Doc Weekly is kicking off 2025 with a visit to Fipadoc ! In anticipation of the festival, we’ve been poring through the programme in order to give you our hot tips from this year’s premiering films in the competitions…
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Doc Weekly is kicking off 2025 with a visit to Fipadoc ! In anticipation of the festival, we’ve been poring through the programme in order to give you our hot tips from this year’s premiering films in the competitions…
The liberal democratic model is at a crossroads. Elections and political unrest around the world have exposed the cracks in our individualist, utilitarian path towards progress. As democracy recedes, people are turning towards authoritarian and theocratic leaders. It is sometimes hard to see this tide turning, but thankfully, documentaries are here to help. Doc Weekly was in attendance at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) to pick out five of the of the most urgent films on the subject, including new 2024 and 2025 releases from Petra Costa and Asif Kapadia.
We inherit much from our families. Some things, like Chloe Abraham’s sweet memories of her ancestral land’s ripe Sri Lankan mangoes, bring joy. Others are as hard and unyielding as the stone at the fruit's core. In her debut feature film, The Taste of Mango, Abraham offers a raw yet warm self-documentation of shared trauma spanning three generations.
Doc Weekly was in attendance at the 2024 edition of International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) where Trains by Maciej J. Drygas picked up the Best Film and Best Editing in the International Competition. A bitter sweet archival portrait of the people of 20th century Europe, Trains captures their hopes, desires, dramas, and tragedies.
Doc Weekly was in attendance at the 2024 edition of International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) where our writer Laoise Murray caught the world premiere of A Want in Her by Myrid Carten, a raw, gut-punching and surprisingly funny examination of the meaning of unconditional love.
In Cape Town, a city as breathtakingly beautiful as it is brutal, a young man leads a daring urban revolution at the intersection of political and property power. Doc Weekly writer Pheladi Sethusa had the chance to see the documentary Mother City by Miki Redelinghuys and Pearlie Joubert in Johannesburg during a screening hosted by the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation.
Doc Weekly is attending IDFA 2024 ! Here are our hottest tips from the films premiering in the competition sections of tof the world’s largest documentary film festival of the year…
As part of Doc Weekly’s coverage of the BFI London Film Festival we spoke with Juliet Klottrup, about her film Travelling Home and the five years that she spent meeting and photographing the travellers that pass by her road as they make their annual pilgrimage to Appleby Fair.
As part of Doc Weekly’s coverage of the BFI London Film Festival we had the chance to see one of this year’s most exciting documentaries, Black Box Diaries by Shiori Itō, the journalist who investigated her own sexual assault to expose Japan's outdated patriarchal laws and become the country’s key #metoo figure.
Doc Weekly is covering this year’s BFI London Film Festival with reviews and interviews of some of our favourite documentaries from the selection. As Noites Ainda Cheiram a Pólvora, or The Nights Still Smell of Gunpowder, by Inadelso Cossa first premiered at this year’s Berlinale. Over 30 years after the end of the Mozambican civil war, Inadelso Cossa returns to his grandmother’s village to record untold stories of the conflict.
Doc Weekly was at this year’s États généraux du film documentaire in Lussas, France, for a rare screening of “The Invasion”, (2024) followed by a Q&A with Sergei Loznitsa. Weeks after seeing it, scenes and characters from Sergei Loznitsa’s new film, “The Invasion”, documenting daily life in Ukraine since Russia’s invasion, remain burned into the retina.
World-renowned wildlife photographer Vincent Munier and novelist Sylvain Tesson’s search, deep in the Tibetan highlands, for the Snow Leopard, notoriously one of the world’s rarest animals.
On the edge of the Trans-Saharan national road, a café-restaurant stands like a fortress. Hassen Ferhani’s latest film reveals Malika and her little kingdom within.
For three years, Gianfranco Rosi filmed armed conflicts in the Middle East along the borders of Iraq, Kurdistan, Syria and Lebanon, witnessing the scars of violence and destruction left across their harsh landscapes.
On 13th February 2017, Kim Jong-nam was assassinated at Kuala Lumpur International Airport by two female assassins using the fastest acting poison in existence, VX. But no one could have foreseen the elaborate hoax which led the women, Siti Aisyah and Doan Ti Huong, to the airport that day.
We’re extremely excited to see so many of our favourite films from the past year included in this record-breaking tally of Oscar shortlisted documentaries. For every one that we’ve covered you’ll find a link to our review, including a trailer and a link to watch the film for yourself.
The setting is hazily atmospheric - neon red, smoky scenes in a dive bar in Las Vegas - aptly named The Roaring 20s - about to close its doors for the last time.
Netflix’s Dick Johnson Is Dead seems to perfectly balance absurdly comical moments with its melancholic undertone. After all, this is a film about life, just as much as it is about death.
“First We Eat” is a POV film from the eyes of Suzanne Crocker, a mother of three living in Dawson City, Yukon, inspired to pick up the camera after a road obstruction led to food shortages in the town, exposing the fragility of her family’s food chain. The family of five embark on a challenge to eat only locally sourced food for a whole year.
