Sheffield DocFest
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Sheffield DocFest 2014: How We Used to Live review
★★★☆☆ Unlike recent pioneering archive-led offerings such as Penny Woolcock’s British Sea Power collaboration From the Sea to the Land Beyond and John Akomfrah’s The Stuart Hall Project, Paul Kelly’s How We Used to Live (2013) isn’t a great deal more than what it appears at first glance – an audiovisual document of a London…
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Sheffield DocFest 2014: 112 Weddings review
★★☆☆☆ With approximately half of all marriages ending in divorce, what is it that still compels couples to take the matrimonial plunge? This is the question posed by 112 Weddings (2013), the latest film from documentary filmmaker Doug Block (51 Birch Street, The Kids Grow Up). For over two decades, Block, like many others, has…
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Sheffield DocFest 2014: Slut Phobia? review
★★★☆☆ It’s a well-known double standard: women are labelled as ‘sluts’ for being sexually liberal, whilst promiscuous men get a pat on the back for their numerous conquests. Or, as one young woman in Sunny Bergman’s candid Doc/Fest selected documentary Slut Phobia? (2013) puts it, “they organise a parade for him and bring out the…
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Sheffield DocFest 2014: Nelson Mandela: The Myth & Me review
★★☆☆☆ An unapologetically personal open letter to the former South African president, Khalo Matabane’s Nelson Mandela: The Myth & Me (2014) is a sincere but ultimately dated piece, made as it was before Mandela’s death last year. Referred to throughout in the present tense – and not simply for the timeless legacy he looks set…
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Sheffield DocFest 2014: Miners Shot Down review
★★★★☆ Though we as a society have arguably become more desensitised to depictions of conflict and violence, every now and then a film comes along that challenges this notion. Rehad Desai’s distressing Sheffield Doc/Fest opener Miners Shot Down (2014) is one of the most recent examples. We’re used to seeing running street battles in distant…
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Sheffield DocFest 2014: Last Hijack review
★★★☆☆ In a world where abstract emotions like fear and terror have been distorted to mobilise society against an invisible foe, pirates have become the latest bogeymen of Western cinema. In Tommy Pallotta and Femke Wolting’s Last Hijack (2014), we’re offered the opportunity to explore behind the headlines and experience the world from the pirate’s…
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Sheffield DocFest 2014: Finding Fela review
★★★★☆ Whilst drumming up support for his new Broadway musical, FELA!, producer Stephen Hendel described Nigerian Afrobeat exponent Fela Kuti as “without question one of the great composers and musicians and activists of the second half of the 20th century.” It sounds like a bold claim on first consideration, but becomes all the harder to…
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Sheffield DocFest 2014: Concerning Violence review
★★★★★ Illustrating the provocative and combative concepts of Martinique-born Afro-French psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon’s anti-colonial text The Wretched of the Earth, Göran Hugo Olsson’s Concerning Violence (2014) aims to explore Africa’s subjugated past in hope of understanding the continent’s current geopolitical condition. An abrasively worded thinkpiece, Olsson’s follow-up to 2011’s The Black Power Mixtape…
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Sheffield DocFest 2014: The 50 Year Argument review
★★★☆☆ Martin Scorsese and editor turned co-director David Tedeschi pay homage to a 20th century American institution in The New York Review of Books: A 50 Year Argument (2014). Their third documentary together following 2005’s No Direction Home: Bob Dylan and George Harrison: Living in the Material World (2011), the duo delve into the journal’s…
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Sheffield DocFest 2014: Visitors review
★★★★☆ Godfrey Reggio seems cursed to be forever looked upon as a perpetrator of the modes and forms of the music video and advert like his comrade in arms, Terrence Malick; but it’s they who have been asset stripped by the parasitical behemoth of those nascent industries. When faced with the conundrum of chicken and…
