“It’s very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present” I have a very strange relationship with Grey Gardens. Documentary filmmaking has always been a passion of mine, and some of the most profound moments in my life as a film-lover have come from non-fiction filmmaking in various ways. Grey Gardens was…

Over the past few decades, the private lives of some individuals have become increasingly public with the rise of reality television and more intimate documentaries. We can point to two specific early examples of personal life being public entertainment. The first is An American Family, the PBS documentary series broadcast in the early 1970s that…

Towards the beginning of American Boy: A Profile of Steven Prince, before the arrival of the eponymous subject, a young Martin Scorsese looks at his cameraman and asks how much film they have left. The answer is roughly two minutes, and Scorsese asks “can we fit a Steven Prince story into two minutes?” and he…

Let’s Get Lost is a standard biographical documentary, approached in quite an unconventional manner – and considering it is a film about Chet Baker, one of the most unusual and folkloric figures in the history of jazz music, it seems oddly appropriate that director Bruce Weber approaches his story in a way that is unusual…

2018 has been an exceptional year for documentary filmmaking, and any lover of non-fiction filmmaking has been spoiled with a panoply of diverse and audacious works on a variety of subjects this year. From the warmth of Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, to the enigmatic love letter to cinema in Shirkers to the thrilling mystery…

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…