I don’t know where to start – Shirkers is an absolutely astonishing film and something I was not expecting at all. When I heard about Sandi Tan’s documentary, I was anticipating an interesting but otherwise inconsequential, film about an unsolved mystery and a filmmaker in search of the answers that have eluded her for years,…

Many of us have often fantasized about the possibility of turning the corner and being confronted with ourselves. It is a common belief that somewhere in the world, we have a doppelganger, and the likelihood of us meeting this person who is identical to us is astronomically small, but it is nonetheless an enduring and…

What happens when you get four of the finest actresses of their generation together, talking about their lives and careers? The answer is Roger Michell’s latest film, a documentary entitled Nothing Like a Dame (also alternatively known as Tea with the Dames) that is nothing short of an exhilarating, hilarious and irreverent look into the…

I will be blunt – Paris Is Burning, without any hyperbole, is one of the most important films ever made. It is the rare breed of documentary film that weaves a beautifully poetic story out of the truth, creating something profoundly meaningful and deeply wonderful. It is a film that represented a portion of the…

I often question why, out of all the filmmakers I adore and admire, it is David Lynch who I consider to be the singular figure that not only altered my perspective of art but changed my life in some way. Why he has remained arguably the most important artistic figure in my life, an individual…

Agnès Varda is one of the greatest filmmakers of all time. This is not merely an opinion, it is a well-accepted fact. A woman of diminutive stature that makes films that tower higher than the work of nearly every one of her contemporaries, and one of the sole female voices in the male-dominated world of…

I have never hidden my admiration for documentary films, constantly writing that the genre of the documentary is inherently of interest to me because of its ability to convey reality in a cinematic manner, where the audience can be introduced to a specific real-life story or figure and be able to engage with it. However,…

Documentary films are such an underappreciated cinematic form, mainly because around-the-clock news programming and micro-documentaries presented on television and over social media have made the idea of the innovative, long-form documentary somewhat redundant. However, the form still manages to live on despite the fact that it panders to an extremely niche audience. I am a…

In about two weeks, we will be celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of one of the most audacious and influential documentaries premiering at the New York Film Festival. Portrait of Jason is one of the most unheralded films ever made, a documentary that is so astounding in its simplicity, but so broad in its multitude of…

“What is cinema? Light coming from somewhere captured by images more or less colourful” These are the concluding words to the penultimate scene of Agnès Varda’s incredible visual essay, the documentary The Beaches of Agnès (French: Les plages d’Agnès). I have been an admirer of Varda for an incredibly long time, and one of her…