Tag: documentary
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Last weekend, Barbican screened four shorts as part of their Project a Black Planet season, which all use memory and myth. But how does eternalising and internalising the past help reimagine cultural identities today? “You cannot step in the same river twice,” Heraclitus reportedly said of our experience in the world. The past is gone;…
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For their eleventh fair, which opens in Kensington’s Olympia centre this week, Photo London is introducing a moving image programme. Previously held in Somerset House, Photo London has moved to the redeveloped Olympia. The move has allowed for an expanded programme now including a section exclusively for moving-image works. The programme includes films by Melissa…
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What does it mean to film a powwow? What does it mean for a powwow to take place now, in the 21st century? These are questions provoked by Sky Hopinka’s second feature, Powwow People (2025), which takes us into the heart of a powwow, a contemporary gathering of Native Americans, bringing together different tribes and…
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With ‘Narrative Warfare’, Jordan Lord reclaims the ‘tell, don’t show’ rhetorical approach as a tool for resistance against fair-right domination of the image economy. In the tradition of documentary, we cannot categorise Jordan Lord’s latest film, Concealed and Denied. This isn’t only because it deals with the rapidly evolving culture of social media politics, or…
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Despite its far-reaching geographical and historical subject, the themes of home and belonging make the eponymous “ground” unmistakably East London, the area in which it rightfully won awards last year. It should come as no surprise that The Ground Beneath Me, a project consisting of the filmic work Legacy of a Heart’s Injury (2026–) and…
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Goldmiths CCA pieces together a the radical history of Paper Tiger Television in a recent retrospective on the collective. I am someone who enjoys nothing more than returning home after a long day at work, sinking into my sofa, and letting the soft, hazy glow of whatever trash TV show I’m currently consumed by occupy…
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Umi Ishihara’s solo exhibition Nocturnal Melody, her first in Europe, follows with a curious ambivalence the lives and ambitions of two dancers in a Shibuya gentleman’s club, inviting viewers into Tokyo’s seedy alternative nightlife scene. Across two galleries, Ishihara builds a colourful, kaleidoscopic account of this nocturnal world. She intersperses documentary footage with direct camera addresses by…
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Returning for this year’s London Palestine Film Festival, Yasmin Fedda’s 2020 documentary about two men forcibly ‘disappeared’ by the Syrian Government, led by the now-ousted Bashar al-Assad. Five years after its release, the hope and perseverance of their loved ones to find answers burns as bright as ever. The film jumps between the lives of…
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Roland Nurier’s minor-release documentary The Tank and the Olive Tree about the history of Palestine passed cinemagoers in 2019. Revived for a screening in Sands Films Studios for the London Palestine Film Festival 2025 last month, the film acts as a catalyst for conversation, with the bittersweetness of renewing its appeal, yet through the vein…
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On its fleeting visit to the UK after winning the Award for Outstanding Artistic Contribution at IDFA last year, Omar Mismar’s meditative documentary A Frown Gone Mad brings Beirut’s industrial complex of beautification to London’s ICA. From a single room in a Bouba’s popular salon, Mismar explores the production of war, beauty, and cinema, with…
