Category Archives: Documentary films

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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The Wolf Dividing Norway: the hunter v the environmentalist

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With unique access to remote communities in the snow-capped landscape of Norway, this film follows characters on either side of a fierce debate on whether to cull the wolf population. For decades the topic has split political parties, families and communities across the country, with environmentalists world-wide criticising Norway for how it handles its tiny population of critically endangered wolves. Here, a group of hunters await news from the government on whether their yearly hunt will be permitted, while the environmentalists anticipate the worst. With angry threats on both sides, the film takes a deep dive into what’s at stake for both groups, as well as the wider world

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Taylor Swift: The Long Pond Studio Sessions review – cosy campfire confessions

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The pop star’s Disney+ movie about quarantine album Folklore reveals the potency of her songwriting, though it’s hazy on any ‘pandemic epiphanies’

Pre-pandemic, few artists were so keenly attuned to the music industry’s calendar as Taylor Swift. She timed her album releases for awards contention and singles to sustain her world tours; the promotional cycle for 1989, released in 2014, seemed to go on for years. With coronavirus, that “circus” – as she puts it on Mirrorball, one of a few songs on her “quarantine album”, Folklore, that address the pandemic directly – was abruptly called off.

Stripped of those structures, “this lockdown could have been a time where I absolutely lost my mind”, Swift says in The Long Pond Studio Sessions, a film that explores the making and meaning of Folklore. Instead, in a matter of months, she created an album as good as any she has ever written. She collaborated remotely with the National’s Aaron Dessner, writing to his musical sketches and self-recording her performances at home.

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‘My mother was like a steel fist in a velvet glove’: the real Audrey Hepburn

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Her delicate beauty and starring roles made her seem fragile. But having endured an unloving mother and a perilous childhood under Nazi occupation, such an impression belied Hepburn’s remarkable strength, compassion and resolve

“Very alert, very smart, very talented, very ambitious.” That was the director William Wyler’s verdict after watching a screen test for Roman Holiday by a young chorus girl called Audrey Hepburn in 1951. She got the part, won an Oscar and the rest is history. For decades, Hepburn has been adored for her graceful beauty and style. But somehow, the “smart”, “talented” and “ambitious” woman Wyler described never makes it into the books about her enduring charm with titles such as How to Be Lovely: The Audrey Hepburn Way. Now a new documentary, Audrey, gives us a more complex picture of the woman.

Directed by Helena Coan, the film features never-before-seen archive footage of Hepburn alongside intimate interviews with her family and friends. Speaking on Zoom from his home in Italy, Hepburn’s eldest son, Sean Hepburn Ferrer, says his mother’s steeliness is often overlooked. “She was no pushover. You have to fight in Hollywood for every little bit, and she did. But she played the part of the ingenue. And that’s who she was, too. None of us are just one way or another.”

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‘It was just a bunch of thugs’: how Collective uncovered a web of state corruption in Romania

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A tenacious team of sports journalists and a persistent whistleblower turn this documentary into a newsroom drama as thrilling as All the President’s Men

Collective begins with profoundly upsetting footage filmed by clubbers on their phones of the fire that broke out in 2015 at a crowded Bucharest nightclub, Colectiv. A Romanian band is singing angrily – “Fuck all your wicked corruption. It’s been there since our inception” – before stopping abruptly to ask if anyone has a fire extinguisher. What appeared to be a striking firework display above the heads of the musicians turns out to be a fire, and within seconds flames have engulfed the building and teenagers are running for their lives.

It is a shocking sequence, but it is not the most disturbing element of an extraordinary documentary that reveals a staggering degree of corruption running through Romania’s health system. The fire left 27 dead and 180 injured, but in the weeks that followed another 37 people died from wounds that should not have been life-threatening, many killed by infections picked up in hospital.

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Singer, activist, sex machine, addict: the troubled brilliance of Billie Holiday

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A new documentary uncovers lost tapes to tell the intimate real story of the jazz singer – one with terrible resonance today as the US continues to fight institutional racism

There’s an electrifying moment in Billie, a new documentary about Billie Holiday, when Jonathan “Jo” Jones, a tempestuous, influential African American drummer who played with Holiday from the 1930s to 50s, challenges his white interviewer. “You don’t know what we was going through then,” he says, referring to travelling through the deep south on Count Basie’s tour bus. “What were you going through?” asks the interviewer, Linda Lipnack Kuehl. “We was going through hell!” he shouts. “Miss Billie Holiday didn’t have the privilege of using a toilet in a filling station. The boys at least could go out in the woods. You don’t know anything about it because you’ve never had to subjugate yourself to it. Never!”

James Erskine’s film is constructed entirely from such interviews by Kuehl, a high-school teacher and Holiday fan with a sideline in arts journalism. In 1971, she began plans for a biography: Holiday had died aged 44 in 1959 and, 11 years on, Kuehl wanted to speak to those who were there throughout her life. She interviewed and interviewed and was still finding people in 1978 – almost 200 of them in all. The project overwhelmed her and she never finished it, and in 1979 she was found dead on a Washington sidewalk. Police deemed it suicide, Kuehl having supposedly jumped from her hotel room, although there was no proof of this.

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

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Totally Under Control recounts the early days of the pandemic in the US, revealing in clinical detail a disastrous federal response to a preventable crisis

In May, as their city began to emerge from the paralyzing grip of coronavirus that killed over 33,000 residents, New York City-based film-makers Alex Gibney, Ophelia Harutyunyan and Suzanne Hillinger started retracing still-raw recent history on film. They tracked whistleblowers, and noted comparisons between the disastrous sprawl of coronavirus in the US and South Korea, which received their first positive coronavirus diagnoses on the same day: 20 January. Meetings were held by Zoom, interviews by remote camera draped by a shower curtain — a large, amorphous ghost, compliant with quickly adopted social distancing guidelines.

Related: Totally Under Control review – shocking film on Trump's failure to handle Covid-19

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The Mole Agent: the story of the most unusual documentary of the year

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An 83-year-old goes undercover in a Chilean nursing home in a warm-hearted and surprising look at age and intimacy

With The Mole Agent, Maite Alberdi set out to make a film noir documentary about a spy in a nursing home. She did not expect it to transform into an aching meditation on isolation and loneliness.

The Chilean film-maker told the Guardian she was initially toying with genre and form. In early scenes, she makes you question whether you’re even watching a documentary because of the heightened noir aesthetic – venetian blinds and high contrast lighting.

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Anbessa review – heart-rending tale of a boy living on the edge

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An irresistibly charismatic farm boy, displaced by a housing development on the outskirts of Ethiopia’s capital, is the star of this affecting documentary

The American director Mo Scarpelli makes a miraculous discovery in her new documentary – a 10-year-old Ethiopian farm boy who has been displaced from his home by urbanisation. Scarpelli has said that when she spotted Asalif Tewold on the street in Addis Ababa, she knew instantly that she wanted to make a film about him. You can see why. A charismatic kid with energy and imagination, he’s at that perfect stage of boyhood with an appetite for adventure and make-believe. That said, Scarpelli’s observational film-making style, slow and lingering, is a challenge and likely to be off-putting to all but hardcore lovers of arthouse.

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‘Show respect and listen’: scenes from Australia’s first Indigenous-run police station

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Amid growing global civil unrest against police brutality and racism, a small station 330km west of Uluru is trying things differently

As protests against police brutality and racism have spread around the world in the wake of the death of George Floyd, two new films demonstrate the extremes of police dealings with Indigenous Australians.

The first, which surfaced earlier this week, is the now notorious mobile phone footage of a violent encounter between a New South Wales police constable and an Aboriginal teenager in Surry Hills, Sydney.

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Becoming review – tantalising tour of Michelle Obama’s life

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This carefully authorised documentary offers glimpses of a dazzling presence on America’s political stage

Michelle Obama is a class act – one of the classiest – and her intelligence and poise now look like something from a lost golden age. The publication of her globally bestselling memoir Becoming in 2018 brought her dazzlingly into the public sphere on her own terms. It gave her an international A-list status to rival her husband’s and provided Democrats and non-Trumpians around the world with a manifesto of decency and dignity to cling on to.

Now we have this watchable, but carefully authorised, behind-the-scenes documentary for Netflix (from the Obamas’ company, Higher Ground Productions) about Obama’s American book tour (with a stopover at London’s O2 Arena). It shows her getting in and out of armoured sports utility vehicles, chatting easily and good-naturedly with her security detail, with colleagues and family members backstage, with beaming celebrity moderators onstage (starting with Oprah Winfrey) and with people getting their copies signed in bookstores who often dissolve in floods of tears just in coming face to face with her. (I was sorry, however, that we didn’t get to see again her amusing cameo in the TV comedy Parks and Recreation, which showed Amy Poehler’s earnest public official Leslie Knope reduced to a gibbering fangirl in her presence.)

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Climate experts call for ‘dangerous’ Michael Moore film to be taken down

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Planet of the Humans, which takes aim at the green movement, is ‘full of misinformation’, says one online library

A new Michael Moore-produced documentary that takes aim at the supposed hypocrisy of the green movement is “dangerous, misleading and destructive” and should be removed from public viewing, according to an assortment of climate scientists and environmental campaigners.

The film, Planet of the Humans, was released on the eve of Earth Day last week by its producer, Michael Moore, the baseball cap-wearing documentarian known for Fahrenheit 9/11 and Bowling for Columbine. Describing itself as a “full-frontal assault on our sacred cows”, the film argues that electric cars and solar energy are unreliable and rely upon fossil fuels to function. It also attacks figures including Al Gore for bolstering corporations that push flawed technologies over real solutions to the climate crisis.

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Netflix announces surprise Michelle Obama documentary

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Becoming, which drops in May, follows the former first lady on her 34-city book tour, will offer a ‘rare and up-close’ look at her life

Netflix has announced a new original documentary focused on former first lady Michelle Obama to be released on 6 May.

Becoming will follow Obama on her 34-city tour to promote her book of the same name and will offer an “intimate”, “rare and up-close” look at her life. It’s directed by Nadia Hallgren, who recently made the documentary short After Maria, which looked at the effect of Hurricane Maria on Puerto Rican families.

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