Netflix announces surprise Michelle Obama documentary

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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When Lambs Become Lions review – on the trail of Kenya’s elephant killers

This coolly even-handed documentary dips into the lives of an ivory poacher and a stressed-out wildlife ranger trying to obstruct the illegal trade

Jon Kasbe’s documentary When Lambs Become Lions has been much praised on the festival circuit, and it is cleverly and effectively made, seeking to grip you the way a thriller would. Yet I’m not sure that I was completely on board with this film, which appears to have smoothly carpentered its narrative in the edit. Is it almost too good to be true?

The film gives us a coolly even-handed study of some ivory hunters in Kenya – and also the rangers, the hunters of the hunters, who have to roam through the landscape, in their camouflage gear and assault rifles, on the lookout for those who are illegally killing elephants for their tusks.

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Talking About Trees review – how the lights went out in Sudan’s cinemas

This poignant and witty documentary focuses on four directors whose careers were stalled by a military coup thirty years ago

This witty and engaging cinephile documentary begins surreally with its subjects, four older male Sudanese film-makers, recreating the famous “closeup” scene from Sunset Boulevard. None of these directors has worked properly in years, since a military coup in 1989 triggered the collapse of Sudan’s film industry for religious and economic reasons. Now a power cut prevents them from even watching a movie, so they make do. Ibrahim Shaddad wraps a blue chiffon scarf coquettishly around his face as Norma Desmond, simpering: “I’m ready for my closeup.”

Films are oxygen for these men, and Talking About Trees follows their mission to reopen a neglected outdoor movie theatre near Khartoum and give away tickets. There are almost no cinemas left in Sudan. As plans go, it looks as rickety as the 12ft ladders they climb to scrub the crumbling walls of the cinema. The four amigos – Shaddad, Suliman Ibrahim, Eltayeb Mahdi and Manar Al-Hilo – repaint the peeling sign, print posters and canvass the local community to decide what film to show first. (The people pick Django Unchained.) They accept setbacks philosophically, with stoicism and amusement. Shaddad finds it hilarious when the general from the morality police dealing with their request for a permit gives them the runaround, disappearing off to pray for two hours.

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Barriers, barbed wire and borders in the head: Josef Koudelka’s Holy Land

The Magnum photographer grew up behind the iron curtain. As a documentary charts his journey where Israel and Palestine meet, Koudelka talks about challenging official narratives – and himself

There’s a surreal moment near the start of Koudelka Shooting Holy Land, a documentary about the acclaimed photographer Josef Koudelka. He has pointed his lens at one of the concrete barriers that separate Israel and Palestine but has been stopped by an official and a heavily armed soldier. His local assistant, Gilad Baram, is trying to smooth things over. “It might result in a book,” Baram tells the soldier. “He is a one of the most renowned photographers worldwide. He is a photographer with an agency called Magnum.”

Suddenly the atmosphere changes. “Magnum? Ah, I know it,” says the soldier, his stern face breaking into a smile. A short discussion later, a friendly handshake and all is well.

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The Kingmaker review – exquisitely horrible portrait of Imelda Marcos

The former first lady of the Philippines is revealed as a monstrous, loathsome, absurdly queenly figure in Lauren Greenfield’s superb documentary

Lauren Greenfield’s film about the Philippines’ former first lady Imelda Marcos reveals a grotesquely self-pitying, wholly unrepentant and very rich woman, who has clearly still kept her hands on a great deal of the American aid money that successive US presidents once gave the Philippines in return for suppressing communism and civil rights and showing hospitality to US naval power – cash that she and her husband, Ferdinand, looted from the public purse and salted away abroad.

Related: 'She's an unreliable narrator': Lauren Greenfield on her Imelda Marcos documentary

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The Cave review – horror and hope in a Syrian hospital battered by war

This powerful, immensely moving documentary follows the courageous medical staff who must treat injured children as bombs fall around them

Feras Fayyad, the young Syrian documentary-maker who filmed Last Men in Aleppo (and was himself imprisoned and tortured by Bashar al-Assad’s regime), returns with a chilling, shaming film made over two years inside a Syrian hospital in Ghouta, the city besieged by the Syrian government for five years until 2018.

If there is a chink of hope here it’s Amani Ballour, the hospital’s manager, a paediatrician in her late 20s. “I know this life is tough. But it’s honest,” she says. Her deep sense of purpose is humbling – it carries her through hellish days treating dozens of bloodied and badly injured children. Her gentleness with patients is desperately moving, too.

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Syrian war documentary For Sama triumphs at British independent film awards

The chronicle of an activist who filmed the destruction in Aleppo wins prizes for best film, documentary, director and editing

For Sama, the acclaimed documentary about life under siege in the Syrian city of Aleppo, has unexpectedly triumphed at the British independent film awards, winning the top prize, best British independent film, as well as best documentary and best director for Waad al-Kateab and Edward Watts.

Described by the Guardian’s Mike McCahill as a film to “break your heart and sear your soul”, For Sama is a chronicle filmed by Syrian activist-director al-Kateab as Aleppo is targeted during the country’s ongoing civil war. Al-Kateab spends much of the time in a hospital where her husband, Hamza, works, recording the destruction and horror. For Sama won a total of four Bifas, including best editing – previously announced with other Bifa “craft” awards on 15 November.

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Archive of blood: how photographer Letizia Battaglia shot the mafia and lived

Her shocking pictures told the truth about mafia murders – and earned her death threats. Ahead of a powerful film about her extraordinary life, we meet the woman who dared to confront killers. Warning: contains graphic imagery

Letizia Battaglia can still remember the first corpse she photographed: a man lying beneath an olive tree in a field in rural Sicily. It remains a viscerally unsettling image, made all the more so by its telling details: the dead man’s shoeless left foot, the resigned gaze of the policeman guarding the body, the olive leaves hanging low over the spreadeagled torso. The fact that he was a mafioso murdered in a local feud is, insists Battaglia, neither here nor there. “Everyone,” she says quietly, “is equal in death.”

What has stayed with her, over 40 years later, is the smell that hung in the summer air that day and was carried on the breeze. “It was very hot and he had been dead for a few days,” she says, drawing deeply on a cigarette. “Now, as soon as you ask about this photograph, it comes back to me. I can almost feel it, this atmosphere of death.”

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‘We lay like corpses’: Bangladesh’s 1970s rape camp survivors speak out | Lucy Lamble

Award-winning documentary Rising Silence preserves the testimony of some of the 200,000 women abducted during the country’s war of independence

In 1971, during the nine-month war that gave Bangladesh its independence from then West Pakistan, four sisters – Amina, Maleka, Mukhlesa and Budhi Begum – were abducted by Pakistani soldiers and local collaborators. They were among the more than 200,000 women held in rape camps and were detained for two and a half months.

“Twenty-two of us would lie like corpses in that room,” says Maleka as she explains how her elder sister Buhdi, “unable to bear the pain”, died before they were released.

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Gaza review – heartfelt chronicle of life under political siege

This sombre, angry documentary captures a sense of ordinary life in the strip bordered by Egypt, Israel and the sea

Garry Keane and Andrew McConnell’s heartfelt film about the unending misery of Gaza – now effectively a blockaded strip of land bounded by the Egyptian and Israeli borders and the Mediterranean Sea – has had a complex reception in some quarters since it premiered at Sundance earlier this year. Some have found it manipulative and politically reticent, in that it only fleetingly mentions Hamas, and includes footage of an Israeli bombardment but shows only stone-throwing as the response. There may be something in this. For instance, eyebrows have to be raised at the moment when an immobile child is shown with her eyes closed, we are encouraged to think she is dead but in a later scene she opens her eyes.

Yet the film has real value as a compassionate human document, in showing ordinary people who courageously have to keep going somehow, in the grimmest of conditions, in a world where, as someone puts it, there is a “wall between the people of Gaza and life itself”. A young woman practises the cello, a young man records rap tracks, a theatre director rehearses a performance piece, a fisherman broods over the oppression of his industry – they are not allowed to fish more than three miles out, and the amount of fish that can be caught so close to shore is pitifully meagre. The sea is what the people of Gaza face: the one boundary that does not seem so brutal, something that should conceivably be a source of comfort, but is almost as unforgiving as the land barriers. A sombre, angry film about a people under political siege.

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The Edge of Democracy review – to the heart of Brazilian politics

Petra Costa’s powerful documentary charts the state’s descent into populism and the fraying of its democratic fabric

Brazilian actor-writer-director Petra Costa is known for mining her personal and family history for material. Her first feature, Elena, turned her search for her absent older sister into a deeply evocative documentary about loss, familial love, rivalry and displacement as it flutters between São Paulo in Brazil and New York City.

Costa’s latest documentary, The Edge of Democracy, finds her intersecting the personal and political on an even bigger public stage, and in the process documents a crisis erupting in slow motion at the heart of Brazilian politics. Thanks to extraordinary access to figures at the centre of the story – former leftist Workers’ Party presidents Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (AKA Lula) and Dilma Rousseff, as well as rightwingers Michel Temer and current president Jair Bolsonaro – Costa manages to craft an intimate primer about the state’s descent into populism and the fraying of the country’s democratic fabric.

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Loughinisland journalists told police investigation dropped

High court judge rebukes police and quashes warrants over unredacted document

Police in England and Northern Ireland have dropped a controversial investigation into journalists who made a documentary about a Troubles atrocity, following a public outcry and a stinging rebuke from judges.

The Durham constabulary and the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) announced on Monday night that they were no longer investigating Trevor Birney and Barry McCaffrey over their work on No Stone Unturned, a film about the murder of six Catholics in Loughinisland, County Down, in 1994.

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‘You get used to the gunfire’ – filming the Libyan women’s football team

Denounced on TV, they train at secret locations watched by armed guards. We meet the woman from Hastings who made a fascinating film about Libya’s guttsiest football squad

‘Just what our country needs!” rails the imam sarcastically on Libyan TV. “A women’s football team! And what’s more, they chose tall, young beautiful girls for the team – and for months their legs will be exposed.”

Women’s football may be getting its moment in the spotlight with the World Cup about to kick off. But, as the absorbing new documentary Freedom Fields reveals, the Libyan women’s national team has some way to go. As well as that imam, the film also features this statement from extremist group Ansar al-Sharia: “We strongly refute what the supporters of immoral westernisation are doing under the pretext of women’s freedom. This might lead to other sports with even more nudity, such as swimming and running.”

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Beyoncé rocks, but so did Woodstock | Brief letters

Roger Waters | Rock concerts | Use-by dates | Exercise | Smartphones

Regarding Jeremy Beecham’s thoughts on Roger Waters (Letters, 19 April), I think we can take it as read Waters would not encourage Madonna to support the Assad regime by playing Damascus.
John Warburton
Edinburgh

• You failed to mention the two most important filmed rock concerts (Homecoming review – Beyoncé documentary is a triumphant celebration, 19 April): Monterey Pop and Woodstock. To write about seminal filmed rock gigs without mentioning them is like writing about influential 60s groups without mentioning the Beatles or the Stones.
Jon Ingram
Ilkley, West Yorkshire

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The Breadmaker: on the frontline of Venezuela’s bakery wars – video

In the midst of Venezuela’s spiralling economic crisis, Natalia and fellow members of a Chavista collective have stepped in to take over production at a local bakery, La Minka. Authorities had suspended operations when the owners were accused of overpricing their loaves and hoarding flour. In March 2017, with the tacit support of the government, the collective began selling affordable bread. This is the story of their fight to safeguard the bakery’s future and keep the Chavista dream alive

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Online fund for unpaid Fyre festival staff raises tens of thousands

GoFundMe receives almost $80,000 for Bahamian workers who lost out in festival scam

Tens of thousands of pounds have been raised for Bahamian restaurant workers whose life savings were “wiped out” in a multimillion-pound fraud by organisers of the Fyre festival.

Maryann Rolle said her team worked round the clock preparing 1,000 meals a day for festival staff but went unpaid when it imploded spectacularly in April 2017.

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Fighting Fyre with Fyre: the story of two warring festival documentaries

The failed music festival has inspired two new documentaries and a war off-screen over the morality of the film-makers involved

Scandal sells, or so it’s said, but few have captured the zeitgeist with quite the velocity as the rise and fall, in April 2017, of Fyre. The luxury music festival – a Bahamas-set Coachella with villas and supermodels, it promised – collapsed into financial fraud and memes of drunk twentysomethings scrambling for Fema tents and styrofoam tray meals, all direct to our screens.

Related: 'Closer to The Hunger Games than Coachella': why Fyre festival went up in flames

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