At first, this look at the inherent bias of algorithms in our daily lives made me uneasy and tempted to ditch all my technology. I stuck with it, though it nearly had me nodding off with its ambling pace, and was rewarded with some third act gems,
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I couldn’t look away from this gripping documentary about the awful abuse and murder of LGBT+ people in Chechnya. What at first seems a story about gay people, becomes something much more universal where we can see the awful ripple effects of persecution, the terrible cost and how easy it is to become a refugee.
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You know if Steven Oliver is narrating, this is going to be a warm and fabulous ride through a serious subject. Taking the 250th anniversary of the landing of Captain Cook in Australia as a jumping off point, Indigenous artists create modern-day songlines that voice an Indigenous view of colonisation.
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There are probably many people like Dr Jess Ting in the world, just going about their work but, because of their empathy and dedication to making a difference, they change people’s lives.
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I wanted to like this documentary about “the first all-female band who wrote their own songs and played their own instruments to reach number one in the Billboard album charts.” This fact in itself is worthy of celebration. That this feat occurred in 1982 and hasn’t been repeated is appalling and I was hoping that this documentary by Alison Elwood might shine a light on “why The Go-Go’s?”
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This quite astounding docudrama by brothers Bill and Turner Ross seems to coalesce all that is precious and precarious about the US on the brink of the 2016 election that saw Trump come to power and the lives of the powerless crumble.
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I’m not sure what I was expecting with this low-key Canadian documentary by Jean-François Lesage that uses the lost and found office at the Montreal metro as a jumping off point for a meditation on loss. From the first bleak and beautiful scene of snow falling against a night sky as a clarinet mournfully plays, you know this is going to be about more than a lost mitten.
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A documentary about Colonia Dignidad, the German fundamentalist evangelical cult based in a Chilean rural compound and led by subsequently convicted paedophile Paul Schäfer, seems to promise shock and horror at the uncovering of the many atrocities that happened there in the 60s and 70s. Directors Marianne Hougen-Moraga and Estephan Wagner manage instead to craft a contemplative and non-didactic meditation on human nature, trauma and denial.
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Who knew that the comedy 9 to 5 (1980) was based on an actual grassroots organisation that began in the 70s to advocate for fair work conditions for (mainly female) clerical workers?
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I knew that I was going to choose a film about Australia’s First People for this prompt and was gearing up to feature The Song Keepers (2017), Naina Sen’s radiant documentary about the funny and spirited women of the Central Australian Aboriginal Women’s Choir. Dujuan, the star of Maya Newell’s In My Blood it Runs, has been on my mind, though, with the talk in the news and our socials lately about systemic racism and violence.
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