Authors — Carol Nahra
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“This Film is Done by YouTubers”: Benjamin Ree on The Remarkable Life of Ibelin
In 2020’s The Painter and the Thief, Norwegian director Benjamin Ree told the story of the unlikely friendship between artist Barbora Kysilkova and heroin addict Karl-Bertil Nordland through overlapping, sometimes contradictory points of view. He has used this approach again for The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, a telling—and repeated retelling—of the short life of Mats Steen, a young, disabled Norwegian gamer who died in 2014 from the rare degenerative disease Duchenne muscular dystrophy. While his loving family was devoted to giving Steen the best life he could have, in the immediate aftermath of his death they grieved the fact that […]
by Carol Nahra on Oct 25, 2024 -
The Ofcom Gap: VOD, UK Broadcasters and Ethical Fact-Based Filmmaking
Netflix’s breakout hit Baby Reindeer brought into vivid relief an issue long at play in the UK: VOD platforms do not have to jump through the same regulatory hoops as broadcasters, for whose programs “compliance” is a necessary headache. The UK’s extensive regulatory framework for broadcasting is overseen by the UK’s Office of Communications (Ofcom), a super regulator covering a vast array of communications from postal services to internet provision and online safety, radio and television. The ten sections of Ofcom’s broadcasting code provide a detailed roadmap for broadcasters to ethically make and deliver programs, addressing a vast number of […]
by Carol Nahra on Sep 30, 2024 -
“We’ve All Gone a Bit Broke Making It”: Lucy Walker on Mountain Queen: The Summits of Lhakpa Sherpa
Nearly twenty years ago, Lucy Walker was making a film on the slopes of Everest following a group of blind teenage Tibetan climbers. While on the mountain, she heard of an incident that had taken place when a male guide attacked his wife and climbing partner, a Nepalese woman named Lhakpa Sherpa. Lhakpa’s cursed expedition was the focus of a damning book published a couple of years later, as well as a feature in Outside Magazine. At that point Lhakpa had summited Everest seven times but was living in a cramped apartment in Connecticut as an illiterate single mother, still […]
by Carol Nahra on Jul 30, 2024 -
“All Filmmakers are Struggling to Find Money”: Kim Longinotto and Franky Murray Brown on Dalton’s Dream
Normally on shoots, veteran documentary maker Kim Longinotto films far away from her native England, often capturing the lives of women in desperate situations over the course of a few weeks. With her latest film, Dalton’s Dream, things ran rather differently. Having watched his victory on the British X Factor in 2018, Longinotto reached out to Dalton Harris, interested in documenting his life in a new country with a new record contract. An initial three-month shoot morphed into more than four years, held up by both the pandemic and the turbulence of Harris’s life as he found himself persecuted for […]
by Carol Nahra on Jul 6, 2023 -
“I’m Not a Fly on the Wall, I’m Not Invisible”: Jeanie Finlay on Your Fat Friend
Over the past 15 years, British filmmaker Jeanie Finlay has earned a reputation for nuanced, sensitive and compelling documentary portraits. Her films have told many unlikely stories: the rise and fall of a reluctant Elvis lookalike in Orion: The Man Who Would Be King, two Scottish hip hop fraudsters in The Great Hip Hop Hoax, a pregnant transgender man in Seahorse. Her third feature film, Sound it Out, told the story of the last record shop in the Northeast of England and its owner, Tom Butchart, a school friend of Finlay’s. The morning after the world premiere of Finlay’s latest […]
by Carol Nahra on Jun 27, 2023
