x+y demonstrates that a documentarian’s skills don’t always translate into the world of fiction films. Director Morgan Matthews has been making documentaries since 2002, but this film is his first foray into fictional features. x+y takes inspiration from his 2007 film, Beautiful Young Minds, telling the story of Nathan, an autistic, talented teenage mathematician (Asa…
Motorcycle racing requires a precise balance – both the physical balance necessary to navigate tight corners at high speeds, and the psychological balance of the exhilaration of extreme risk and the fatal consequences of pushing that risk too far. Unfortunately, motorcycle racing documentary Road, which chronicles the sharp turns of the Dunlops, an Irish family…
Finding Fela!, a documentary from Alex Gibney (The Armstrong Lie, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) about legendary Nigerian singer/political dissident Fela Kuti, follows the model popularised by the Oscar-winning Searching for Sugar Man. That model, found in the likes of Finding Vivien Maier, The Last Impresario, A Band Called Death – tends to…
Illmatic is one of those rare texts to have established itself as a classic within two decades of its release; it’s a hip-hop touchstone and unquestionably one of the greatest records ever released. It’s understandable, then, that Nas: Time is Illmatic, One9’s documentary of both the artist and the album, takes an uncontroversial, conventional approach…
Last Saturday I made a mid-morning visit to GOMA’s Cinémathèque for a couple documentaries by Hong-Joon Kim on the subject of Korean cinema. It was hardly an accessible double feature: as a fellow critic commented, it was “too niche for its audience of five people,” presenting interesting but opaque oral histories. I expected the same…
The word ‘necessary’ is perfect to describe Silvered Water, Syria Self-Portrait, a film that is as difficult to watch as it is important. As explained by its opening title card, the film is constructed out of 1,001 images/videos taken from 1,001 Syrians – these videos, regularly drawn from crude cameraphones and interrupted by the trill…
The story told by Kitty Green’s documentary Ukraine is Not a Brothel is a fascinating one. But the appeal of this film is not the mystery it unravels as it examines the inner workings of Ukrainian feminist movement FEMEN, but the thoughtful and thought-provoking perspective provided by its Australian director. This is a sterling example…
Opening with a Thoreau quote questioning how best to tackle unjust laws, The Internet’s Own Boy makes it very clear where it stands on the issue, lionising legendary internet hacktivist Aaron Swartz’s downloading (theft, if you prefer) of library documents as a necessary act of political rebellion. The documentary is disingenuous, making the tenuous argument…
In order for a documentary to be great, is it obliged to be innovative? Some of the best documentaries I’ve seen over the past year – Stories We Tell, My Winnipeg, The Act of Killing – are innovative in one way or another, whether it’s through a self-reflexive examination of the process of documentary-making or…
“Even people who have never encountered snow can imagine what it’s like to walk through it. You leave footprints – declivities. When you step on fresh snow, you pack it down. You pack it down onto the sidewalk and when all the loose snow later blows away, it actually leaves a positive record of that…
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