King Rocker – Review Rob Salusbury February 6, 2021 Reviews This film was previously reviewed in June 2020 as part of our Sheffield Doc/Fest coverage. Many so-called rockumentaries have tackled the pressures and pains that come with rock and roll stardom. But a...
Everyday Greyness – Sheffield Doc/Fest 2020 Review Sophie Maxwell July 11, 2020 Reviews Everyday Greyness is the story of Magda, a young Polish woman in recovery from drug addiction. Magda has been living at a treatment centre where, along with a small group of others, she has given up her life...
The Kiosk – Sheffield Doc/Fest 2020 Review Nick Davie July 9, 2020 Reviews An overarching theme of this film may be the media publishing industry as a whole, but it is essentially an intimate observation of the press trade at its roots: the newspaper kiosk. In a wealthy area of...
The Filmmaker’s House – Sheffield Doc/Fest 2020 Review Nick Davie July 9, 2020 Reviews Part-documentary, part-fiction, Marc Isaacs invites audiences into his home, in this overtly invasive and introspective examination of life in controlled spaces. A foreboding uneasy sensation is shared amongst...
The Washing Society – Sheffield Doc/Fest 2020 Review Fatima Sheriff July 5, 2020 Reviews There is no such thing as unskilled labour—only unseen, or unappreciated. Inspired by the Atlanta Washing Society of 1881, where African American laundresses united for better pay and agency, The Washing...
Your Day is My Night – Sheffield Doc/Fest 2020 Review Fatima Sheriff July 4, 2020 Reviews From the cramped quarters of New York’s Chinatown where individual beds are rented, Your Day is My Night artfully brings hidden immigrants into the light. The film follows a handful of people from this close...
Aswang – Sheffield Doc/Fest 2020 Review Nick Davie June 30, 2020 Reviews Alyx Ayn Arumpac assesses the Filipino government’s war on drugs, in this pivotal and terrifying examination of the impact on life in the region. When Rodrigo Duterte is voted in as the president of the...
Southern Journey (Revisited) – Sheffield Doc/Fest 2020 Review Nick Davie June 28, 2020 Reviews British filmmakers Tim Plester and Rob Currie retrace the steps made in 1959 by Alan Lomax, the American ethnomusicologist who charted folk music in the South of the United States. This road movie and music...
The Metamorphosis of Birds – Sheffield Doc/Fest 2020 Review Nick Davie June 28, 2020 Reviews The transcendent debut from Portuguese director Catarina Vasconcelos partly looks back at how Beatriz meets Henrique, and subsequently marry on Beatriz’s 21st birthday. Henrique is often away, serving as a...
Corporate Accountability – Sheffield Doc/Fest 2020 Review Nick Davie June 27, 2020 Reviews Jonathan Perel’s audiovisual quandary is a film essay dissecting the relationship between industry and the last military dictatorship in Argentina. Perel documents a present haunting absence of humanity in...
Sentimental Education – Sheffield Doc/Fest 2020 Review Rob Salusbury June 25, 2020 Reviews Fragments of memory and the struggles of being stuck in neutral collide in this slight but sincere first-person documentary from Spanish filmmaker Jorge Juárez. Juárez was one of many young Spaniards...
A Month of Single Frames – Sheffield Doc/Fest 2020 Review Rob Salusbury June 25, 2020 Reviews In 2018, one year before she passed away, the influential feminist filmmaker Barbara Hammer revisited a project she had worked on 20 years prior, compiled over the course of a month while living in one of...
A Cat Is Always Female – Sheffield Doc/Fest 2020 Review Sophie Butcher June 23, 2020 Reviews Though just 15 minutes long, A Cat Is Always Female paints an evocative portrait of Croatian artist and sculptor Marija Ujevic Galetovic - though she prefers to call herself a “manual labourer”. Directed...
The Go-Go’s – Sheffield Doc/Fest 2020 Review Nick Davie June 21, 2020 Reviews From the punk scene in L.A. to Broadway musical, this documentary is a deserved and welcomed portrait chronicling seminal all-female band The Go-Go’s rise, fall, and eventual reunion. America’s first, and...
FREM – Sheffield Doc/Fest 2020 Review Rob Salusbury June 18, 2020 Reviews Two of modern society’s most pressing topics collide in Viera Čákanyová’s mediation on the power of artificial intelligence and the gradual erosion of the arctic landscape at the hands of climate...