Florian Zeller’s heart-rending film The Father is the latest in a spate of recent works tackling the condition and its effects on the familyFirst shown way back at Sundance in January last year, and repeatedly delayed by the pandemic, The Father waited…
Handsome review – meandering Down’s syndrome road trip
The world travels of a pair of brothers, one with Down’s, start to look like a middling gap-year projectOn the rare occasions the cinema has engaged with Down’s syndrome – 1996’s The Eighth Day and 2019’s The Peanut Butter Falcon are the main ones to s…
Jeanie Finlay: ‘I don’t film alpha males. They don’t need more exposure’
She spent a year in her room as a teenager, and now makes heart-wrenching documentaries about people looking for safe spaces in record shops, on goth cruises – and even on the set of Game of ThronesThere are many wonderful moments in the films of Jeani…
Streaming: the best of the Edinburgh film festival 2021
The festival returns with live screenings, but will continue to offer an online edition, with gems from Norway and Iran, plus a 30-year stop-motion passion projectAs the film festival circuit returns to semi-normal – Cannes wrapped a delayed but succes…
Sabaya: the shocking documentary filmed inside Syria’s notorious al-Hawl camp
With car chases and shootouts, it may feel like a Hollywood action flick, but, as the director, Hogir Hirori, explains, the film is really about the exploited women and girls thereIn August 2014, after Islamic State (Isis) militants attacked the Sinjar…
RIP SENI director: why I made a film about a graffitied artwork, race and mental health
Daisy Ifama discusses her documentary about why graffiti was emblazoned outside the Bethlem royal, a psychiatric hospital in south LondonOur latest release on the Guardian Documentary strand is RIP SENI, a film about an event in June 2020 when graffiti…
The Meaning of Hitler: exploring our cultural fascination with Nazism
In a wide-ranging new documentary, the lasting and insidious influence of the Nazi dictator is put under the microscope Start a conversation about Donald Trump these days and it’s only a matter of time before someone mentions Adolf Hitler.But if your s…
‘The very worst things we could imagine’: a terrifying documentary on US wildfires
In Bring Your Own Brigade, British film-maker Lucy Walker takes us back to the California tragedies of 2018 and a crisis that continues to rage on“In the Christian imagination,” says Lucy Walker’s voiceover, “hell is fire pits, it’s being burned alive….
‘It doesn’t leave you’: the toxic toll of LGBTQ conversion therapy
Netflix documentary Pray Away, exec-produced by Ryan Murphy, traces the history of conversion therapy with regretful leaders of the “ex-gay” movementJulie Rodgers was 16 years old when her mother introduced her to Ricky Chelette, the “singles minister”…
The Sparks Brothers review – a match made in heaven
Shaun of the Dead director Edgar Wright is a perfect fit for the absurdist antics of art pop’s most elusive duo in this stranger-than-fiction documentary“They are a band who you can look up on Wikipedia and know nothing!” So says long-term Sparks fan J…