How does one begin to describe a city? Do you examine the architecture and how it has evolved? Or is it a case of exploring the culture through the generations of people who have called it their home? Perhaps the most effective approach would be to simply choose one aspect and allow the rest to…
Category: documentary
Mr Warmth: The Don Rickles Project (2007)
Purely based on logic, it seems implausible that there is any subject that could attract a range of notable names in the entertainment industry to gather for a discussion, in which this group includes the likes of Clint Eastwood and Sidney Poitier, to Joan Rivers and Chris Rock, and everyone in between. However, such a…
Bye Bye Tiberias (2023)
“Images of the past overlap those of the present “ These words are spoken by Lina Soualem, whose voice is heard primarily as the narrator of her film Bye Bye Tiberias (Arabic: باي باي طبريا), in which she travels from her home in France to a small village in Palestine, in an effort to unearth…
The Méliès Mystery (2021)
For as long as we have been celebrating the history of cinema, there has been a concerted effort to cite someone as the proverbial “father” of the medium. There is a debate around who we can consider the first true pioneer, so it would seem that the most appropriate solution is not to label an…
Black Box Diaries (2024)
While it was only labelled as such roughly a decade ago, the MeToo movement has been around a while, but only started to gain momentum once more women stepped out and decided to talk about their own experiences with sexual violence and harassment. In the early days of the movement, many of us found ourselves…
Catching Fire: The Story of Anita Pallenberg (2024)
As far as counterculture icons go, Anita Pallenberg is certainly one of the most fascinating, despite not being as widely known or revered as some of her peers. Someone whose career path was as layered and complicated as her ancestry, she was Italian-born of German parents, and who spent almost her entire life oscillating between…
Mister Organ (2022)
It seems that every time I discuss a film that focuses around conspiracies or investigations around the ambiguities of everyday life, Thomas Pynchon’s famous quip in Bleeding Edge that “paranoia is the garlic in life’s kitchen – you can never have too much” comes into the conversation at some point. Perhaps overused, it is still…
Bobi Wine: The People’s President (2023)
Generally speaking, there are two kinds of people living under an authoritarian regime: there are those who just blindly accept that this is the way their lives have to be, and then there are those who stand up and fight in some way, even if it is only launching their own small, intimate rebellion against…
Will & Harper (2024)
Behind every massively successful comedic actor, there is usually a brilliant writer who works closely with them to help develop material. Very rarely do we find comedians being entirely independent when it comes to producing work – even if they craft their own material, there is usually someone who assists in shepherding those ideas or…
Land Without Bread (1933)
Where does one even start with a discussion on Land Without Bread, the ambitious and deeply unnerving documentary by Luis Buñuel? This isn’t to suggest that this is the kind of unimpeachable masterpiece that renders the viewer speechless (although this is certainly not untrue, for reasons we will discuss momentarily – it is one of…
The Postmodern Pelican 