Marking a career genre-shift, Manas is Marianna Brennand’s first fiction feature. Developed from a decade of research into child sexual abuse in the Amazon, this was a real story she knew she could only be told through fiction.
All in Film
After moving to Brazil aged 19 to pursue her love of graffiti, filmmaker Sissel Morrel Dargis discovered another of Brazil’s underground art movements. Over the next decade, she became deeply embedded in the world of baloeiros, clandestine artists who, operating from the favelas of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, spend months - even years - building gigantic hot air balloons.
At Visions du Réel, Doc Weekly interviewed director Denis Côté about his latest film, Paul, which has been garnering a lot of attention on the festival circuit since its world premiere at Berlinale earlier this year. Denis Côté's new documentary follows Cleaning Simp Paul, a man and online persona who's path out of depression and social anxiety has been subservience to dominant women as a cleaner.
Doc Weekly interview Ross McClean for the World Premiere of his short film No Mean City in competition at Visions du Réel, a film that questions that uses the Belfast’s switch from sodium to LED lighting to question the city’s wider transformations.
When Patricia Franquesa was blackmailed with intimate photos after her laptop was stolen, she faced an impossible choice. My Sextortion Diary is a firsthand account of life under digital ransom, told exclusively through the very technology that ensnared her.
The possibilities within a virtual world are endless. With a vast wealth of experiences, characters and stories available to the player, games such as Grand Theft Auto can be pure escapism. But can they be more than that? Shot entirely in GTA, Grand Theft Hamlet explores the sense of community that such virtual worlds can create and the art that can be born from violence.
You've seen documentaries about video games, their creation, their rise to prominence, perhaps their ever growing impact on the public psyche. But have you ever seen one shot entirely in GTA's Los Santos ? Or one who's script is composed of World of Warcraft gamelogs ? The “machinima” genre is currently having a moment, particularly when it comes to documentary.
Doc Weekly was in Biarritz to interview director Lee Shulman for the premiere of I Am Martin Parr at Fipadoc 2025, a rare portrait of the unassuming photographer who, under cover of an irresistible sense of humour has impacted his art form beyond recognition.
‘They want our ideas, they just don’t want us’. Follow sociologist Patricia Kingori, the youngest black and female professor at the University of Oxford, as she takes us through the bought essay industry, which involves an estimated 40,000 Kenyans writing academic papers for students in the global north.
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 covering this year’s BFI London Film Festival with reviews and interviews from some of our favourite documentaries. Our writer Ellie Malpas interviewed Shiori Itō , director of Black Box Diaries, which comes out in UK cinemas today, the 25th of October 2024. Shiori Ito is known as a leader of Japan’s #metoo movement, after she chose to pursue the man who raped her, an influential journalist.
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.
