to the recent documentaries about Michael Jackson and Jeffrey Epstein. This reaction is more of a reflection of the public’s feelings towards Allen – particularly in the US – than of the documentary, which sets itself up as an investigation but much more resembles PR, as biased and partial as a political candidate’s advert vilifying an opponent in election season.

Related: Allen v Farrow review – effective docuseries on allegations of abuse

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Eye of the Storm review – moving film about Scottish painter in love with nature

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James Morrison’s work was full of awe for the natural world, and this documentary does his landscape painting full justice

Scottish painter James Morrison died shortly before the completion of this affectionate documentary about his life and work, and it’s a fitting tribute to an articulate and self-effacing artist with an extraordinary affinity for Scotland’s everchanging land- and seascapes. It’s directed by Anthony Baxter, best known for highlighting the stubborn local resistance resistance to Donald Trump’s golf course in Aberdeenshire with his You’ve Been Trumped films; this is something of a change of pace, while offering a not-dissimilar celebration of a very Scottish style of quiet, unfussy determination.

Morrison’s story is interesting enough – born and raised in Glasgow, the son of ship’s fitter, who settled on the east coast and made epic trips to paint abroad, most notably to the Arctic – but it’s added to here by a plangent late-life twist: he is losing his sight, to the extent he can barely see what he is painting. True to form, Morrison accepted this as uncomplainingly as anything else – “irritating” is the strongest imprecation I can recall – and there’s something inexpressibly moving about the way he strokes a blank sheet of paper taped to his easel as if he can’t wait to get started.

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My Brother’s Keeper: a former Guantánamo detainee, his guard and their unlikely friendship – video

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Mohamedou Ould Salahi and one of his former guards, Steve Wood, reunite in Mauritania 13 years after last seeing each other, rekindling an unlikely relationship that profoundly changed their lives.

Mohamedou was a prisoner at Guantánamo Bay for 14 years. During his incarceration he was subjected to torture and solitary confinement, but never charged with a crime. His memoir, Guantánamo Diary, became an international bestseller and was adapted into the film, The Mauritanian, starring Tahar Rahim and Jodie Foster.

My Brother's Keeper is BAFTA longlisted for British Short Film 2021.

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Ayouni review – a raging lament for Syria’s ‘disappeared’

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Yasmin Fedda’s powerful documentary lays bare the human cost of the Assad regime and salutes those who continue to fight

Director Yasmin Fedda, who is from a Kuwaiti and Syrian background and lectures in film at Queen Mary University of London, has created a powerful and urgent documentary tribute to those who have been “forcibly disappeared” by the Assad regime in Syria, estimated to be around 150,000 since 2011.

Fedda focuses on two people: dissident writer and computer programmer Bassel Khartabil, who was abducted in October 2015 in Damascus, and Father Paolo Dall’Oglio, the hugely popular and admired Christian priest who was taken in July 2013 in Raqqa. She uses existing video of these two, from various family members and organisations, along with her own footage showing the campaigns of the loved ones left behind with their burden of anguish and their need to battle on and bring these crimes to the world’s attention.

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Khashoggi confidant Omar Abdulaziz: ‘I’m worried about the safety of the people of Saudi Arabia’

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The close associate of the journalist killed by the Saudi regime is determined to speak out in a new documentary, despite the arrest of family members

Not long before he was murdered, the journalist Jamal Khashoggi told his young friend Omar Abdulaziz two things that have subsequently never been far from his thoughts. The first was: “Never forget, your words matter.” And the second: “Be careful, this kind of work might get you killed.”

Omar Abdulaziz, 29, lives in exile in Montreal, Canada, where he has been, before and after Khashoggi’s death, among the most vocal critics of the Saudi regime that killed his friend. His words do matter – his tweets have been viewed nearly a billion times in the past year; he has an almost daily YouTube programme that has clocked up 45m views. And he is left in no doubt of their potential consequence: death threats are routine; both of his younger brothers and dozens of his friends have been arrested and imprisoned in Saudi Arabia in failed attempts to silence him.

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Oscars release first shortlists for 2021 Academy Awards

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Boys State, MLK/FBI and Crip Camp among contenders as categories announced include best documentary and best international film

Shortlists for nine Oscar categories have been unveiled by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (Ampas), an intermediate stage in the thinning-out of films that have qualified for consideration for the Academy Awards. The categories include best documentary, best international film and best song, as well as best live action and documentary shorts.

The rules for each voting process vary, but in most categories a preliminary vote from industry specialists in each field is employed to create the shortlist and then the final five nominations, with the full membership of the Academy invited to vote on the winner.

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Are we all living in the Matrix? Behind a documentary on simulation theory

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In A Glitch in the Matrix, film-maker Rodney Acher speaks to people who are convinced that the world we’re living in isn’t real

Rodney Ascher’s new documentary A Glitch in the Matrix opens, as so many nonfiction films do, with an interview subject getting settled in their camera set-up. In this instance, a guy named Paul Gude is Skyping in from a setting familiar to anyone who’s spent the last year trapped in video-chats. He’s sitting in what appears to be a bedroom made to double as an office, the fisheyed webcam lens catching some dirty laundry, a shelf full of books and decorative toys, some homemade-looking art on the walls. But the eye is instantly drawn to Gude himself, a hyperreal computer-generated creature with shiny copper skin, warrior armor, a scar stretching from his forehead to his cheek, and a mane of shifting polygons in jewel-tone ruby red making his head look like a 20-sided die. He could be a distant cousin of Lion-O from the Thundercats, and he’s here to tell us that everything we know may be a lie.

Related: A Glitch in the Matrix review – deep-dive into simulation theory

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Flee review – remarkable refugee story told with heart and audacity

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A thrilling documentary made with a blend of animation and archive footage tells an immensely powerful tale of a gay Afghan survivor

In what’s proving to be a rather sub-par Sundance (an understandable blip given the unusual nature of this year’s virtual festival), it’s a genuine thrill to encounter a film as exciting and immediate as Flee, a much-needed jolt of energy now reverberating on laptop screens across the country. Even in a traditional year, it’s the kind of audacious and uniquely told story that would have attendees excitedly buzzing around Park City, urging others to seek out, and despite the fractured nature of this year’s edition, a swell of digital support has helped it nab a seven-figure deal with Neon (helped also perhaps by its star producers Riz Ahmed and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), this year’s first big sale, a well-earned reward for what’s likely to be the best film of the festival.

Related: Passing review – Rebecca Hall's elegant but inert directorial debut

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The Capote Tapes: inside the scandal ignited by Truman’s explosive final novel

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He partied with high society America but caused outrage when he spilled their secrets. Ebs Burnough talks us through his new film about Answered Prayers – the ‘smart, salacious’ novel Capote never finished

When Truman Capote died in 1984, he left the remains of a novel he had been hatching for nearly two decades, and talking about for almost as long. Answered Prayers, the story of a budding writer screwing his way through polite society, was intended to be Capote’s most explosive achievement. He likened it to a deadly weapon. “There’s the handle, the trigger, the barrel, and, finally, the bullet,” he told People magazine. “And when that bullet is fired from the gun, it’s going to come out with a speed and power like you’ve never seen – wham!” Having bragged about the book for years, all he had to do now was write it.

A contract was signed in 1966, but advance chapters published in Esquire magazine nine years later proved to be far below the standard of his defining successes, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and the “non-fiction novel” In Cold Blood. There was a cost to his social reputation as well as his literary one. As soon as the socialites and wealthy wives with whom he had mingled happily for years – including Slim Keith, Babe Paley and Gloria Vanderbilt, whom he called his “swans” – saw how casually he had spilled their most intimate secrets, those friendships were dead. Capote hadn’t bitten the hand that fed him. He’d gnawed it off at the wrist.

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About Some Meaningless Events review – attempted murder and the movies

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In this intriguing film, banned in the 70s, Mostafa Derkaoui grapples with the purpose of cinema on the streets of Casablanca

Here is an intriguing, bewildering fragment of what might be called underground new-wave cinema from Moroccan director Mostafa Derkaoui: a docu-fiction shown once in Paris in 1975, but then immediately banned by the Moroccan government after which it disappeared from view, resurfacing in 2016 when a negative was found in the archives of Filmoteca De Catalunya in Barcelona.

Derkaoui and a group of other young film-makers are shown hanging out in Casablanca, in a bar and on the streets and at the port, interviewing people about what they think cinema should be doing. Long scenes in bars spool past, apparently semi-improvised, in which the film-makers and their interviewees get very drunk, among lots of other drunk people who are always on the verge of an argument or a fist fight They occasionally ask young women in the bar what they think about cinema and shamelessly tell them they are beautiful enough to be in the movies, asking for their contact details.

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Lupita: the powerful voice of one indigenous woman leading a movement

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Film-maker Monica Wise talks about making her documentary on Mexican indigenous resistance

Our latest Guardian documentary tells the story of Lupita, a courageous young Tzotzil-Maya woman​ ​at the forefront of a Mexican indigenous movement. Over twenty years after Lupita lost her family in the Acteal massacre in southern Mexico, she has become a spokesperson for her people​ and for a new generation of Mayan activists. She balances the demands of motherhood with her high-stakes efforts to re-educate and restore justice to the world. The film-maker Monica Wise talks to us about her experience making the film.

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Mayor review – grappling with reality inside Ramallah city hall

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Ramallah’s leader Musa Hadid navigates diplomatic stresses and day-to-day problems in this love letter to the West Bank

Musa Hadid is the popular Palestinian mayor of Ramallah in the West Bank, and this thoughtful, sympathetic documentary tracks his stressful day-to-day working life – shown suddenly getting a lot more stressful in 2017 when President Trump announced his recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, moving the US embassy there from Tel Aviv. Hadid feels strongly that this move emboldened Israel’s military to be more menacing in Ramallah, with soldiers marching into stores and demanding to see security camera footage on the grounds that there could be images of terrorists – and even doing the same at city hall.

The film lets you appreciate Hadid’s delicate and complex situation. He is often receiving high-profile international visitors and relishes the opportunity to show off the city he loves – the opening and closing sequences of this film, incidentally, almost feel like the introduction to Woody Allen’s Manhattan. One such VIP is Prince William, though some of Hadid’s colleagues are less than happy: “All the problems of our country come from Britain!” says one, referring to the 1923 Mandate.

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Dune, Bond and Top Gun returns: Films to look out for in 2021

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Daniel Craig hands in his licence to kill, Frances McDormand delivers her best ever performance, Carey Mulligan unsettles in a rape-revenge drama and Tom Cruise reaches for the skies … this year’s must-see films

Paul Greengrass’s latest film is based on the western novel by Paulette Jiles, about a girl returning to her family in 1860s Texas after being kidnapped by the Kiowa tribe. Helena Zengel plays the girl, Johanna, and Tom Hanks plays the man who must look after her: Captain Kidd, an ex-army veteran who makes a living reading aloud from newspapers to illiterate townsfolk, and who is now in the middle of a very big news story.
• Released in the UK on 1 January

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