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…

Part of being a film-lover is often finding something in a film that you can relate to. I have always managed to try and find some small part of every film that relates to me in some way, even if it is minuscule and completely insignificant. I have found so many films that bear a…

Being a documentary filmmaker can be the most exhilarating, fascinating career in the movies – but it also comes with tremendous responsibility. Unlike narrative filmmakers, documentarians have a responsibility to reflect real life – reality needs to be told through the lens of their camera, and the world they portray needs to be truthful. Whether…

The documentary is undeniably one of the most popular forms of filmmaking, because there is something about the truthful conveyance of real events that attract audiences, as evident by the popularity in true-crime documentaries, and stories of amazing human feats of strength or endurance. We are drawn to these stories because it feels like we…

I have recently, as you’ll know, been looking at various cinematic genres and their origins in the history of filmmaking. It is a difficult task, because the very nature of art is that there isn’t really any way to determine which film was the “first” of its kind, so sometimes its better to just leave…

There are two things I love in this world – the films of Jim Jarmusch and the music of Iggy Pop. Also, the universe can be extraordinarily kind every now and then, and in this case, we were blessed with a combination of the greatest independent filmmaker of all time making a documentary about the…